Donald Trump is frustrated, suffering from a severe dose of "relative deprivation," the conscious experience of a negative discrepancy between his expectations and political reality. Trump is frustrated in part because he has been unable to secure funding for his signature campaign issue of building a wall along the length of our southern border. Mexico won't pay for it, and Congress has not been able to secure the votes to do so either. Given this reality, it is not difficult to imagine that Mr. Trump, with assistance of his senior advisor Stephen Miller, a former aide to then Senator Jeff Sessions, and well known for echoing white supremacist and anti-immigrant viewpoints, would conjure up a strategy intended to create a hostage situation designed to shame Democrats into helping move a Republican backed immigration measure across the line in Congress.
On April 6 Trump issued a memorandum ending "catch and release" at the border, a practice which releases illegal immigrants from detention while they wait for their immigration court hearing. He directed Homeland Security, the Justice and Defense departments to come up with measures they would be able to take to end this practice. Attorney General Jeff Sessions subsequently ordered federal prosecutors to adopt a "zero tolerance" policy. A month later he clarified what he really meant: "If you cross the border unlawfully, then we will prosecute you. If you smuggle illegal aliens across our border, we will prosecute you. If you are smuggling a child, then we will prosecute you, and that child will be separated from you as required by law. If you don't like that, then don't smuggle children over our border." Six week later 2,300 plus kids had been separated from their parents, interred into wire cages, forced to sleep on concrete floors, housed in warehouses and internment camps reminiscent of conditions that existed in the camps Japanese-Americans were forced into during World War II. To avoid transparency, the press and elected representatives were denied access to these hastily erected internment facilities.
As the reality of this process became clear, its consequences quickly generated overwhelming critique from every corner of the country, and from the world at large. The 47-member United Nations Human Rights Council, which began its latest session on June 18 with a broadside against Mr. Trump's immigration policy by the High Commissioner for Human Rights, called the policy of separating children from parents crossing the southern border illegal and unconscionable. The next day the Trump administration announced its withdrawal from the council.
Instead of immigration reform, kids in cages, considered child abuse by many, became the focus for politicians of both parties, people from all faiths from the Vatican on down, and from all First Ladies still living. While acting like ventriloquist dummies, A.G. Jeff Sessions, and Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, remained unapologetic in their support of Trump's policy. Sessions justified his decision to separate families by citing a biblical admonishment from Apostle Paul in Romans 13 to "obey the law of the government, because God has ordained them for the purpose of order." In response, more than 600 clergy and lay members of the United Methodist Church, to which Sessions belongs, signed a letter opposing his viewpoint. In the mean time Trump doubled and tripled down on this policy, blaming Democrats for the problem. "They don't care about crime, and want illegal immigrants to pour into and infest our country, like M.S. - 13" [sic].
Trump, Sessions, Nielsen and other apologists continued their bombastic lies as international pressure mounted. Comparisons to Nazi-Germany's forcible removal of 400,000 children from their parents, and Putin's goons arresting kids first at anti-Putin rallies, began to surface regularly. Democratic leaders lamented that taking children from their parents was a form of state terror, and that hostage taking was one of the most effective tools of terror most of us never thought we would see an American administration implement. Trump finally appeared to back down and signed a Presidential Executive Order nominally halting the practice, a political document entirely unnecessary and still lacking clarification and follow-through. A day later the president followed up by featuring an event in the White House rose garden callously showing off families who were "permanently separated" from their children killed by illegal aliens. A few days later he proposed to deport asylum seekers immediately after crossing the border without extending to them their legal right to due process.
None of this should have surprised us. Donald Trump feels the need to project strength without restraint. He routinely indicates that he prefers "strong" autocratic leaders over our "meek, dishonest and weak" traditional democratic allies. His new-found friend Kim Jong Un, China's Xi Jinping, Egypt's Fatah al-Sissi, Turkish Erdogan, Russia's Putin and others appear to have more what our president looks for in a leader. Not surprisingly, none of these criticized him about his stance on immigration. While Trump refers to illegal immigrants as vermin infesting our country, they routinely and openly dehumanize migrants and other irritants as well. In the president's mind compassion and empathy are signs of weakness. He won't acknowledge that those are character traits that actually make us human. Given the chance, it would not be much of a stretch to imagine him rubbing shoulders with Hitler and Mussolini.
His relentless attacks on the free press, his disregard and disrespect for our laws and democratic institutions, even suggesting that he is above the law and could pardon himself, unilateral withdrawal from international agreements, and his perpetual lies leading up to and surrounding this disgraceful episode, makes us wonder how close we have come to the end of rules based democratic government in our country. London's King's College instructor Angelos Chryssogelos, in a May 31, 2018 Time magazine article, warned: "Populism can indeed become a threat to democracy if populists in power undermine liberal institutions and enable illiberal democracy that can, with time, degenerate into outright electoral autocracy."
Mussolini was known for having said that "if you consolidate power by plucking a chicken one feather at a time, people won't notice." Trump is considerably less subtle, he plucks them out by the fistful. We need to pay attention. The abyss lies at the bottom of a slippery slope.
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