Disappointing News For Señor Trumpanzee: Racist Presidents Are Not Eligible For Nobel Prizes

Trump grew up in a racist family. His father, who he has always emulated, was arrested as KKK street brawler and Trump was taught at an early age to discriminate against blacks and Latinos in their real estate business. "Throughout his public life," asserted the Washington Post [NOT FAKE NEWS] yesterday, "Trump has pitted one group of Americans against another and inserted himself in racial controversies… As he leads his party into the potentially perilous midterm election five months from now, Trump is trying to make cultural identity a central theme of the Republican pitch to voters. His messages have been amplified by his surrogates as well as by friendly broadcasters on Fox News Channel and elsewhere in the conservative media... Trump is calculating that by playing to people’s fears and anxieties he can maximize turnout among hard-core supporters to counterbalance evident enthusiasm on the Democratic side. Fueling Trump’s approach, advisers say, is an unremitting fear of his own: that his base could abandon him if he is deemed too weak on immigration, which was a centerpiece of his 2016 campaign."

I hope you took a look at our post yesterday on white evangelicals and racial anxiety. James Hohmann gave Post readers a comprehensive look at how Trump and Stephen Miller-- his in house neo-Nazi-- have outraged the county with their racist, xenophobic policies and how they have made a tactical retreat-- for now. "Young boys," he wrote, "who were forcibly taken away from their parents are waking up this morning at an old Walmart in Brownsville, Texas, that’s been converted into a shelter called Casa Padre. Painted on the wall is a mural of President Trump and a quote from The Art of the Deal, his 1987 book. 'Sometimes by losing a battle,' it reads, 'you find a new way to win the war.' Make no mistake: The executive order Trump signed Wednesday to end his own policy of separating families who are caught crossing the border illegally was a tactical retreat. It was not a surrender. The president’s war on immigration-- both illegal and legal-- rages on.

Trump made clear during a campaign-style rally last night in Minnesota that he hopes the order will let him shift the immigration debate back toward terrain he’s more confident he can win on. Speaking to 9,000 supporters at a hockey arena in Duluth, the president leaned into the us-against-them language that propelled his 2016 bid.

“I signed an executive order (so) we’re going to keep families together, but the border is going to be just as tough as it’s been,” Trump said. “Democrats don’t care about the impact of uncontrolled migration on your communities, your schools, your hospitals, your jobs or your safety. Democrats put illegal immigrants before American citizens. What the hell is going on?

“The media never talks about the American victims of illegal immigration,” he added. “What's happened to their children? What's happened to their husbands? What's happened to their wives? The media doesn't talk about American families permanently separated from their loved ones.”

As the crowd chanted “build that wall,” Trump attacked the caliber of Mexican immigrants to the United States: “They’re not sending their finest,” he said. “And we’re sending them the hell back!”

To wit, the Border Patrol says Trump’s “zero tolerance” approach will continue, which means any adult caught crossing the border will be prosecuted with a misdemeanor and families will now be held together in federal custody pending the trial. There’s a great deal of uncertainty among experts about whether this can pass legal muster, but immigrant advocates worry that Trump is laying the groundwork for indefinite detention.

“And senior administration officials said the order did not stipulate that the more than 2,300 children already separated from their parents would be immediately reunited with them … Top officials at the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees their supervision, were unable to say when the families would be reunited,” David Nakamura, Nick Miroff and Josh Dawsey report. “One senior DHS official acknowledged that Immigration and Customs Enforcement has almost no ability to add detention capacity for families because its jails are already full. … The DHS official said ICE is not planning to put children in adult detention centers as prohibited under the 1997 court settlement in Flores v. Reno, which stipulated immigrant children must be placed in the least restricted environment possible while awaiting immigration court proceedings.”

Trump reiterated that Congress must come up with a solution. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen even told lawmakers during a private briefing that the family separations could resume if they fail to act.

...White House Counsel Donald McGahn pushed back internally when the president ordered an end to the separations yesterday morning, arguing that an order could not be written to comply with the existing legal limits on child detentions. “Many aides, though, including Ivanka Trump and Kellyanne Conway, urged the president to end the separations. Eventually, after a number of meetings, ideas and drafts, McGahn said the final product could be legal,” David, Nick and Josh report.

Meanwhile, the Justice Department has formally requested the Defense Department's help in prosecuting the surge of new immigration cases, and the Pentagon has agreed to deploy active-duty military officers to the border in Texas, Arizona and New Mexico to serve as special assistant U.S. attorneys. These judge advocate generals, known as JAGs, are being told to expect six-month tours of duty, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow reports.

ICE is also ramping up raids in the heartland: While we were watching the Southern border this week, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested 146 workers at a meatpacking plant in rural Ohio. It was one of the largest workplace raids carried out so far by the Trump administration. Agents lined up dozens of workers, in white helmets and smocks. Two weeks ago, ICE arrested 114 workers at a gardening company’s two Ohio locations. In April, the feds raided a meatpacking plant in rural Tennessee and arrested 97 immigrants. In January, ICE agents blitzed dozens of 7-Eleven stores-- but made only 21 arrests.

These raids, too, are tearing families apart. “One father said to me, ‘I feel like my heart is being pulled out.’ His wife was taken, and he has two children under the age of 2,” Sister Rene Weeks, director of the Hispanic ministry at St. Paul Church in Salem, Ohio, told Kristine Phillips after this week’s raid.

Trump remains keen on displaying resolve against illegal immigration and may look for other ways to do so. The president used the word “strong” nine times in rapid succession to describe himself during a meeting with conservative lawmakers in the Roosevelt Room, where he announced the order was being drafted. “We are very strong,” he said. “If you’re really, really pathetically weak, the country is going to be overrun with millions of people, and if you’re strong, then you don’t have any heart. That’s a tough dilemma. Perhaps, I’d rather be strong.”

The president has no intention of rebranding himself as “a compassionate conservative” a la George W. Bush. He made that clear a few hours later when reporters gathered in the Oval Office to watch him sign the order. Before Trump signed it, Vice President Pence announced that doing so showed “compassion and … heart … and respect for families.”

“But it’s still equally as tough,” the president clarified, “if not tougher.”

“Stoking racial tensions is a feature of Trump’s presidency,” White House bureau chief Phil Rucker reports: “Echoing the words and images of the white nationalist movement to dehumanize immigrants and inflame racial tensions has become a defining feature of Donald Trump’s presidency and of the Republican Party’s brand. Trump has stirred supporters at rallies by reading ‘The Snake,’ a parable about a tenderhearted woman who takes in an ailing snake but is later killed when the revived creature bites her. It should be heard as a metaphor for immigration, he says. The president referred to some African nations as ‘shithole countries.’ He posited that ‘both sides’ were to blame for last summer’s deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville. And, again and again, he has accused black football players who took a knee during the playing of the national anthem to protest police discrimination of being un-American.

...The Trump administration changed its story on family separation no fewer than 14 times before ending the policy. JM Rieger tracks the evolving messages: “First it was a deterrent. Then it wasn’t. It was a new Justice Department policy. Then it wasn’t. The Trump administration was simply following the law. Then it said separations weren’t required by law. It could not be reversed by executive order. Then it was.”

...A Nobel Committee member says Trump is “no longer the moral leader of his country or the world.” Thorbjorn Jagland, one of the five members of the Norwegian committee which picks the winner of the peace prize, said: “Everything he does excludes him from the role American presidents have always had. He can not speak on behalf of the so-called free world.” Jagland is the head of the Council of Europe, a Strasbourg-based international human rights organization with 47 signatory states.

Melania Trump made increasingly clear to her husband in recent days that he should use his power to fix the mess he made. The Slovenian-born first lady’s own lawyer says the family separation policy evoked the internment of the Japanese during World War II and the inhumanity of detention in Nazi Germany. “It reminds us of past mistakes. It’s a big disappointment,” Michael Wildes told Mary Jordan. He also represents Melania’s parents, Viktor and Amalija Knavs, and her sister Ines, also from Slovenia. (Wildes declined to say what Ines’s immigration status is at this point…)

Theresa May condemned Trump's immigration policy, even as the British prime minister reiterated the importance of keeping open the lines of communication with the United States: “On what we have seen in the United States, pictures of children being held in what appear to be cages are deeply disturbing,” she said. “I clearly, wholly and unequivocally said it is wrong.” But she dismissed calls to cancel Trump’s upcoming U.K. visit., adding that when “we disagree with what they’re doing, we will tell them so.”