How Does It Feel To Have Someone In The White House Working Against The Best Interests Of The Country And Its Citizens?

Can anyone deny that for Putin, the Russian investment in the election of Trump, is the gift that keeps on giving? In his NY Times column yesterday, Republican pundit David Brooks observed that "The Trump era has been all about dissolving moral norms and waging vicious attacks. This has been an era of culture war, class warfare and identity politics. It’s been an era in which call-out culture, reality TV melodrama and tribal grandstanding have overshadowed policymaking and the challenges of actually governing." As David Graham pointed out in his piece for The Atlantic Monday, The Worse Things Are, the Better They Are for Trump, the last moves by the satanic pig-fucker Putin put in the White House "suggest his goal is not to fix the system, but to exacerbate turmoil for political gain... Trump and Lenin share a strategic instinct. Lenin reportedly said, 'The worse, the better'-- meaning that conditions that were more miserable for the people were likely to help his political aims. Trump’s approach to immigration and health care, both in the past few days and throughout his presidency, evince a similar understanding of power."

A friend of mine, an independent who has never contributed politically except twice to Bernie, once in 2016 and once this year, always tells me that if Trump cleans up the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) problem, he'll be reelected. I've been telling him for over 2 years that Trump hasn't the tiniest interest in cleaning up the MS-13 problem, only of exacerbating it so he can use it to scare his low-IQ base.

Graham continued that last week Señor Trumpanzee announced plans to end assistance to the Northern Triangle countries of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, or as Fox & Friends put it, "3 Mexican countries." Señor T on Friday: "No money goes there anymore. We’re giving them tremendous aid. We stopped payment." That's about $450 million, including money to support law-enforcement efforts against gangs. "The actual cash is a minimal amount-- a little less than 8 percent of the $5.7 billion Trump demanded for his border wall when he shut down the government in December, and less than 2 percent of the $25 billion the administration estimates the wall would cost overall. The fact that the aid numbers are small doesn’t justify spending them per se, but there’s a strong consensus among Latin America experts that these cuts are counterproductive. It’s common to talk about push and pull factors in immigration. Pull factors are things that draw migrants to a new country: the promise of better work, for example. Push factors are those things that drive migrants to leave home: unstable politics, high crime, poor economies. Trump has worked to reduce one pull factor by trying to make it harder to get asylum, but he has limited options beyond that, because no president wants to make the economy worse in order to deter immigration (though Trump has been willing to risk hurting the economy to install protectionist tariffs). But Trump’s decision to cut aid to countries that are major sources of immigrants to the United States seems likely to only increase the push factors, driving more people to attempt the journey as conditions in their home countries stagnate or worsen."

Many of Trump’s decisions on border issues seem designed not to solve any problem. This includes Trump’s standing threat to close the border with Mexico; his decision to end DACA, a program that he has said achieves goals he favors; and most prominently, his decision to separate unauthorized immigrant families arriving at the border. None of these do anything to solve or reduce what Trump has called a crisis at the border. In fact, they are likely to only worsen the crisis. Separations, for example, became a costly and distracting circus, taking up already short space in detention centers and then necessitating a major effort to reunite families and restore the status quo ante when courts predictably rejected the policy.

Along similar lines, it’s more politically useful for Trump to be in a lengthy fight about building a border wall than it is to have actually built it. If and when the wall is built, it will become clear that it isn’t a panacea for immigration, but in the meantime, it’s a useful political wedge. The more migrants are coming toward the United States, the more Trump can warn of an “invasion” and inflame nativist fears that he thinks will help him win reelection. Trump isn’t really interested in solving immigration. A permanent crisis is more useful to him.

The same dynamic holds true on Obamacare. Last week, the White House told a federal appeals court that the Affordable Care Act should be thrown out entirely. Trump then announced that he was calling on Congress to produce a replacement for the law. The decision was reportedly made over the objections of Trump’s attorney general and secretary of health and human services, and it has received a chilly reception from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

When the GOP controlled Congress in 2017 and 2018, it tried at length to repeal Obamacare and failed, and there’s no chance a Democratic House will be amenable to rescinding or replacing the law. In the absence of legislative movement, Trump has worked to weaken the ACA throughout his presidency. He has cut back on outreach and advertisement, slashed subsidies, supported repeal of the individual mandate, and enabled so-called association health plans, which a judge struck down last week, calling them “clearly an end-run” around the law.

The cynicism of Trump’s latest move on the ACA runs deep. The administration still doesn’t have any plan for what it actually wants to do on health care. Meanwhile, Axios's Jonathan Swan reports that the president doesn’t expect to win in the courts: “Trump has privately said he thinks the lawsuit to strike down the Affordable Care Act will probably fail in the courts, according to two sources who discussed the matter with the president last week.” For Trump, it’s a political win-win. Either he gets Obamacare thrown out, or judges rule against him, giving him another chance to rail against the judicial system, delegitimizing it and further undermining the rule of law.

None of these steps would make any sense if Trump’s goal was to improve health care, just as cutting aid to the Northern Triangle would make no sense if the president wanted to reduce immigration. But increasing turmoil is the point, since the worse things are, the better things are. For Donald Trump, at least.

Babies in Cages by Nancy Ohanian

In the file of "purposely making things worse for political gain, let's also look at a development Betsy Woodruff reported on Tuesday for the Daily Beast: Homeland Security Disbands Domestic Terror Intelligence Unit. This is a win-win in Trumpworld: a wink and a nod to his neo-Nazi support base and a way to make a bad problem worse. What could be more Trumpian? "The Department of Homeland Security has disbanded a group of intelligence analysts who focused on domestic terrorism," reported Woodruff. "Numerous current and former DHS officials say they find the development concerning, as the threat of homegrown terrorism-- including white supremacist terrorism-- is growing. 'It’s especially problematic given the growth in right-wing extremism and domestic terrorism we are seeing in the U.S. and abroad,' one former intelligence official told the Daily Beast."

The group in question was a branch of analysts in DHS’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis (I&A). They focused on the threat from homegrown violent extremists and domestic terrorists. The analysts there shared information with state and local law enforcement to help them protect their communities from these threats.

Then the Trump administration’s new I&A chief, David Glawe, began reorganizing the office, which is the DHS component that has a place in the Intelligence Community. Over the course of the reorganization, the branch of I&A focused on domestic terrorism got eighty-sixed and its analysts were reassigned to new positions. The change happened last year, and has not been previously reported.

“We’ve noticed I&A has significantly reduced their production on homegrown violent extremism and domestic terrorism while those remain among the most serious terrorism threats to the homeland,” said one DHS official.

Former officials pointed to a spate of domestic terror attacks in recent years as evidence that DHS erred by shuttering this branch. From the massacre that left 11 people dead at a Pittsburgh synagogue to a shooting targeting Republican members of Congress in June 2018 to bomb threats that a deranged Trump fan directed at prominent Democrats and CNN, violent attacks informed by homegrown hatred have left Americans increasingly terrorized.

...Nate Snyder, a former DHS official who focused on violent extremism, said the department’s move undercuts Trump administration claims that it takes domestic terror seriously.

“You hear the secretary and this administration say how domestic terrorism is a clear priority and how resources will be bolstered, but you can’t say that and then all of a sudden get rid of the unit that’s there to detect threats and share information with our first responders, law enforcement, and federal partners,” Snyder said. “You can’t have it both ways.”

All Aboard! by Nancy Ohanian