Key Observers Agree: Trump Killed DACA, Torpedoed Solutions and Sounds “Divorced from Reality”
Across the nation, key observers are highlighting how and why President Trump’s laughable attempts to blame Democrats for the demise of DACA is falling flat. Moreover, Trump’s decision to end DACA and torpedo every attempt at a bipartisan solution is likely to hurt the GOP in November’s elections.
Below, we excerpt a few key takes:
- Writing in the Washington Post’s “The Fix,” Amber Phillips outlines the three key reasons that Trump’s attempt to blame Democrats for ending DACA is failing: “The most obvious is that Trump ended DACA….2. Trump hasn’t proved to be a reliable negotiator on dreamers…After waffling for months on whether Trump even wanted a permanent solution for dreamers, his administration took a hard turn to the right and proposed drastic changes to the legal immigration system in exchange for a path to citizenship for millions of qualified dreamers….3. Trump’s rhetoric on immigration doesn’t match what he’s saying now.”
- Conservative Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin argues, “Trump’s incoherence on immigration ought to embarrass his supporters.” Rubin cuts through the spin, “Let’s get real. Other than a visceral distaste for Hispanic immigrants (and others from “shithole” countries, in Trump’s words) and a need to feed material to the white-grievance racket (e.g. Fox News, Breitbart, FAIR, anti-immigrant bloggers, etc.), Trump doesn’t much care what the current law is or what current conditions exist for immigrants. All he knows is that he blew the deal for the wall and will get blamed for DACA (which he repealed). Trump and his spokesmen should not get a free pass, the presumption of rationality, when the president sounds this uninformed and divorced from reality.”
- In his latest piece “How Failure of a ‘Dreamer’ Deal May Tip Control of Congress,” Bloomberg’s Sahil Kapur makes the case that Trump and the Republicans’ role in ending DACA and creating Dreamers’ crisis is likely to be a factor in many races this cycle. Kapur quotes Republican pollster Whit Ayres assessing, “It will be most salient in areas with large numbers of DACA kids, like in California and Texas. Beyond that, it’s primary relevance is symbolic. There are vast swaths of the country where there are almost no DACA kids, but they would still like to see our political system function at a minimal level, which it doesn’t seem to be able to do.”
- And, finally, CNN’s Chris Cillizza deciphers the thrust of Trump’s tweets: “The just-below-the-surface message is this: White people made this country great. Brown people are flooding in. They pose an existential threat to your daily life and what the future holds for your children. If you don’t fight back now, you may lose everything.”
