Donald Trump backs himself into a no-win corner
For all his bloviating bluster and blatant grifting, the past year of Donald Trump’s pseudo-presidency has largely consisted of playing it safe when it came to political policy. Trump seemed to understand that the best way to stave off his inevitable ouster was to avoid making the kinds of risky moves that might force the issue. Then Trump got a big head. Literally.
As most of Trump’s closest political advisers gradually resigned from the White House, he didn’t bother to replace most of them. At this point it’s really just John Kelly, who no longer appears to have any influence at all, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who is reportedly preparing to quit, and Stephen Miller. You all know Stephen Miller, the guy with the giant forehead and presumably tiny nether regions, considering how insecure he is about his own existence. He’s a sexist, a racist, a xenophobe, and a loser. For the past couple months, Miller has firmly had Trump’s ear. Trump’s big mistake was listening to him.
Stephen Miller somehow convinced Donald Trump that the best way to salvage his failing presidency was to forcibly separate thousands of Hispanic immigrant kids from their families and lock them up in concentration camps. Miller’s motivation was obvious enough; he’s a white supremacist. But Trump seemed to think that Miller’s plan was somehow going to help him finally get his ridiculous border wall built, and because Trump is desperate for a win, he went along with it.
Instead, Donald Trump’s treatment of immigrant children has created a national outrage of a fundamentally different nature than the kind of outrage we’ve grown all too accustomed to feeling toward him. This is literally the kind of thing that Adolf Hitler was doing during his mid-period, and we all know what he did next. This is blowing up so badly in Trump’s face, former First Lady Laura Bush – who has always chosen her words carefully and tried to avoid controversy – just called out Trump for being “immoral” and “cruel.”
When you reach the point where mild mannered Laura Bush is publicly and fiercely taking your head off, you’ve blown it. It’s not just the liberals and the Trump-haters who are calling him out as a monster; now a Republican First Lady is doing the same. Other such voices will quickly follow suit. Trump had been trying to play it safe on policy, because he didn’t want to risk facing additional trouble as his criminal scandals close in on him. Then he listened to Stephen “forehead” Miller, and now he’s in a no-win corner. Now we’ll see if Trump backs down on immigrant kids, or if he decides that this is the hill he wants his presidency to die on.
