Donald Trump’s child concentration camps take an ugly new turn

| 6:04 pm EDT September 5, 2019
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Donald Trump’s latest idiotic blunder seems to epitomize everything wrong with his farce of a presidency. He makes an embarrassing, obvious mistake as he often does – naming the wrong state in the path of a hurricane. Unlike previous mistakes like calling Apple CEO Tim Cook, “Tim Apple,” this has serious implications, since it has the potential to cause residents to panic unnecessarily and a state to call for resources it doesn’t need.

He could admit he misheard somehow, and this story would have never been. But he’s an egomaniac with a staff of enablers, so he’s doing everything he can to emphasize that he cares more about appearing correct than he cares about the people in the volatile storm’s path. Consequently, we have a combination of his narcissism and his indifference to human suffering – something that was on display already when forecasters initially thought the storm would hit Puerto Rico.

We’re still awaiting the aftermath of the storm while Donald Trump melts down in public, but by paying so much attention to his tantrums, we’re missing a pretty significant and much darker story – one that the Trump administration is hoping the media will ignore for more coverage questioning Trump’s mental competence. A new report on Wednesday from the Health and Human Services inspector general suggests the coverage of children separated at the border was just the tip of the iceberg.

This new investigation interviewed personnel at 45 of the migrant detention camps, focusing on the mental health of the children being held there, and found, to the surprise of no one, that the detainees who had been separated from their families were doing much worse than children who were not – and that many of them experienced considerable trauma – kidnapping at the hands of gang members, or witnessing their own family members kidnapped and raped as they fled their home countries – before they were separated from their families at the border. Some of those who were separated believed they were abandoned by their parents.

As usual, the administration is carrying out its most sinister plans in secret. There’s another good reason for this distraction: Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon and Rep. Judy Chu of California are working to bring a bill to the floor that will shut down child prison camps, and the administration is hoping it dies quietly before anyone can vote for it.