It's All About the Midterms: Trump Took Those Children Hostage to Stoke His
Base
By Juan Cole, Informed Comment
20 June 18
Journalists have almost certainly misunderstood the Trump White House when
they pen this morning's flurry of articles and television commentary about
the White House abruptly being "worried" about the fall-out of the Family
Separation Policy announced in May by John Kelly and reaffirmed this month
by Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Eminence Grise Jr., Stephen Miller.
This "worry" is said to have impelled Trump and his aides to have Department
of Homeland Security head Kirstjen Neilsen fly up Monday from New Orleans to
tell lies about the policy instead of Sarah Sanders (this move, despite what
some reports speculate, almost certainly had nothing to do with Sanders
being reluctant to go on lying about the Trump policy and attributing it to
the Congressional Democrats, which is a lie.)
Here is an alternative scenario. This crew are psychopaths and, as their
attempt to blame the Democrats for their own policy shows, unrepentant
professional prevaricators. They don't have a kind bone in their bodies, and
on the contrary, spontaneously orgasm at the thought of the opportunity to
be sadistic to others. The Family Separation Policy is not something they
regret or worry about, it is something that gets them off.
But it can't be explained entirely by mere sadism, though the policy
certainly wells up from that motivation.
The Trump White House is still being advised by Steve Bannon, and Bannon is
on record that immigration is a winning issue for Trump- that whenever and
however it becomes a headline, Trump wins and the Democrats lose.
Trump desperately needs to have the GOP do well in the November midterms.
Those midterms are a big question mark. Trump has an advantage inasmuch as
voters in off years when the presidency is not being voted on tend to be
whiter, richer and older than the voters in presidential election years.
Laid against that general advantage is the tendency for the president's
party to lose seats in the midterm. American voters, whether they strategize
this issue or not, appear to like split government and don't usually like to
put all their eggs electorally in the basket of one party. Election years in
which one party does well, such as 2004 or 2008 or 2016, are usually
followed by years in which voters put the opposite party to the one in the
White House in charge of Congress.
What Trump needs to win the midterms is for his base to be exercised and
excited, and for the Democratic base to be prevented from voting through
various forms of voter suppression. These include voter i.d., purging rolls
of voters in good standing, and spreading fake news about Democratic Party
candidates and policies.
Ripping infants out of the arms of their mothers excites Trump's base. Some
46% of Republicans approve of the policy, according to an Ipsos poll done
for the Daily Beast. And only 32% of Republicans disagree.
Trump's base has been primed to believe that undocumented immigration into
the United States is suddenly a huge crisis. It isn't. More
Mexican-Americans, for instance, leave annually than come in. There may have
been a problem in the 1980s and 1990s. But not now. The reason we should not
call the policy Zero Tolerance is that the Bush and Obama administrations
deported some 400,000 persons a year. There was already zero tolerance. What
changed was the charging of asylum seekers and economic migrants as
criminals and the consequent removal of their children to concentration
camps. His base will likely agree that the situation was created by the
Democrats.
If Trump's policy is overturned, he can use that action to expand his base,
by playing the martyr to liberal perfidy. He can also accuse Democrats of
letting criminal gangsters (never mind that they are two years old) into the
country. Trump has drunk the Bannon Kool-aid.
So while it may be, as corporate media tells us, that only a third of
Americans agree with the Family Separation Policy, that statistic is
irrelevant. In a typical midterm, only about a third of the electorate comes
out to vote. If 46% of Republicans come out, but, as in Ohio and elsewhere,
democratic votes can be suppressed by purging the voting registration rolls,
then Trump wins. After all, that is how he got into the White House in the
first place.
Trump's base comprises Evangelicals and others who often have an
authoritarian mindset, who will likely believe his lie that Family
Separation is a Democratic project, and based on Democratic legislation. Fox
will help spread this monstrous falsehood. Nothing in the law requires Trump
to prosecute refugees who seek asylum in the US for criminal misdemeanors
(which triggers the family separation, since children are not allowed to
accompany parents into a Federal penitentiary.)
So far from fretting or regretting, Trump is using the immigration issue to
whip up sentiment in his base, in hopes that it will turn into a strong
showing in the midterms and allow Trump to keep control of Congress.
You might say, America is better than this.
And I will say, the proof is in the pudding.
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