Immigration Derangement Syndrome
What’s the deal with Donald Trump and immigrants? On Mondays and Wednesday he wants to deport them all. It was the first thing he said to the American People: every immigrant without legal credentials is either a rapist, a murderer, or criminally insane. He promised to deport at least a million by December. His minions immediately fell to the floor, licked his boots, and got to work. For Steven Miller, it was a gift from God: all that pain with an imminent deadline!
But now the calendar has moved to Tuesday, and Donald Trump has another idea: we need those immigrants after all! They do the work no one else will do, and the country will go under unless we can properly exploit them. So now he’s issued another set of orders: if you’re a brown-skinned immigrant from Mexico or Central America working in an industry that Donald Trump favors, you remain forever a despised illegal, but at least you can stay in the country for a while, until JD Vance increases the population. As far as I can tell, this applies to hotel chambermaids, gardeners at Trump-owned resorts and golf courses, the McDonalds staff in Palm Beach, Florida and persons involved in the President’s comb-over. That alone is a team of thirty.
I wish I could say that there was a positive here; that what happened on Tuesday (and maybe Thursday) is a sign of progress and moral enlightenment. But because it originated in a disorderly intellect, it has all the staying power of a wisp of hair. Sauron suddenly realized that he’s a hotel owner who needs underpaid chambermaids to preserve his fortune. And his cronies in agribusiness and other stoop-labor industries called his secretaries to complain about his policies. Holy crap! They need Mexicans, too!
And then other cronies called other secretaries to remind their president that they abominate brown people, and that the danger of replacement is real and imminent. Enter Stephen Miller (again)! Drown them all in the Rio Grande!
And so we have a whole new way of thinking about immigration. It’s really bad until it’s really good, but no one’s actually drafting policy because we no longer recognize expert opinion, refined and vetted in deliberative bodies by representatives of the American people. So now it’s really bad again.
Everything that passes for governmental action is barfed up each morning by Donald Trump, until it is barfed up tomorrow and the day after that. Let’s name the ugly thing in front of us: the lurching up-chuck of a chaotic leader with a toddler’s understanding of acts and consequences.
This can’t go on, but of course it will. Demand that your representative end this tragicomedy, and then get out into the streets every weekend. All the tyranny thinkers say exactly the same: nothing will happen unless we undertake our protests with passion, volume, and grim consistency.