Never-ending border "crisis"
By BEN MATHIS-LILLEY
APRIL 08, 20198:33 PM
... you might be asking yourself: Didn’t we just get done with an extended news cycle related to Trump’s impetuous and legally dubious demands for some sort of border-related crackdown? And the answer is yes, the president shut down parts of the government for more than a month this winter because Congress wouldn’t fund his famous wall, then came up with a plan to pay for the wall via a controversial national emergency declaration instead. (That declaration is currently being challenged in court.) Before that, in the summer of 2018, Trump’s administration instituted a family separation policy at the border that caused a nationwide furor before being halted by a judge on due process grounds. And before that, in the first days of his term, Trump instituted a ban on travelers from Muslim-majority countries that was likewise struck down by courts.
... Sooner or later .. the president’s attention is going to drift back to the idea that an immigrant group is invading or infiltrating the U.S.
The curious thing .. is that it has not been a winning strategy for Trump. The Muslim ban coincided with the early plummeting of his approval rating, which took another dip during the recent wall-motivated shutdown. Family separation polled poorly, and it preceded midterm elections that went badly for Republicans even after Trump sent troops to the border in October in a stunt precipitated by the “migrant caravan.” His emergency declaration actually triggered a significant number of Senate Republicans to vote against him, something we’ve rarely seen during his time in office. If the past is any guide, Trump’s rumored plan to close the El Paso port of entry and separate adults from their children even if they arrive in the U.S. legally will not make him more popular with Republicans in Congress or Americans as a whole ...
The president’s other policy initiatives might have felt disjointed because he can’t retain other staffers for more than six months—but Miller .. has kept himself in Trump’s good graces by staying behind the scenes and maintaining a singular focus on punitive, white nationalist–adjacent immigration policies that speak directly to the president’s political id. That id in turn is maintained and fueled by Fox News, which the president watches all the time and whose most prominent hosts long ago established a business model that depends on perpetually portraying the U.S. as being under attack ...
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/04/trump-border-crisis-repeats-itself-again.html