DACA Clown show

In the hope of proving he is not the semiliterate ignoramus numerous media have depicted him to be, Donald Trump held a televised meeting with members of Congress to discuss immigration. It was, the White House told a friendly reporter, the president’s very own idea:

In some, very superficial aspects, the stunt fulfilled Trump’s goals. He was depicted at a table, meeting with important people and talking politics while wearing a tie, as opposed to in bed with a cheeseburger watching cable-news hits. But looking even slightly below the surface imagery, the meeting instead confirmed the very idea Trump had set out to refute. Michael Wolff had reported that Mitch McConnell said of the president, “He’ll sign anything we put in front of him.”

[...]

“When this group comes back with an agreement … I’m signing it,” he promises. “I will be signing it. I’m not gonna say, ‘Oh, gee, I want this or I want that.’ I’ll be signing it. Because I have a lot of confidence in the people in this room that they’ll be coming back with something really good.”

  NY Magazine

A very stable genius.

The meeting centered on Trump’s signature policy issue, immigration, which his staff no doubt considered safe. (Imagine if they had to talk about something like health care.) At one point, Democratic senator Dianne Feinstein proposes that they pass a bill to formalize deferred action for child arrivals (DACA). Trump gives his enthusiastic ascent.

This promise so alarms his fellow Republicans that House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy is forced to interject with an explanation that, actually, Trump doesn’t like this idea at all.

A clown show.

Trump may occasionally appear to be trans-ideological, but in fact he is sub-ideological. His moments of flexibility occur on those occasions when he is in the room with a moderate or a liberal, and lacks the contextual understanding to identify what about their proposals he doesn’t agree with.

Or even care about. He just wants good press coverage. Or at least press coverage.

But that’s not what one might take away from the exchange if, for some reason, they opted to read the transcript released by the White House. The Washington Post’s Ashley Parker noticed that the line where Trump agrees with Feinstein’s proposal — saying, “Yeah, I would like to do it” — is “curiously missing” from the document.

When the Post asked about it, a White House official “said that any omission from the transcript was unintentional and that the context of the conversation was clear.”

  NY Magazine

Fake news.

Surely, this was all an honest mistake. Video of the meeting is widely available online, so it would be a bit silly to try to mitigate Trump’s mistake in the official record. Plus, there’s absolutely no evidence that Trump has ever denied remarks that were caught on tape, or tried to convince people that their memory of something they saw with their own two eyes wasn’t accurate.

Never.

[J]ust as Congress seems close to a permanent fix for Dreamers, a federal judge in California has exposed the cravenness of the DACA rollback for what it was, declaring in a ruling late Tuesday that its cancellation “was arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, or not otherwise in accordance with law.”

  NY Magazine

That's our Trump. Arbitrary, capricious, abusive, and mindless of law.

U.S. District Judge William Alsup said Trump’s move would cause irreparable harm to hundreds of thousands of young undocumented immigrants unless the court stepped in.

And so he did, essentially ordering the Trump administration to unwind the wind-down of DACA and even telling the Department of Homeland Security to “post reasonable public notice that it will resume receiving DACA renewal applications and prescribe a process consistent with this order.” [...] There’s no doubt the Department of Justice will want this ruling blocked and appeal this all the way to the Supreme Court.

[...]

The judge acknowledged that his ruling was all the more strange because Trump “publicly favors the very program” he ended, which in turn justifies leaving it in place until Washington figures out how to sensibly deal with it. Just hours before the decision dropped, Trump tweeted that “DACA approval” — by which he means permanent legislation addressing the status of Dreamers — will only be possible if Congress also gives him a wall for the southern border.

Or, as somebody pointed out on Twitter, enough wall to have a photo op.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.