While President Trump is often unpredictable, he can be counted on to do some things quite predictably. When faced with criticism, he will shift blame to Democrats. When faced with being exposed for shady moves by members of his 2016 campaign team, he will insist that the investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller into that campaign’s alleged collusion with Russian government operatives, Trump will insist that the investigation is a witch hunt invented by Democrats for losing the 2016 election while also ranting about spies placed within his campaign, which makes no sense.
His tweets on Tuesday morning covered all of these deflections and more.
In regards to the recent controversy over separating children from their parents at the U.S. border, it is time to begin separating the truth from Trump’s lies.
What is True
It is true that a photo attached to tweets criticizing Trump’s new and inhumane policy of separating children from their parents at the border. That photo was taken in 2014 during the administration of President Obama.
What is Not True
While the photo is from 2014 and shows children kept in detention centers during the presidency of Barack Obama, it is not a photo of children who were separated from their parents. These are migrant children who came to this country unaccompanied due to political violence and poverty in their home countries and could not be released penniless and with nowhere to go.
In recent days, Trump has made other untrue claims about his border policy and blamed Democrats for refusing to change the law that requires it. There is no such law. Trump’s own administration officials have said publicly that the new policy (not law) of separating children from their parents is being implemented to deter undocumented immigrants from crossing the border.
What is also true is that the ACLU is fighting back against this new policy after reports from these children that they are suffering physical, psychological, and sexual abuse after being separating from their parents.
What is most importantly true is that the president today is Donald Trump. If he is truly concerned about these children, he has the power to stop this policy.
The Rest of It
The rest of Trump’s Tuesday morning tweets are just more of the same nonsense he’s pushed since he took office. The Democrats are responsible for the Russia probe, which they began in 2016 before Trump was ever elected so they’d have an excuse for why they didn’t win (which makes no sense). It is a team of “13 Angry Democrats” leading that investigation and they are all bent on taking him down at the behest of two Democrats who are no longer in any office and with no plans to seek office again (Hillary Clinton and President Obama).
There were no spies placed in his campaign. The FBI did get information from informants inside the campaign, but there is absolutely zero evidence that those informants were placed there by the FBI. The targets for which information from informants were used were George Papadapoulos and Carter Page, both of whom Trump has insisted were never part of his campaign. If there was absolutely nothing that the Trump campaign team needed to hide, the informants should be of no concern to any of them.
Twitter was also able to separate truth from fiction. See some of their responses below.
Featured image via Getty/Chip Somodevilla
