The Trump administration continues to prove enveloped in self-obsession. This Monday, for the first time in well over a month, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders held an on-camera press briefing. The initial focus of the afternoon was comments from administration officials including President Donald Trump’s national security adviser John Bolton, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, and Trump economic adviser Larry Kudlow, but eventually, she took questions too.
Watch below.
Reporters quickly turned to the just concluded partial federal government shutdown and the looming possibility of another one, since Trump has insisted he’s not willing to agree to any long term funding without billions of dollars for a border wall.
Sanders acted as though the concept of a wall blocking off Mexico like Trump has long sought is some kind of divine ordinance or destiny, asserting that if Democrats don’t come to their senses — or whatever — Trump will “have” to use executive power to get the wall built.
He’s previously repeatedly floated the idea of declaring a national emergency in order to be able to redirect funds for wall construction, and this Monday, Sanders commented:
‘If Congress doesn’t do their job, then the president will be forced to make up for all of their shortcomings.’
To be clear — undocumented border crossings continue their overall downward historical trend, and there’s little to no evidence that those who do make it over pose some kind of special security threat to the United States. In reality, the issue at the border is the many people who arrive fleeing violence in their home countries, which the Trump administration somewhat acknowledges and maintains will be solved by… a wall, somehow.
Sanders said:
‘The president’s opened the government on the basis that Democrats have signaled to us that they’re willing to actually get serious about a real deal and get serious about fixing the problem at the border including funding for a border wall… He’s one of the people that’s identified the fact that we have a problem and should fix our immigration system. If Democrats want to get serious about fixing that, they have a president that’s more than happy to sit down with them and do exactly that.’
She added that last part casting her boss as some kind of immigration policy luminary after a reporter asked about the irony of a recent report highlighting undocumented immigrant workers at Trump Organization businesses. Still, it highlights the Trump team’s overall approach to this situation.
However, in short, a wall will not simply make the problem of the issues asylum seekers face simply go away as the Trump team has claimed since they supposedly won’t be at the border anymore. A real solution would require… wait for it… compassion and even just basic decency.
It would be short-sighted, however, to expect as much from the team that separated thousands of undocumented immigrant children from their families for the sake of “deterrence” and then alternated between casting the detention facilities as “summer camps” and claiming they didn’t have a policy of separating families at all.
Featured Image via screenshot from the video
