President Donald Trump keeps digging further into his rabidly anti-immigrant positions as the 2020 presidential elections get ever closer, trying to send truths and established legal decency surrounding the situation up in smoke. This past week, he visited Calexico, California, a border area where he toured a section of physical barriers and offered outlandish rhetoric that CNN’s White House correspondent and longtime Trump antagonist Jim Acosta methodically ripped apart on Twitter for all the world to see.
In response to the president claiming at the border that asylum seekers should be turned back because the United States is “full,” Acosta noted that:
‘Just this week Trump was talking about how his father was from Germany.’
The irony is that Fred Trump (Donald’s dad) wasn’t even born in Germany! He was born in New York, where his German father and Scottish mother had ended up. Trump has claimed multiple times that Fred was actually born in Germany, always trying to use the claim to bolster his apparent stake in relations with mostly white, European countries. He wants us to respect immigration of these mostly white people while literally walling off entire populations of people who happen to not be white.
Acosta noted that the president’s again renewed harsh immigration rhetoric has previously set off GOP leaders, but the president doesn’t seem to care. He simply keeps dragging the Republican Party down the drain of fiercely antagonizing immigrants.
As Acosta put it:
‘Trump used this rhetoric heading into the midterms. It infuriated House GOP aides who warned he was turning off swing districts. Trump is doing it again heading into 2020.’
Since the Republican Party ended up losing control of the U.S. House in the recent midterms, Trump’s continued passionate commitment to ranting against asylum seekers and other immigrants at every opportunity could again put the GOP on the rocks, to put it lightly. For his part, at his post-midterms press conference, Trump blamed defeated Congressional Republicans for their own losses because they didn’t supposedly align themselves with him enough, offering yet another indication that we’re in for a lot more angry singling out of immigrants with no tangible support but racism.
Trump has claimed that there’s some desperate crime problem associated with the southern border and immigration over it, but that’s simply not true. Every border county but one is significantly safer than comparably sized inland jurisdictions, and crime rates among undocumented immigrants are lower than those among native-born Americans.
Still, Trump is continuing on in his angry racist fantasy, offering the outlandish claim this week:
‘I look at some of these asylum people. They’re gang members… it’s a scam. It’s a hoax.’
He went so far as to rage against the “Flores decision,” a 90s case in which the courts ruled that the government can not keep minors in immigration detention for more than 20 days. Destroying his claim we should take his complaints about having to let kids go seriously, he bungled the name of the judge, claiming they were the “Flores,” although that’s the name of an immigrant teenager who was a plantiff in the case.
Worth noting about the Flores decision which Trump says he doesn’t like: “One of its central provisions… the government cannot hold children in detention centers for more than 20 days.” https://t.co/hlGNy8FmjX https://t.co/EqqBQsqrBV
— Jim Acosta (@Acosta) April 5, 2019
Check out Twitter’s response to Acosta…
Featured Image via screenshot
