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How Trump’s Politics Betrayed Him and All of Us
On June 6, I wrote a post about the dangers of Trump following the Bush political playbook, as he does, and how that could trip him up. The parallels between W. Bush political strategy and Trump’s political strategy are uncanny. Further, the Left reacted to both men in almost the same way. We are still, for all the talk of Hope and Change and Draining the Swamp, in a Bush-Clinton Family political moment with the Republicans and Democrats both running different versions of Bush and Clinton when they aren’t running someone with that name.
In my previous post, I wrote that the danger for Trump would be the mainstream media finding a weakness in his aggressive, fighting tendencies or lack of knowledge about our norms. In his child separation policy, the media found a perfect and telling issue to hammer Trump and force him to fold.
Trump’s misunderstanding here is similar to W. Bush’s mistake in nominating Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court in 2005. Bush lost his base and lost the Democrats provoking a crisis right after his triumphant re-election, that made people question one of Bush’s greatest political assets, his leadership. In Bush’s case because he was not pursuing any kind of Conservative ideology but selling himself, his style, and his transactional ability to get some Conservative agenda items passed, Miers seemed a smart choice for the Supreme Court.
Bush, much as Trump, sold himself as a deal maker and able to work across the aisle to get things done. When he came in the first time he managed to get education reform passed with Edward Kennedy and now, at the start of his second term, it made sense to Bush to get a Supreme Court nomination passed with strong bi-partisan support. Surely, the Conservatives would follow him and back him on this? The people were voting for Bush and his sensibilities not for Conservative ideology, right? Wrong; it turned out. As much as the Republicans were a party of Bush, at the time, they were not going to surrender on this and Bush was forced to back down and name someone of talent and Conservative integrity to the Supreme Court.
Trump is making a similar mistake. Unfamiliar with many of the issues he addresses, he calculates things out politically and how they affect his “brand” as a politician. With the child separation policies, I can see why he thought it might be a winner. Getting tough on the border, enforcing the law and discouraging illegal immigration are all things that he was elected to get done and his child separation policy does all those things.
Americans hate being cold, cruel and unkind. America is a land of political contradictions on all kinds of issues. Americans often become passive militarily and want to withdraw from the world. We hate getting into other people’s business and we rather everyone just left everyone else alone to get on with making money. This was most defiantly true in 2008 for instance. These themes are often a winning political message but the minute, second even, this policy makes America look weak, the American people become bloody-minded warmongers ready to take the fight anywhere and to anyone who thought we were weak. The shock of this shift in public mood has often wrong-footed politicians. When they recognize and understand it, they can lead and guide this switch of opinion to great political success.
As with immigration. Many Americans, enough of them at the very least to elect Trump President, were tired of uncontrolled immigration at the border. They sensed that our leaders and business elites playing “normal” Americans for fools and that our laws were dead letters on the border. When Trump is attacking this, he has a lot of support; when the media elites go against him on these issues, they get little traction. This attitude can only hold as long as Americans perceive themselves as the victim and not as the villain.
Trump, with little ideology to guide him, lacking understanding in the American character and not very experienced at politics (though extremely talented at elections), fell right into a perfect storm of separating children from their families at the border and turning the American people from saps who are being played into the cruel villain. Americans, as Reagan understood best of all, love to play the hero. We hate, hate to be the villain.
This is not a large mistake and can be fixed. Trump, for all his “fighting” ability, seems to be backing down and retreating from his policy quickly. Politically that is good, in the moment, but for the long term it is troubling. The administration had no solid plan for why they had to do this, and so had trouble explaining themselves. Because of that, they could not take advantage of the Leftists overstating their case and calling us Nazi Germany for temporarily separating families. This is the kind of mistake that will often happen to administration with no well-formed ideology and simply doing what the boss wants done.
Third, it shows the administration is not thinking through their policies for what is best for the country and the problem at hand but viewing things through the optics of support on each issue. Trump and his administration could have put together a zero-tolerance policy that was effective, provoked over-the-top leftist outrage, was good for our border policy and was morally and practically defensible. The fact that neither Trump nor any of his team thought this policy through does not speak well of them.
At a basic human level, this policy was going to dramatically impact and harm innocent children and non-violent parents in a very painful way. The Trump administration seems to have given all that little thought. That is not the Conservative way, it is no way to do politics, and it leads to evil results.
Bush made this kind of mistake at the beginning of his second term. While he recovered from the Miers nomination, he was vulnerable to Katrina and the chaos in Iraq. All of this probably helped scuttle his Social Security reform.
Trump’s mistake is more severe. He messed up one of the most basic of American political truths. Americans sympathize and often reward a politician for being too compassionate on an issue and then getting tough. It is a story that Americans love to tell themselves embodied in the old saying, “Never start a fight but always finish one.” Americans don’t like a tough policy that is implemented in the wrong way. If we are tough we have to get it right because we love the powerful to get their comeuppance.
If Trump starts out too tough and has to back off, he looks weak — and weakness for Trump is political death. To be tough, one has to be competent and the Trump administration has been anything but competent on this issue. Trump is now in a dangerous political moment. If he continues to appear weak, his administration is doomed. But if he stays tough and wrong, he will be destroyed.
It will be interesting to see how he handles this test … and we aren’t even at his first midterm yet.
Published in Immigration
The smart play, in my opinion, would be to back the Cruz bill (even if the timetable in it needs to be tweaked) and make the dems vote against keeping families together while asylum claims are adjudicated. He wants his wall, and may yet get it, but there’s no way to get it by holding children hostage. The government must act in a way that respects our laws (which catch & release doesn’t do) and also respect human dignity (which family separation violated.) It’s not a choice between upholding law and respecting human dignity. If that becomes a choice, then the particular law needs to be reexamined.
If you want to end catch-and-release, what options did he have?
Well if we go back to the standing rules before the current policy was implemented, the question of separation falls on the executive. They don’t have to separate. All the courts seemed to rule was that they can’t detain children (mind you I might be over simplifying the legal rulings, I’m sure in the next few days our various legal experts will pour over all of this and we will all be better informed). So the court isn’t ordering them to separate, just not to detain children. They have already made the argument that they had no choice but to separate already and clearly even Trump thinks it has not worked, hence the reversal.
The reality is that the executive in this case has to take responsibility either to release the families or to separate them. It is within its discretion to do, and in fact it is what the past administration chose to do by and large.
Your whole comment is right on. I would add to what I quoted from you above that Trump might then claim to have brought attention to the bad situation and “forced” congress to finally act. This might be his path out of the mess.
In order for one to claim the policy itself is bad, it seems to me one has to accept the alternative prior to the policy–de facto open borders for those arriving with children. For many, that’s bad. So we get back to a matter of messaging and the optics of implementation. That’s mostly political.
Thus, keep families (detained) together.
No way false choice. First as Trump you bring up the problem and say that we can’t allow all people with kids to just come into the country to disappear. You site numbers and hard facts about the problem. You then also add in the child trafficking problem and wanting to close to loop hole to child traffickers. Again cite cases to support the position. Then having already met with people like Senator Cruz and other like minded Senators propose a solution to the current problem and say that there is 20 day limit starting today. If Congress fixes the problem in 20 days great, if not the Administration will have get the kids out of detention and send them to relatives or foster homes until the Asylum cases have been adjudicated. These sudden separations, the lack of preparation, both practical and political, the failure to telegraph the distinction between Asylum seekers crossing the border illegally or coming to a port of entry and on and on was terrible policy and politics both. No parent should have their child suddenly and forcibly removed. A 20 day countdown for everyone would have been a far more humane policy and having a plan in place for even a more humane way to keep families together and contained would have been competent indeed.
Or, to be ordered by a court to separate them from their children. Explicitly.
You know, I’m sick and tired of socialist policies causing me to pay $13,000 a year for medical insurance while people who come here illegally get medicaid for $50 a month most times.
If pictures of families divided at the border keeps people away, then the policy is a win.
And the argument hasn’t been stressed enough that the people most responsible for these families being divided are the families themselves. No one asked them to come here. If they need asylum, they can go to Mexico too. Or Columbia. Or Germany.
I am not responsible for their children and their risky choices.
I don’t think that what I said discounts any of this. To me it comes under the heading of messaging and preparation.
Any parent who wouldn’t voluntarily return to Mexico to avoid separation from a child has no business being a parent.
Here are some of the articles about Steve Schmidt’s decision.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/20/us/politics/party-of-trump-steve-schmidt.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/today-i-renounce-my-membership-longtime-gop-strategist-steve-schmidt-announces-hes-leaving-his-party/2018/06/20/5918d7ee-747d-11e8-b4b7-308400242c2e_story.html?utm_term=.c76bfa1065d5
https://www.thedailybeast.com/steve-schmidt-mccains-campaign-chief-quits-indecent-and-immoral-gop
https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/20/politics/steve-schmidt-leaves-gop/index.html
Opps! I saved Steve Schmidt’s decision to leave the Republican Party under the wrong Post! I have my own post in the Member Feed.
And John Dillinger just brought attention the the lax security at Banks? I’m sure they will spin it as hard as they can. And while the MAGA crowd will buy anything they sell the question is how will the other +60% of Americans buy it.
If there is a hit out on them and their family from a cartel and they returned to Mexico willingly has no business being a parent. If there is no danger to the person yeah I would avoid the separation by returning to Mexico too. But people in desperate circumstances would not and should not.
Yeah I agree about the morality and truth of such a Trump defense. It would be baseless and dishonest. However I think that is the kind of line that Trump will run with and his supporters would rally behind and it would give him a dodge out of looking weak. I was discussing it as a problem of political survival for Trump. It is just the case that this is an instance where he just did not know what he was doing.
To me, “sudden and unannounced” clearly denotes lack of preparation and deficiency in messaging. Even the failure to wait 20 days is only deferring the implementation of the same policy (and hence deferring the outrage). I’m not sure if we are talking past one another here, but I would have strongly supported starting this in a different manner with full knowledge that it could lead to the same end game..
I believe most of these folks are from Central America rather than Mexico.
I think I understand you better now. The policy of retaining people at the border we agree on. We disagree at least a little bit, I think, on exactly how badly the Trump administration bungled the job of implementing the policy. You give him at least a slightly more favorable pass on it than I do. Otherwise I think we pretty much agree.
I agree. I just used one of many different examples of why someone is seeking asylum they are not all faking it.
But they are willing to be separated from their children to enter the US illegally. Why should we be more concerned about the separation of their families than they are?
Because we are the ones separating them. In the scenario I mentioned they have no choice but to seek asylum but we have a choice in how we carry out our policies. We could keep them together and hold them humanely as I outlined above. Nothing and no one forced the Trump Administration to take the path they did. We don’t have to separately and we should not. An administration with a well thought out ideology on immigration could have handled this well or did exactly what they did and stuck to their guns and made their case against the criticism. It is not about caring more for someone else’s child then they care.
It’s a six week old policy. If they’ve been traveling up through Mexico from Central America, it’s entirely possible they didn’t know what would happen when they arrived. And though I understand there’s a tendency to say the parents maybe have it coming for breaking the law, the kids themselves do not. They should not be victimized in this way. I think both sides are guilty of treating their lives like political footballs.
We may also differ on whether separation is ever acceptable. My issue is with the preparation for implementation of this policy and the lack of a case for why it’s necessary. I believe that the case could have been made other than by sending a relatively inexperienced DHS Secretary to meet the wolves.
Then they has the length of that trip to apply for asylum in Mexico. Where, I’m sure, no one would dream of separating children from their parents.
How would you deal with people who enter the country illegally with children and then insist that they can’t be detained because it would separate them from their children?
That was effectively the status quo for a significant portion of Trump’s presidency. I fully understand that it’s untenable, but the signs that it was so have been there for awhile. Perhaps some groundwork should have been laid in terms of preparing the public or challenging Congress prior to six weeks ago.
Where they might not be safe. Listen I understand that many asylum seekers are doing it as as tactic but not all them. Some really need asylum here not in Mexico.
There are circumstances and situations that require separation sometimes sudden separation, with suspicions of trafficking, but if the case was made competently and carried out competently and plan was to be humane and sensitive to parents and their children. There would be no moral outrage the Lefties might make a stink about it but we could laugh them off and mock them for it like their complaints about the tax reform.
The policy as it is carried out right now by the Trump administration was always unnecessary and in humane. I think it was from a mix of incompetency and malice a fore thought.
For the record, the distinguishing feature of this policy and that implemented by the previous Administration is that Obama “got away with it” prior to deciding to shift course. It’s extremely relevant to his entire discussion to recognize that Obama “interred” children. Why that fact, and the numbers supporting it, have not been publicized by DHS goes back to our earlier discussion about messaging.