Yesterday morning Trump was obviously watching Fox & Friends and saw this segment:
“We are a nation of immigrants, but we are a nation of lawful immigrants, that needs to be the message going forward” –@tomilahren on caravan of migrants headed to U.S. pic.twitter.com/vBmqqkSSNk
— FOX & friends (@foxandfriends) April 1, 2018
The hosts were referring to this article by Adolpho Flores, who is traveling across Mexico with a group of about 1,200 migrants, including children, women and men.
About 80% of them are from Honduras. Many said they are fleeing poverty, but also political unrest and violence that followed the swearing in of Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández after a highly contested election last year…
Sweating after miles of walking in more than 90-degree heat with her two kids, Karen said conditions in Honduras were so bad she decided to take a chance with the caravan. She declined to give her full name.
“The crime rate is horrible, you can’t live there,” Karen told BuzzFeed News on the side of a highway near Huixtla, a town in Chiapas, Mexico’s southernmost state. “After the president [was sworn in] it got worse. There were deaths, mobs, robbed homes, adults and kids were beaten up.”
It is probably safe to assume that the president didn’t read the actual article, but responded on Twitter to the report on Fox & Friends.
He continued the rants this morning.
Because he is so uninformed about this group of migrants, Trump continues to fan the flames of fear-mongering by repeating the lie about immigrants, drugs and crime. He is also obviously unaware of this:
About two thirds of the roughly 1,200-person caravan plans to either seek asylum or cross the USMexico border undetected, and another third intend to stay in Mexico.
In other words, the president is suggesting that we need to spend billions of dollars on a wall because he is afraid of 800 migrants, many of whom will be seeking asylum rather than attempting to cross the border illegally.
It is bad enough to have a president that is so woefully uninformed and, once again, is simply responding to a hyped-up report on Fox News. But perhaps the most telling part of Trump’s rant is that he is making it painfully clear that he is completely ignorant about DACA—something he has been talking about for months now.
First of all, the president obviously doesn’t understand that DACA, which is an executive order signed by Obama, only applies to children who were brought to this country prior to 2007. That means that it could not be taken advantage of by any these migrants. But beyond that, Trump’s own administration decided to end DACA back in September 2017. While that decision is winding its way through our legal system, the courts have ruled that current recipients can continue to renew their status, but no new applications are being considered.
The depths of Trump’s ignorance sometimes take my breath away. It is astounding that the president of the United States knows so little about the job he has been elected to do and simply relies on a propaganda source for bits and pieces of information. What is equally astounding is that from yesterday until today, either no one in the White House bothered to inform him about DACA, or he wasn’t interested in hearing what they had to say.
Some might argue that Trump actually knows more than he lets on and is simply using things like DACA in order to fear-monger. I see no evidence of that. I believe that he is willfully ignorant and only processes information from sources like Fox News that support his delusional instincts, even as he has the vast resources of the federal government at his disposal. That is precisely what makes him so dangerous and unfit to serve.
