A White House Leak Just Confirmed Our Worst Fears About Today’s Trump DACA Announcement
Today, President Trump revealed that he is ending President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program (DACA), which protects from deportation 800,000 youth who have committed no crime but calling the United States of America — the country where they were raised — home.
While the most egregious component of Trump’s move is its unmitigated cruelty, White House leaks, detailed by the New York Times’ Michael D. Shear and Julie Hirschfeld Davis, reveal another disturbing truth: Trump did not seem to understand what he was doing.
Shear and Davis write:
As late as one hour before the decision was to be announced, administration officials privately expressed concern that Mr. Trump might not fully grasp the details of the steps he was about to take, and when he discovered their full impact, would change his mind, according to a person familiar with their thinking who spoke on condition of anonymity without authorization to comment on it.
Trump, however, did not change his mind.
A president’s aides not knowing with certainty that their boss grasped a decision of this magnitude is, in itself, a cause for great concern. The fact that he moved forward with that move after learning it would devastate more than three-quarters of a million innocent people is nothing short of horrifying.
In light of the unpopular move that Trump seems not to have understood, he sent Attorney General Jeff Sessions to make the announcement in his place.
“We are people of compassion, and we are people of law, but there is nothing compassionate about the failure to enforce immigration law,” Sessions said to justify the heartless act.
With revelations that Trump neither seemed to understand the decision he was making nor changed his mind once the cruel act was explained, we can be certain that compassion and law are two things that this president knows nothing about.
