Trump on threats from Southern border

President Trump addressed the nation Tuesday, on network television, and his goal was to persuade the country that the danger to the nation’s southern border is fraught with such serious danger, that only a concrete wall is necessary to protect the nation from the danger of rapists, terrorists, and drug dealers, intent on harming the United States.

The truth is that most, thousands, intent on doing harm, in any manner, come through airports; yet another falsehood perpetuated by the president, and recently on FOX TV by White House spokesperson, Sarah Sanders, in his intent to keep a campaign promise on the wall, that has become central to his presidency and many of his supporters, and has succeeded in a partial shutdown of the government, sending thousands of government workers without a paycheck, an abyss that will cause untold pain, as they struggle to pay the bills.

Determined to blame the Democrats, for any failures to protect the nation, the truth, for many, is that this is not a conviction, but a political ploy, and a dangerous one; and, one that should he succeed will be fodder for the 2020 presidential election.

As Roll Call reported, “If his past statements are any indication,” the Oval Office remarks “will be full of malice and misinformation,” say Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, who will jointly deliver a response after the president’s remarks, said in a Monday statement.

Trump added another Friday, that he never promised his supporters a concrete-based border wall during his 2016 campaign. That’s false. His top aides have added another misleading statement in recent days, saying thousands of terrorist suspects have been detained at the southern border. DHS and State Department data show those have been made mostly at airports.”

To keep the pressure and the anxiety afloat, Vice-President Mike Pence “during the Monday session with reporters repeatedly uttered this line, aimed at trying to force Democratic leaders to the table: “There is a crisis at the southern border, and Democrats are refusing to negotiate.”

The White House has called for a national emergency in order to work around Congress, and build the wall anyway, to keep his promise, but will surely open the whole affair to a lawsuit and weighing in is “GOP Judiciary member, Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, on Monday [who] said an emergency declaration would add “new elements to this — court hearings and litigation that may carry this on for weeks and months and years,” adding: “To me, injecting a new element in this just makes it more complicated.”

Roll Call also noted that “Margaret Taylor, a governance studies fellow at the Brookings Institution and a former Democratic chief counsel for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, wrote recently that without an “appropriate statutory authority ... such action would be unconstitutional.” But she speculated that what White House lawyers are searching for “is what existing statutory authorities the president could reasonably rely on to use already-appropriated funds to build the wall.”

At best, as Taylor argued in her article, with all of the approvals needed, Trump might not be able to jump constitutional hurdles, to keep this promise,

The foundation of this effort lies the long standing nativism that reached its zenith with the arrival of the Irish immigrants in the 19th century, and peaked with the the Draft Riots in New York, and continued down through the ages, to the 2016 presidential election, where Trump claimed that Mexico was not sending the U.S. their best, but rapists and drug dealers, and gang leaders, stereotyping a large swath of people.

As we noted last January, Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign capitalized, largely, on fear-based prejudices that many Americans harbored towards immigrant from Mexico, and Central America. Add to that came the age-old pejoratives such as “wetbacks” and “jungle monkeys”, which stand in direct contrast to the stated ideals written on base of the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.

The quote is from Emma Lazarus’ sonnet, “New Colossus”, and the welcoming sight of Lady Liberty, must have warmed the heart of many immigrants, not only from Ireland, but from Southern Italy, and Eastern Europe, to name but a few, fleeing from famine, war, and hunger.

It’s been often said, that had these Mexicans, and Central Americans, come from Northern Europe, and been Protestants, the hue and cry, for border walls, would be absent.

When the Honduran marchers came in search of political asylum and legal under American law, the optics, and the media were filled with people fleeing violence, and destruction in their home countries but met, after interminable delays, desperate acts to cross the border to Mexico and the States, to be met with tear gas and bullets; exhausted and drained many of them fell away.

Compounded with the deaths of children kept in freezing conditions, and even in cages, the result has shown the darker side of America.

Looking at the children who were separated from their parents, has now resulted in an effort of reunification, for many who were scattered across the country, and 66 to Chicago. But, the effort to reunify the children is fraught with the cumbersome apparatus of American bureaucracy, and poor record keeping, with the result, say critics, that many children will not see their parents again.

The resulting furor has not, as Abraham Lincoln said, been the “better angels of our nature,” yet many people in the nation cling to the negative, as well as the pejoratives, and Trump cleverly played on these prejudices, rallying his base, as well as the hackles of those opposing him.

The moral dimension has not been lost on those that heard the president, and one of them, was Jim Wallis of Sojourners Magazine who posted the following on the website: " . . .last night many feared that Trump would designate his falsified national security crisis a “national emergency,” which would justify bypassing the legislature to fund the wall. Such an act would violate the separation of powers in the Constitution, continuing Trump’s dismissals of presidential protocols, practices, and the rule of law, potentially a first step on the road to dictatorship. Thankfully, Trump did not make that declaration — yet. But make no mistake: If President Trump concludes from this episode that he can invent an emergency to justify ignoring the limits of the other branches of government, the survival of our democracy is in grave jeopardy."

So far, the GOP has backed Trump, but some are beginning to want a compromise to open the government and create a stopgap measure to fund border protection. But, we are now seeing some senators, such as Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins and Cory Gardner of Colorado, and James Lankford of Oklahoma, are pressing the president to accept some sort of compromise, to stem the vocal outcries of some federal workers that are facing a payless Friday.

Yet, that hope might be dashed when the president walked out of a meeting with Democratic leaders, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, when he asked the former if she would fund "my wall," and when she refused, said, "The we have nothing to discuss," and walked out of the room.