There is no missing the messages Donald Trump has been sending even before white nationalist senior adviser Stephen Miller was given control over the administration’s immigration policy: Go away, migrants and asylum seekers, the country is full. That this is nonsense — Nordics need not apply? I don’t think so — is inconsequential to him and the people who carry his dank water. Cruelty is the coin of the realm, racism the language spoken to his devout base, and the rule of law broken and forged again in the fires of white nationalism is the final goal.
The latest iteration of this ongoing degeneration arrived last Thursday, when The Washington Post reported that Trump had proposed shipping thousands of migrants to various “sanctuary cities” around the country as a way to punish Democrats who refused to give him his southern border wall. The idea, to the shock of none, was credited to Miller.
According to The Post, the idea was shot down by officials and legal experts for being illegal, logistically unworkable and (worst of all) terrible optics. After a day of horrified reactions, which included a White House statement claiming the strategy had been dispensed with, Trump jumped out of his spider hole and doubled down on the plan. “The Radical Left always seems to have an Open Borders, Open Arms policy,” he tweeted, “so this should make them very happy!”
Once in a while, and all too rarely these days, we are afforded a moment when the better angels of this nation’s nature rise up and spread their wings. So it was when sanctuary city after sanctuary city – there are more than 300 declared jurisdictions within 27 states – called Trump’s bluff. The front page of Saturday’s New York Daily News spoke for all with a bellowed response: WE’LL TAKE THEM. “We will do what we have always done, and we will be stronger for it,” wrote Jenny A. Durkan, mayor of the sanctuary…