When Donald Trump was running for president, absent any actual relevant experience, he claimed he was qualified for the job thanks to his superior deal-making skills—an argument that many ended up buying, despite vast stores of evidence to the contrary. Unfortunately for the U.S., what Trump didn’t explain—though laid out pretty clearly in his book The Art of the Deal—was that as a businessman, making “a deal” to him meant the other side loses, rather than both parties walking away with a happy compromise. “Sometimes, part of making a deal is denigrating your competition,” he wrote, because yes, he’s just that much of an asshole. But whereas his business-world competition could simply get up from the negotiating table and leave, sadly for America, that asshole is our president. And this week, we all got a taste of his singular deal-making style. Only instead of jockeying over some crappy Atlantic City casino or Versailles-inspired condo, this deal had to do with the fate of hundreds of thousands of people who might be sent back to a country they’ve never known because the president is a fraud.
Despite claiming over and over that he has a “big heart” where DACA recipients are concerned, that he wants to come up with a solution before the March 5 deadline he set, and that if lawmakers came to him with an agreement, “I will be signing it,” Trump this week chose to torpedo Congress’s best stab at a bipartisan deal. With four proposed Senate bills to protect the Dreamers from deportation, the White House chose to “work vigorously to oppose” a centrist bill that had the best chances of passing, with the Department of Homeland Security claiming it amounted to “mass amnesty for over 10 million illegal aliens.” While the Common Sense Coalition measure, sponsored by eight Republicans, seven Democrats, and one independent, would have provided $25 billion for border security, including Trump‘s precious wall, it would have done so over a period of 10 years and not immediately, as the man-child in the Oval Office has demanded. “I don’t think the president helped very much,” Senator Lindsey Graham, told The New York Times, adding, “As long as the president allows Steve Miller and others to run the show down there, we’re never going to get anywhere.” Thanks to Congress’s paralysis, experts estimate that more than 100 DACA recipients are losing their status daily. And Trump’s the business world is pissed.
“I’ve been very worried for quite a while that I was watching a train wreck in slow motion, and yesterday we had that train wreck,” Tamar Jacoby, president of ImmigrationWorks USA, an alliance of small businesses, told the Financial Times. Echoing the sentiment was Jay Timmons, president of the National Association of Manufacturers, who noted: “We have people who are working here contributing to our society. Many of them are in the manufacturing sector. We don’t want to lose those folks. And frankly our country shouldn’t want to lose those folks—especially in manufacturing where we have 364,000 open jobs.” Earlier in the week, Goldman Sachs chief Lloyd Blankfein said in interview, “I couldn’t bear the idea of sending outside the country someone who grew up here his or her entire life,” adding that “over time, immigrants add to the economy because they bring in skills,” a data point the administration would rather not hear. To that end, the Cato Institute estimates that if the employers lost all of their DACA employees, it would set businesses back $6.3 billion in worker-turnover costs.
You might think a guy who just delivered a billion-dollar tax break to corporations would remain invested in keeping those corporations happy. But of course, Trump doesn’t deal in facts, so such negotiating points are lost on him. Art of the Deal, indeed.
*************************************************
“Putin’s Idiot” Donald Trump specializes in taking potential “win-win” situations and turning them into “lose-lose.” That’s certainly what he has done with the Dreamers. And, we all share in their loss.
Nevertheless, if our country survives, the Dreamers will end up better than Trump and his apologists. The Dreamers aren’t going anywhere, for the most part. But, I’m betting that we will see a number of the super slimy folks who served Trump in the White House or his campaign headed for jail (or at least a few years of “supervised release.”).
PWS
02-17-18
|
