Moar stupid Trump tricks

Via tenor.

Speaking of bestial topics, I guess it's part of the emperor's privilege to set the conversation, and we seem to be giving in more and more to his wishes, but this one about proposals to ship asylum seekers from the border to "sanctuary cities" is so ridiculous even Jonah Goldberg recognizes it as "trolling in place of public policy", in his morning chat with NPR, and yet we go on talking about it.

It's pretty clear that, riffing off what Steve says, Trumpy Republicans believe that all white people hate immigrants as much as they do and only pretend not to out of "political correctness" or just to be bloody-minded or to pick up on all those imaginary illegal-immigrant votes that keep Republicans from making it a one-party state, and the way this arose must have been some time last November, no doubt from one of his Fox friends, I'd guess Lou Dobbs (who was pretty much attributing the Republicans' loss of the House to those votes), and Trump was screaming around the West Wing why wasn't his worthless piece of shit DHS secretary just sending those shithole illegals to San Francisco since Nancy Pelosi loves them so much, and deputy policy coordinator May Davis sent out a query to DHS, in the hope of shutting him up, as The Times broke the story on 11 April:

“The idea has been raised by one to two principals that, if we are unable to build sufficient temporary housing, that caravan members be bused to small- and mid-sized sanctuary cities,” Ms. Davis wrote to the officials at the agencies. She added, “There is not a White House decision on this.”

Matthew Albence, the acting deputy director of ICE, objected to the idea, telling the White House that there would be liability issues if a migrant were injured during transport. He also raised concerns that the agency’s budget had not been appropriated for that purpose.

Which effectively killed the idea—Trump forgot all about it once it had vanished into the bureaucracy, I imagine, until the Times story appeared five months later and he realized he'd been hoodwinked and thwarted once again, and once again made to look like an impotent failure, so his first instinct was to deny the Times story:

The New York Times Sanctuary Cities/Immigration story today was knowingly wrong on almost every fact. They never call to check for truth. Their sources often don’t even exist, a fraud. They will lie & cheat anyway possible to make me look bad. In 6 years they will be gone........

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 13, 2019

Which some of us thought was denying that this conversation in November had taken place, but what he really seemed moments later to be objecting to was the idea that his own staff had dared to kill his idea (which, of course, is what happened):

Democrats must change the Immigration Laws FAST. If not, Sanctuary Cities must immediately ACT to take care of the Illegal Immigrants - and this includes Gang Members, Drug Dealers, Human Traffickers, and Criminals of all shapes, sizes and kinds. CHANGE THE LAWS NOW!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 14, 2019

Then he began to really double down, speaking to reporters on Friday:

we could fix that, and so fast, if the Democrats would agree. But if they don’t agree, we might as well do what they always say they want. We’ll bring the illegal, really, you call them the illegals. I call them the illegals. They came across the border illegally. We’ll bring them to sanctuary city areas and let that particular area take care of it, whether it’s a state or whatever it might be. California certainly is always saying we want more people. They want more people in their sanctuary cities. Well, we’ll give them more people. We can give them a lot. We can give them an unlimited supply. Let’s see if they’re so happy. They say we have open arms. They’re always saying they have open arms. Let’s see if they have open arms. The alternative is to change the laws. We can do it very, very quickly, very easily. Okay?

I'll fix you, my pretty. And your little dog, too!

But it's totally empty. In the first place, Albence was right about the money issue. This plan can't be carried out as long as Congress doesn't appropriate funds to do it, any more than the Wall could be built that way. It's against the law. And if you think declaring a national emergency to build some Wall was pretty out of line, wait till you see him try declaring a national emergency to punish the mayors of Sacramento and New Brunswick. It won't fly.

And in addition to money it would take Customs and Border Patrol personnel, who are supposedly doing important work where they are on the border with terrible understaffing problems. How many of them are you going to redeploy as bus chaperones?

And then you need to understand that most undocumented immigrants come to the US with a plan, and a set of phone numbers, to get them where they'll find support in setting themselves up. As we've said before, they have family members and other contacts here, and the plan is to join them; that's why most don't want to stay in Mexico, and that's why they won't stay in random cities they're bused to—why hole up in Sacramento if you have a job and a cousin waiting for you in New Jersey?

Although on the other hand "sanctuary cities" are where the concentrations of the undocumented already are—that's why city governments take the position, because the community is there and has to be protected from random police and ICE abuse. Although on the other hand from that you can't really tell where they are, because there are effective sanctuary cities that pretend not to be for political reasons, like Houston.

So if you did after all find the resources and try to carry out the plan it would simply shuffle the people arbitrarily to nowhere, and they would then proceed to deal themselves where they were planning to go and the whole enterprise would just vanish like a dust storm. Not only would Nancy Pelosi not get punished, she wouldn't even notice it. So in general there is no possibility that any of this will happen. It is an entirely idle discussion. You might as well talk about clean coal—oh wait.