Not wanting to criticize President Trump personally, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham has directed his anger and frustration at Trump’s staff instead, more specifically at a particular senior aide.
"As long as Stephen Miller is in charge of negotiating immigration, we are going nowhere,” Graham said Sunday. “He's been an outlier for years."
That drew a response from the White House staff, which attacked Graham personally and directly and most importantly, did so in the president’s name.
“As long as Sen. Graham chooses to support legislation that sides with people in this country illegally and unlawfully instead of our own American citizens, we're going nowhere,” deputy press secretary Hogan Gidley said, directly mocking Graham’s statement. “He’s been an outlier for years.”
“I’m from South Carolina,” Gidley said. “I’ve known the man for a long time.... to pretend he is anything other than someone who wants open borders and amnesty is disingenuous.”
In normal times, which these are not, that kind of vitriolic, public exchange between a senior Republican senator and a Republican White House would be extraordinary. But it demonstrates how deep and emotional these disagreements have become, not just within the American public but within the Republican Party as well.
Within the GOP, Miller and Gidly have a point: Graham is the outlier. He wants protection for the Dreamers, he respects the traditional role of immigration in creating the American character and as he made clear to both Trump and Miller, he is horrified by the racist motivation and justifications of the immigration policies that the two men are pushing.
However, once you escape the conservative Bubbleworld, everything changes. As Graham points out, in the real world it is Trump, Miller and their supporters who are the clear outliers. As pointed out earlier, every single demand contained in the Trump immigration plan is profoundly unpopular with the American people.
- The president stomps his feet and demands $21 billion of taxpayer money -- American dollars, not Mexican pesos -- to build his precious wall. That's a lot of money to waste on a monument to one man's ego, which explains why in poll after poll, it is endorsed by roughly 35 percent of American voters. That's Trump's base, and nobody else.
- Trump demands a significant reduction in legal immigration, even though 89 percent of Americans say they continue to view legal immigration as good for the country, not as a detriment.
- He demands an end to programs that encourage immigration from a diverse range of countries, when 78 percent of Americans see diverse sources of immigration as a source of strength for the country.
- He insists that we restrict immigration to "stable countries," as opposed to "shithole countries," a stance backed by just 15 percent of Americans.
- Most important of all, the racism, bigotry and nativism that drives the Trump policy, and that increasingly drives the Republican Party, is rejected by the American people as a whole. Some 58 percent say that Trump's "shithole" comments were racist; that stubborn 35 percent says they were not.
Trump and his staff do hold one big card in attempting to implement their highly unpopular agenda, and that is the Dreamers. Basically, they’ve taken those 800,000 people as hostages, and the legislative ransom they demand is passage of their highly restrictionist, racially motivated immigration policy. Otherwise, they suggest, they are prepared to end legal protections for the Dreamers and begin mass deportations.
I doubt they have the guts to do it, but they just might have the stupidity.
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