As published in the Immigration Daily on February 21, 2020
Barreling along, President Trump today appears to be an unstoppable force on his way to reelection in November. That is the view from here. Despite his moves towards an imperial presidency, cozying up to Russia and largely allowing it free reign throughout the world, inhumane treatment of vulnerable groups here and abroad, and corrupt or highly questionable moves to gain political advantage towards his reelection, he is gaining in popularity while the Democrats are in disarray with candidates destroying each other on debate stages.
Yet it is dispiriting that in this country founded on constitutional principles, honor and decency, Americans will choose to reelect a president without any of the above.
In this administration, all decency appears to be lost in dealing with vulnerable groups with a president who only respects the strong. The treatment of undocumented immigrants including separation of families in the border regions and in the interior, stigmatizing them as criminal rapists, murderers, and drug traffickers when the vast majority are law-abiding, attempting to suppress their representation by adding a citizenship question to the census to intimidate them from being counted, speaking of them in racist and other pejorative terms, dropping refugee admissions to record lows, and making immigrant entries a wealth test through the new public charge law, etc., all points to an innate lack of decency and refusal to make America a shining beacon as compared to the rest of the world.(Although we do not minimize the impact of immigrant crime upon its victims, we note that much higher percentages of crimes are committed by Americans upon Americans as a percentile of the population, and that Mr. Trump is adept at making a mountain out of a statistical mole hill).
Mr. Trump exhibits no honor as seen in his attack on Gold Star family members and decorated veterans who dare to criticize him, his abandonment of this country’s Kurdish allies who paid more than 7000 lives to support US efforts against ISIS and invitation to Turkey to invade their lands, his misappropriation of military funding to build his border wall, and his inveterate lying –staining the office of the presidency with a whopping 16,241 false or misleading claims since taking office as reported by the Washington Post on January 20, 2020.
Constitutional principles such as separation of powers are anathema to this president who believes that Congress is beneath him, that the presidency and the executive branch are higher than the other two branches of the US government, and that all executive branch members have no greater duty than giving their personal loyalty to him.
One would think that with such highly negative factors, Mr. Trump could not stand a good chance of reelection. Yet Democrats are up against numbers like those in the Gallup poll in January 2020 showing that a record high 90% of Americans are satisfied with their personal lives, that American confidence in the US economy is at a 20 year high, and that a record 49% of Americans approve of Mr. Trump’s performance as president.
Immigration is a topic on which all Democratic candidates hew center left or left and generally agree upon – the difficulty is the other policies such as healthcare, taxes, and redistribution of wealth and that no candidate can win an election without the undecided of this country which will not vote for those that they consider too far to the left. Conversely those who support candidates on the far left of these issues may not vote for the candidate who only projects center left (such as many of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ supporters who stayed home rather than vote for Mrs. Clinton in 2016).
Where do the Democrats go from here? With the number of candidates still campaigning against each other, the bloodletting, backbiting and divisiveness will only get worse while Mr. Trump sits on the sidelines without opposition – only having to occasionally snipe at the growing Democratic fiasco on Twitter.