Amid widespread, increasingly loud outrage over the Trump administration’s policy of separating children from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border, President Trump has deployed his time-tested strategies of bald-faced lying and passing the buck. Trump has claimed repeatedly that while it pains him to watch children wrenched from their mothers, it’s only Democratic intransigence that prevents him from ending a policy he personally put into motion, and could halt at any time.
On Sunday, First Lady Melania Trump put out a mealy mouthed statement that echoed her husband, calling for congressional action where none is necessary.
NEW: Statement from @FLOTUS spokeswoman @StephGrisham45 to me regarding what’s happening to kids at our borders: pic.twitter.com/fpsfHJSOTa
— Kate Bennett (@KateBennett_DC) 17 June 2018
During an appearance on Meet the Press earlier in the day, White House adviser Kellyanne Conway applied the same tactic. “As a mother, as a Catholic, as somebody who has a conscience … I will tell you that nobody likes this policy,” she said, making it sound like the White House didn’t have a choice on the matter.
The reality is that, at the urging of anti-immigration diehard Stephen Miller, Trump put into place a system that his predecessors had rejected as inhumane. His clear-eyed strategy is to use the separated children as pawns to extract concessions from Democrats on an immigration package that would include money for Trump’s border wall and cuts to legal immigration, among other measures.
Conway said that an unnamed aide who had said as much to the Washington Post was sorely mistaken.
