We are at a moment in our history that demands action. It demands that people fuck shit up. We hope they do it by protesting, by voting, or with legislation. But what the GOP hopes is that it leads to crazy shit, and Trump is going to keep pushing and pushing, with the ICE round-ups and the family separations, because they want congressional Democrats arrested, they want violence to occur at one of the concentration camps, they want protesters to riot, and they want it all filmed. Trump is going to keep upping the intensity of his immigration crackdown until the left cracks.
This is the cold political calculus of Trump advisor and man most likely to own a suit made of human skin, Stephen Miller. It's beyond "annoy the libtards and make the snowflakes cry." We're now into "let's get good footage for campaign ads" territory. You can imagine it now: Evil music, low-pitch voice saying, "Nancy Pelosi and the crooked Democrat Party want to let MS-13 animals into the country" over footage of, say, a fight at a detention center or maybe Rep. Juan Vargas or other members of Congress getting led away by cops as the voice continues, "Tell Nancy Pelosi that you stand with Americans, not illegal animals." Or some such shit. That's probably too subtle. More likely it'll just be Trump braying something incoherent like a particularly brain-damaged jackass.
Trump's GOP (and it is Trump's GOP now) doesn't give a fat rat fuck about reaching out beyond his base. The election strategy is simple: get his idiot horde all fired up with a stream of Reddit-provided conspiracies and blatant lies; suppress the vote wherever and however it can be suppressed; and, possibly, look for an assist from hackers. In order for the first part to work, you've gotta be as confrontational as possible to draw Democrats and liberals into an act that can be portrayed as extremism. Sure, an action like blocking the roads to and from detention locations, like, fer the love of fuck, tent cities for children is a relatively mild form of civil disobedience, but as far as the whiners on the right are concerned, it'll be "terrorism the likes of which the nation hasn't seen" or whatever the fuck Fox "news" contorts it to be.
Unsurprisingly, Fox has gone all-in on supporting Trump on the savage child detention policy, so Tucker "Bitch Face" Carlson and Laura "My Kids Went to the Shittiest Summer Camps" Ingraham would orgasm constantly if they got to report on violence involving migrants or defenders of migrants. Sean Hannity's studio would be sticky for weeks.
Let's be clear that the family detention policy didn't start with Trump, but the "zero tolerance" part of it, which includes asylum seekers and the separation of children from parents, is totally Trump's. They planned this shit specifically to deter people on the run from awful violence, including rape and murder, including forcing kids into gangs, to stop seeking asylum in the United States. And lying ogre of blonde doom, DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, can repeatedly insist, as she did at her belly flop of a press appearance yesterday, "DHS is not separating families legitimately seeking asylum at ports of entry. If an adult enters at a port of entry and claims asylum, they will not face prosecution for illegal entry. They have not committed a crime by coming to the port of entry." And Trump can assert in that goddamned moron voice of his that "We’re stuck with these horrible laws. They’re horrible laws" that are forcing the country to treat migrants this way, even going so far as to blame Democrats for the laws themselves.
But the motherfucking truth is that those "laws" have been in place since the 1950s, agreed to and signed off on by Congress members and presidents of both parties, including, most recently, in 2008, George W. Bush. And the motherfucking truth is that story after story is coming in about asylum seekers who have their children taken away from them. And the motherfucking truth is that none of what the Trump administration is doing, the written policy they have, is going to deter a mother trying to escape from a man who is beating her and her kids and threatening their lives. They don't have fucking Twitter on the path from El Salvador to the American border.
Today, in a tweet, Trump made clear the racist intent of his immigration policies, which is a refreshing change from the coded racism that Republicans usually use. Saying that "illegal immigrants...infest our Country" (incorrect capitalization courtesy of Trump), he is blurring the line between violent criminals and economic refugees and asylum seekers, which is exactly what a racist would want to do.
So what do we do? The left is obviously being baited into a fight. Yet that doesn't mean we shouldn't fight. Fucking hell, if traumatized kids doesn't get you fighting, nothing will. So fuck it. Let the ads fall where they may. They'll say we're shitty criminal lovers no matter what. Sometimes a big enough fish can grab the bait, yank the fisherman right into the water, and devour him.
