Mr. Trump to the dreamers: Drop dead.

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

PRESIDENT TRUMP has often spoken and tweeted of the soft spot in his “great heart” for “dreamers,” the hundreds of thousands of young immigrants brought to this country as children. This supposed concern has now been revealed as a con.

Offered bipartisan legislation in the Senate that would have protected 1.8 million dreamers from deportation, in return for a down payment on the $25 billion wall Mr. Trump assured voters that Mexico would finance, the president showed his cards. The deal was a “total catastrophe,” the president said, punctuating a day in which the White House mustered all its political firepower in an effort to bury the last best chance to protect an absolutely blameless cohort of young people, raised and educated as Americans.

Despite the withering scorn heaped on the bipartisan plan by Mr. Trump, with a hearty second by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), eight Republican senators backed it, giving it a total of 54 votes — six shy of the 60 required for passage. Had Mr. Trump stayed silent, or suggested he could accept a modified version, the bill may very well have passed. But he turns out to be far less interested helping the dreamers — helping anyone, really — than in maintaining his anti-immigrant political base.

His own blueprint, an obvious nonstarter that included sharp cuts to legal immigration, mustered just 39 votes in the Senate, nearly all Republicans. That’s a telling total, one that mirrors the percentage of Americans who still support him. Of the four immigration measures voted on in the Senate last week, the Trump bill had the least support.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/mr-trump-to-the-dreamers-drop-dead/2018/02/17/26799300-1320-11e8-8ea1-c1d91fcec3fe_story.html?utm_term=.e84ce7b024c9&wpisrc=nl_rainbow&wpmm=1

[customerserviceguy]

1. I figured

when I saw that "four pillars" deal, that he wasn't serious. Did anyone else notice that there was no condemnation of the near tripling of the people who were going to get residency (and a path to citizenship) from Tom Cotton or any of the other hardliners? Trump took them aside and said, "Let me toss a monkey wrench into the opposition, just praise this deal, and know that it won't possibly happen. We will be able to take the moral high ground with this, or at least get both sides blamed equally for failure to get a DACA deal."

Lo, and behold, here we are after a week in which the US Senate shot down several proposals, and all the Sunday talk shows were going on about is the indictment of some Russians for, well, being Russians, and a school shooting that is not going to have any more legislative action taken on it than any of the other dozens of shootings did. DACA isn't even news anymore, with the rapid pace of the news cycle, and Trump didn't even have to personally create either of those two distractions. He's certainly capable of hijacking a news cycle all on his own without any help from circumstances.

He, or at least those around him, have made the calculation that a stalemate that involves both sides pointing the finger at each other leads to a situation where he can come out on top, at least in the short one, and can pass muster with his base. That base has GOP Senators and Representatives cowering in fear as we approach the midterms, and he's been getting his way an awful lot these days.