Trump lies again about refugees
That Trump/Russia thing just keeps getting juicier, doesn’t it?
The Trump administration was officially handed the keys to the White House a month ago, today.
It hasn’t not been pretty.
There’s been non-stop, full-scale, palace intrigue, with the constant rumors of spies, super-spies, super-duper spies, that are accompanied by back-biting, name-calling, career-ending, teeth-gnashing controversy.
I don’t care. (At least not this week)
Sometimes, some things, can be more fascinating than a president who invites the nation’s investigative reporters to gladly sift through his motives.
Here’s one of those things!
Back on Feb. 2, I watched President Trump make a statement about his telephone conversation with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull.
Trump wasn’t pleased.
Prime Minister Turnbull had alerted him to the fact, that the Obama administration had agreed to admit 1,250 refugees from Central America into the United States.
“We have a problem where, for whatever reason, President Obama said, they were going to take, probably, well over a thousand illegal immigrants who are in prisons. And they were going to bring them into this country. And I just said, ‘Why?'” he asked.
There are two words in that statement that stunned me – “illegal immigrants.”
For some reason, the President of the United States of America refused to differentiate between people who’ve entered this country illegally, and those who would be given refuge from persecution, or even death in their homelands.
To use one of Trump’s favorite words, in the endless string of his Twitter tirades – “SAD!”
Worse, Trump claimed those people are in “prison,” but they’re really placed in detention camps in Australia, because of that country’s stringent anti-refugee laws.
It takes a mighty short-sighted president to intentionally confuse “the tired, poor, huddled masses, yearning to breathe free” with people who’re “bringing drugs, bringing crime,” or “who are rapists.”
And to emphasize his point (or, to compound his deceit), Trump took to Twitter, and he wrote, “Do you believe it? The Obama administration agreed to take thousands of illegal immigrants from Australia. Why? I will study this dumb deal!”
To Trump, 1,250 refugees, became thousands of them.
Hyperbole will suffice, when facts and good judgment go hiding, I suppose.
If that had been the only case of Trump ignoring the differences between refugees and illegal immigrants, I would have just chalked it up to Trump-being-Trump.
But that wasn’t the only case.
Last Monday, when he appeared at a news conference with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Trump was asked a very pointed question: “President Trump, you seem to suggest that Syrian refugees are a Trojan Horse for potential terrorism. While the prime minister hugs refugees, and welcomes them with open arms, I’d like to know if you’re confident the northern border is secure?”
Translation? Since Canada has openly welcomed over 40,000 Syrian refugees, and because there’s no northern wall to keep them out of the United States, how would a ban on Syrian refugees (temporary or otherwise) from coming to this country really keep the country safe?
That’s a reasonable question.
But the answer certainly wasn’t.
“You can never be totally confident but…,” was as close to reasonable as Trump got.
Instead he pulled out the refugees-are-really-only-illegal immigrants card.
“We’re actually taking people that are criminals; very, very hardened criminals in some cases, with a tremendous track record of abuse and problems, and we’re getting them out. That’s what I said I would do,” he declared.
See what he did there?
I do.
He simply ignored the question, and he held forth with some self-congratulatory nonsense about him “getting them out,” because “That’s what I said I would do.”
A more appropriate answer to that question might have been less nonsensical if he’d merely said, “Maybe we need to build a northern wall, too.”
That didn’t happen.
He did, however, manage to segue from a question about Syrian refugees to somebody being “drug lords,” and “gang members,” flooding (most likely) across the southern border.
From there, he moved on to his favorite subject, “We won by a very, very large electoral college vote.”
Edward A. Owens is a three-time Emmy Award winner and 20-year veteran of television news. E-mail him at freedoms@bellatlantic.net