President Donald Trump tours the border wall between the United States and Mexico in Calexico, California, April 5, 2019. | Photo by Saul Loeb | AFP/Getty Images
By Jesse Jackson 04/08/2019
Donald Trump’s flailing on immigration and the Mexican border continue to spiral into chaos. First, he threatened to close the border with Mexico. One week later, he walked that back. He declares a national emergency about the “invasion” of people seeking asylum from Central American countries, and then says he’s stopped all aid to those countries, which can only worsen the conditions that cause people to leave. He says he’s already building a wall. That isn’t true. He torpedoes bipartisan measures that might begin to make things better.
It’s increasingly clear Trump wants a crisis that he can use politically, not a solution that can ease human suffering.
OPINION
Two weeks ago, Trump’s threat was clear: “If Mexico doesn’t immediately stop ALL illegal immigration coming into the United States throug [sic] our Southern Border,” he tweeted, “I will be CLOSING…the Border, or large sections of the Border, next week.” His aides said he was deadly serious. Trump’s leading mouthpiece, Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, told ABC News that it would take “something dramatic” to stop him from doing it.
Less than a week later, Trump reversed himself. He suddenly praised Mexico as being “very nice,” claiming that Mexico had changed its policy toward the asylum seekers, which a befuddled Mexican government quickly denied. He retreated by issuing new bluster: “We’re going to give them a one-year warning, and if the drugs don’t stop, or largely stop, we’re going to put tariffs on Mexico and products, in particular cars. And if that doesn’t work, we’re going to close the border. You know I will do it. I don’t play games,” Trump warned, playing games with his threats.
What was the “something dramatic” that convinced the president to take back his threat? He was mugged by reality.
Closing our 2,000-mile border with Mexico would be an economic catastrophe, a moral blight, inconceivably inane and literally impossible. A combined 15 million people live along the border. Some $1.7 billion of two-way trade and hundreds of thousands of legal travelers cross the border each day. Mexico is the second-largest market for U.S.-made products (Canada is first). It is our third-largest trading partner (after Canada and China). It is the fourth-largest supplier of foreign crude oil to the United States. It is the top destination for U.S. travelers.
Trump lives in a universe that he shares only with rabid Fox News commentators, but, in this case, he was forcibly reminded of reality by Republican business leaders and by the conservative U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which warned that closing the border would “inflict severe economic harm on American families.” Even Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who usually wags his tail at whatever the president tweets, warned of “potentially catastrophic economic damage.”
Trump’s threats are just posturing, but his policy is a chaotic calamity. He declares a national emergency to claim money for his wall (largely from the military) against the will of the bipartisan majority in both houses of Congress. He rails about the import of drugs, ignoring the reality that virtually all of the hard drugs come in through legal ports of entry that his “wall” won’t address. He describes the rising number of people seeking asylum as “an invasion,” scorning both international and U.S. law and basic morals, then directs his State Department to cut off $450 million in aid to Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, which will surely worsen the conditions that are driving people to seek asylum. He traveled to the California border to celebrate the building of a new section of his promised border wall, when no new building had taken place, only a routine upgrade of old fencing.
He cut off protections for the Dreamers, young people who have grown up in the U.S., and torpedoed the bipartisan agreement that would have protected them and added to border security after he said he’d sign it. He scaled back protections for asylum seekers, helping to create the backlog at the border. Then his administration cruelly separated parents and children at the border, creating a shameful human horror that continues to this day.
Clearly Trump wants an issue to run on politically, not a solution to a humanitarian tragedy. Steve Bannon, Trump’s 2016 campaign strategist, argued that as long as the debate is over immigrants, Trump benefits. Trump uses attacks on immigrants as the centerpiece of his white nationalist appeal. His railing about the crimes of Latin American gang members is simply the updated version of the Willie Horton ad that George Bush used against Mike Dukakis.
So don’t worry about Trump closing the border. Even his administration won’t be that self-destructive. And don’t expect him to make progress with the humanitarian crisis at the border. Trump is fanning the flames, not putting out the fires.
A sensible border policy and humane and effective immigration reform will have to wait for the next president.
Jesse Jackson
During a February 2017 demonstration in Los Angeles, people protest Trump administration policies that they say threaten the Affordable Care Act, Medicare and Medicaid, | David McNew / Getty Images
By Jesse Jackson 4 / 2 /19
Donald Trump’s madcap presidency is now seeking to strip 20 million Americans of their health care coverage. He has instructed the Justice Department to join the lawsuit seeking to declare the Affordable Care Act unconstitutional.
He then proclaimed that Republicans would offer a far better alternative, tweeting they’ll become the “Party of Great Health Care.”
OPINION
Only there is no plan. Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate majority leader, wants nothing to do with trying to develop one. Confusion reigns. This grotesque misrule might be funny were it not putting millions of people at risk.
Trump has taken his animus against all things Obama to new heights in his obsessive drive to repeal or disembowel the Affordable Care Act. After the Republican Senate rejected repeal — feeding Trump’s disdain for Sen. John McCain, who cast the determining vote — Trump’s administration has sought to undermine the act administratively.
Seven million fewer people now have health care coverage since Trump was elected. Now he hopes to have the courts repeal the act. That would end the expansion of Medicaid, which covers more than 10 million low-wage workers and their families. It would repeal the requirement that insurance companies cover those with pre-existing conditions — putting anyone who is ill now covered under the act at risk.
It would repeal the provision allowing the young to be covered under their parents plan to age 26. Once more, insurance companies would be free to enforce lifetime limits on coverage, putting the most vulnerable at risk.
Trump adds insult to this injury by proclaiming the big lie: that Republicans have or will have a plan that will cover more and be less expensive. But there is no plan. Trump aides say it will be developed in the Senate. McConnell, who rules Senate Republicans with a tight fist, says, “I look forward to seeing what the president is proposing and what he can work out with the speaker.”
When asked if the two committees tasked with overseeing health care would come up with a plan, Sen. Charles Grassley responded tersely with a “no.”
Scrambling to put a cover on his barefaced lie, Trump announced that Sen. Rick Scott, Republican of Florida, would join with a couple of other senators to come up with a “spectacular” plan.
This is like naming Al Capone to design the tax code. In the 1990s, Scott was the CEO of Columbia/HCA. He resigned in 1997, the same year the FBI announced an investigation of the company for massive Medicare fraud. In the end, Columbia/HCA pled guilty to systematic fraud — featuring false billing of Medicare on a breathtaking scale. The company pled guilty to 14 corporate felonies and paid out some $1.7 billion in criminal fines and penalties in what the Justice Department called the “largest health care fraud case in U.S. history.” No doubt, if Scott were to come with a plan, it would be “spectacular” for the money guys, and savage for those in need of care.
On health care, Trump’s lies are dangerous to life. The U.S. is the only advanced industrial country that does not provide universal health care as a right. We are paying almost twice per capita as other countries with worse health care results. U.S. life expectancy has declined for three years, in part because of the opioid crisis, in part because of the absence of adequate health care. Meanwhile, the insurance companies and the drug companies and the private hospital complexes rake in fortunes.
What should be done is clear. The U.S. government should negotiate with drug companies to force lower prices for prescription drugs. Medicare should be strengthened and then extended to cover more people in stages. Cover those up to 30 and those 55 and over in the first stage. And then over years, perfect and extend the program to cover all. Pay for it by requiring the rich and the corporations pay their fair share of taxes. We’d end up paying less and getting better coverage.
That rational solution runs into the strongest of entrenched interests — the drug companies and the insurance companies and their legions of lobbyists. They are prepared to spend billions to protect their profits. They buy ads to scare the hell out of people, pay for politicians, and blanket congress with lobbyists. Now they have Trump fronting for them. It will take an aroused public to overcome that resistance.
Trump believes that if you tell a big lie over and over and over again, pretty soon people will begin to believe. His political debut was the big lie about Obama’s birth certificate. He’s done the same with his racist rants on immigrants and the border wall. Now he plans the same big lie technique on health care: slandering what is, claiming to have a better plan when there is no plan, posturing as a champion of the people when he’s defending big money interests.
The real deal is clear: the rich get a tax cut; the poor get a health care cut. The rich are living longer in splendor. The poor are dying earlier in distress. The only thing “spectacular” about the Trump health care lie is his audacity to believe that he can sell it.
Jesse Jackson
