Keeping America White?

White Extinction Anxiety:  After Mitt Romney lost the 2012 election to Barack Obama the Republican Party spent a little bit of time trying to better understand the results of the election with the intent of developing an inclusive strategy to win the presidency in 2016.  One of their conclusions was that the party needed to reach out to Hispanics, believing that their historically conservative family values should made them a “natural” fit for the Republican message.  Then Trump showed up with his own strategy, one that focused instead on energizing downtrodden white people, playing on their fears about the changing face of America, something that NY Times columnist Charles Blow calls “white extinction anxiety.”  With the assistance of his like-minded advisors Stephen Miller and Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Trump continues to exploit that anxiety, in fact it’s the basis of his immigration strategy.  So after feigning distress about the separation of children from their families during the week and sending out the First Lady on a faux compassion mission, he reverted back to form, lambasting all those migrants as violent invaders, misquoting crime statistics in order to assert that they are all hooligans, drug traffickers and murders whose violent ways are infecting US border cities and then parading out families who have lost relatives at the hands of illegal aliens.  As sad as those families stories are, and they genuinely are sad, statistics don’t lie. For the most part undocumented immigrants are law abiding, more so than the rest of us because they know that one mistake will doom any chance they have of staying in the country and border cities such as El Paso and San Diego actually have low crime statistics.  Moreover, few of the migrants detained at the border are violent gang members or drug smugglers, so few that only 180 out 180,000 detained during the year were identified as felons.  Trump’s zero tolerance policy is, however, sucking up resources, straining the legal system and diverting attention from the real bad guys, the gang members and the drug smugglers and other bad players that the Department of Homeland Security and the Justice Department should be focusing on.  It also costs far more to detain people than to release them with monitoring technology like ankle bracelets something Obama started to implement and a policy that results in almost all of them showing up for their hearings, but that the Trump administration, now spending millions on tent cities and child care, decided was too expensive.  As to those children, the 2000 plus who have been separated from their parents,  DHS claims to know where all of them are, says that they have already returned a few hundred and has set up a crisis taskforce to try to reconnect the remaining with their families, something far easier said than done because while authorities may know where many of the children were placed they don’t know where a lot of the parents are located because so many of them have already been deported.   Still the zero tolerance policy continues.  The military is in the process of building tent cities to house tens of thousands of detained migrants including families with children, the Trump Justice Department is trying to get the court to agree to allow them to intern those children with their families beyond the current twenty day limit specified in the long standing Flores Settlement Agreement and a number of Republican members of Congress who so far have been unable to pass immigration legislation are in the processing of writing legislation intended to override the Flores restrictions altogether.  And Trump, he just wants to override the Constitution, the document he probably still hasn’t read, by stripping due process rights from the immigrants.  On Sunday he tweeted “We cannot allow all of these people to invade our Country. When somebody comes in, we must immediately, with no Judges or Court Cases, bring them back from where they came. Our system is a mockery to good immigration policy and Law and Order.”  Though the week may not have gone as planned for Trump, he probably didn’t really want anyone to discover just how many kids had been taken from their parents or to learn about the plans to set up tent internment camps, he’s gone on the offensive, turning the children tragedy into another midterm, anti-Democratic talking point.  The immigration problem is their fault because they are obstructionists who won’t pass his legislation or fund his wall.  It’s all Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and Obama’s fault.  Sadly, that’s a strategy that seems to resonate with his base, who appear to support him more than ever. The rest of the electorate and at least one restaurant owner in Virginia not so much.  Sarah Huckabee Sanders learned about that the hard way when the owner of a Red Hen restaurant asked Sanders to leave her restaurant because of her belief that she “works in the service of an inhumane and unethical administration.”  As to Huckabee Sanders, don’t feel too bad about her predicament.  Over the weekend her father, former Arkansas Governor, one time presidential candidate and a Southern Baptist minister, tweeted out a picture of five heavily tattooed Hispanic men who appeared to be making MS 13 gang hand signals with a heading saying  “Nancy Pelosi introduces her campaign committee for the take back of the House.”  Nice going Mike, and thanks for confirming what we all kind of knew, the Sarah apple doesn’t fall far from your tree. Trump wasn’t just focused on “violent migrants,” he also found time to coin a new nickname, this one for Congresswoman Jackie Rosen who is running against Nevada’s Senator Dean Heller, the most vulnerable Republican up for reelection this fall, he’s now calling the very serious challenger Wacky Jackie, he’s also back to calling Elizabeth Warren Pocahontas.  So presidential.

Cohen and Manafort:  The cast of characters involved with Michael Cohen continues to grow.  On Friday, Tom Arnold, the very quirky actor and comedian who was once married to Roseanne Barr represented that he’d been spending time with Cohen and that the two of them were planning to release some of those tapes that Cohen may or may not have of Trump saying and doing things that he’d rather us not see.  Arnold, an outspoken and frequent Trump critic, is in the process of filming a series with Viceland, one that focuses on uncovering Trump related dirt.  He doesn’t appear to have a real relationship with Cohen though the two have met in what Cohen describes as a “chance, public encounter in the hotel lobby where he asked for a selfie."   Arnold is however, very good at getting attention, his story went viral for awhile on Friday, so much so that he actually appeared and initially was taken somewhat seriously on a number of MSNBC shows, not one of MSNBC’s shining moments. He also gave a very rambling interview to CNN.  As to Cohen, his future continues to look murky.  So far out of 300,000 files examined by Judge Kimba Wood’s neutral arbiter only 161 have been determined to be protected by attorney client privilege.  It was also reported that Stormy Daniels was scheduled to sit down with the attorneys from the Southern District today to discuss the payment that she received from Cohen on behalf of Trump but her interview was canceled, at least for now, because of their concerns that it was attracting too much publicity, which it probably was.  Paul Manafort hasn’t been having a good month either.  He's still in jail and Amy Berman Jackson, the judge overseeing one of his cases  turned down his lawyers’ request to nix money laundering charges.  As to Special Counsel Mueller, his ratings have been sinking too.  Already low among Trump’s base, they’ve are even lower among independents and some Democratic voters.  It turns out that remaining silent and discrete while everyone around you attacks your credibility hurts.  Senator Mark Warner may have an answer to that.  Over the weekend he was heard “joking” with some donors  on Martha’s Vineyard “If you get me one more glass of wine, I’ll tell you stuff only Bob Mueller and I know. If you think you’ve seen wild stuff so far, buckle up. It’s going to be a wild couple of months.”