Nielsen: Trump won't visit children he jailed because of the ‘optic’

Trump officials keep saying the quiet part out loud.

Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen appeared on CNN Thursday night to hype Trump’s Friday visit to a section of border fencing in California — a fence that has been there for decades, yet features a plaque declaring it to be the “first section of President Trump’s border wall.”

And during the interview with CNN’s Chris Cuomo, Nielsen admitted what almost anyone with a functioning brain already knew: The trip is nothing more than a stunt.

Cuomo asked Nielsen why Trump wouldn’t visit one of the baby jails where migrant children are still being held, instead of a recently refurbished segment of fencing that was first erected during the Vietnam War.

“Well, I think part of that is just a — it’s an optic,” Nielsen said. “To have the president stand in front of the wall indicates immediately to any viewer that he’s at the border.”

Cuomo wasn’t having it.

“Politics 101, as we both know, is go to the victims,” Cuomo said. “He can go in the building and show the faces of people and show that he cares about them instead of just the fencing.”

Cuomo added that this fencing “isn’t even new, it was budgeted before the shutdown, it was done in 2017 as a rebuild.”

“I don’t get the commemorative nature of that event — when there are kids, that I know you care about, that I know you go to see — why doesn’t he?” Cuomo concluded.

First off, it’s not at all clear that Nielsen really does care about the children who have been ripped from their families and jailed under her watch.

Nielsen has strongly defended the Trump administration’s inhumane jailing of migrant children, some of whom are infants, as well as the administration’s cruel and inhumane separation of children from their parents.

She has claimed to be ignorant of the common-sense conclusion that ripping kids away from their parents is a traumatizing experience.

And Nielsen has also defended the treatment of the migrants whom the Trump administration has jailed, gas-lighting the country by telling the public that the dog kennels they clearly see migrants housed in are actually more humane because they are “larger” than dog runs and have “facilities.”

But all of that aside, Nielsen can’t defend Trump’s visit to the wall — which he has resorted to stealing money Congress already appropriated elsewhere to fund — because it’s not defensible.

On Friday, Trump will stand in front of an absurd plaque on a segment of border wall that’s been there for decades.

It’s nothing more than a publicity stunt. Trump’s own people admitted as much.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.