Trump holds photo op to pretend family separations aren't his fault
Trump really didn’t like all the negative press he’s been getting for tearing families apart — so he held a photo op to pretend he had fixed it.
In response to overwhelming public pressure over his ripping of children away from their parents, Trump held a desperate photo op to try to blame the crisis he created on everyone from Barack Obama to Dwight D. Eisenhower.
“It’s been going on for 60 years,” Trump said when asked why it took him so long to fix the problem he created. “Sixty years, nobody’s taking care of it, nobody’s had the political courage to take care of it, but we’re going to take care of it. We’re going on — it’s been going on for a long time.”
Trump also said he didn’t like “the sight” of families being separated, and that’s why — after insisting that only Congress could fix the problem — he was signing an executive order that he claimed “keeps families together.”
Then he blamed the crisis he created on President Obama.
“This is a problem, if you look at some of those horrible scenes from a few years ago,” he said. “To me they were horrible seems they were just terrible, and that was during the Obama Administration. Other administrations have had the same thing, we’re keeping the family together.”
But other administrations, including Obama’s and Eisenhower’s, did not have a policy of ripping children from their parents at the border. The scenes to which Trump refers were of unaccompanied minors or families who were detained together, not ripped apart by a blanket “zero tolerance” policy.
And the order that Trump signed does not end the policy of prosecuting all border crossings as crimes; it gives the government more power to detain children and families together, while failing to address the more than 2,000 children who have already been ripped away from their parents.
Trump might have felt the need to do something in response to the toxic publicity he’s been getting over this policy, but no one should be fooled by this photo op. This catastrophe is Trump’s fault, and it has not ended.
Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.
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