Trump’s new tack: Immigrants as guided missiles

President Donald Trump wants to send the people he calls “illegals” to sanctuary cities. It’s one more shameful, bizarre twist in the lunacy that is this presidency.

Someone, probably Stephen Miller, who has become the de facto czar of immigration—and I mean czar as in Ivan the Terrible—came up with the idea and Trump liked it. Naturally. But the people running the immigration agencies found executing the idea to be impractical, costly, possibly illegal. It was shelved. For a while.

No bad idea stays dead and buried in this administration. Destroy Obamacare? Why not? Another huge tax cut for corporations and the rich? Sure.

Trump won’t be able to execute these two wishes because the House of Representatives is now an unmovable rock. But for Trump, just proposing such things is useful to satisfy different parts of his base, in one instance the Tea Party types who hate Obamacare and, on the other, the plutocrats who would like their taxes to be zero no matter the consequences.

Punishing sanctuary cities has been a Trump fantasy for some time. Recently, rumors surfaced that the administration once again was considering a form of punishment previously floated and dismissed: sending asylum seekers to sanctuary cities. These are cities that, despite threatened federal funding cuts, have refused to allow their local police to act as an auxiliary of the immigration police, ICE. Cities like San Francisco, New York, and Chicago where the political leadership has defied the administration.

That’s principled leadership in sharp contrast with Miami-Dade’s Mayor Carlos Gimenez, who wasn’t pressured to comply but eagerly agreed to task the local cops to collaborate with ICE, this in the community with the highest percentage of first and second-generation immigrants in the country. As an immigrant, a Cuban native, a U.S. citizen, a resident of Miami-Dade and a human being, I am embarrassed, ashamed, and outraged.

Asked by reporters whether the administration was going to implement the relocation policy after all, White House aides spent days denying it. Then, characteristically, Trump moved the ground under “his people” and summarily put the idea back on the table. Trump mouthpieces quickly did a 180 degree turn and began defending Trump’s proposed policy. Lesson: If you work in the White House, be sure you check your self-respect and your integrity at the door.

Although Trump has said and done such fantastic things that we have almost lost the ability to be surprised or shocked by his antics, this particular initiative—which amounts to a scheme to weaponize immigrants for the purpose of retaliating against members of Congress and local communities who have stood up against his anti-immigrant crusade—caught some people off-guard. Yet, in the fun-house mirrors atmosphere in which we are living, it makes sense.

T-Rex, aka Donald Trump, is a vengeful creature. He lacks patience, is easily frustrated. If Obama moved in the world like a Zen master, Trump acts like a WWE wrestler, foaming at the mouth, hurling insults and threats, charging like a rhino at every opponent, breaking things and shattering every rule of sportsmanship.

Trump has tried almost every means at his disposal, and even some that are not legally at his disposal, to coerce Congress into enacting his immigration policy. Caged  children. Shut down government. Threatened to seal the border. Invented a phantom national security emergency. Nothing has worked. No wall. No money.

Dumping immigrants in the districts of members of Congress he hates, like Nancy Pelosi, is one more manifestation of Trump’s psychology and persona. Moving immigrants around like pawns to retaliate against liberal adversaries is a typical Trump move encompassing two of his more despicable tendencies: the proclivity for dehumanizing the other, in this case by treating immigrants as things, specifically, guided political missiles; going as low as necessary to seek vengeance against political adversaries.

The pro-Trump terrorist who sent bombs to anti-Trump politicians and other prominent critics of the administration surely was thinking he was doing what Trump might fantasize doing but cannot do except symbolically. Trump famously failed to denounce the bombing campaign, assailing instead the reaction by the media and the Democrats, calling the whole thing a distraction from the Republican mid-term campaign. The bomber must have felt assured that he had read Trump right.

Trump, in contrast, did not read the Democratic leaders of sanctuary cities right. They are not backing down. Indeed, it seems they are eager to challenge the President to carry out his threat. In the end, as with most other Trump threats and promises, this one will turn out to be an empty one. Aside from all the objections voiced by those inside the government, the reality is that, what the relocation policy would accomplish, is to provide a safe and friendly environment from which the immigrants can get their bearings before embarking on the journey to their intended destination, the home of a friend or relative, a job with an employer desperately seeking workers.

Trump seems to imagine that by letting loose immigrants in cities far-flung from the border, he will wreak on those defiant communities the type of hardship that would be created by a group of Ebola patients suddenly showing up. In case the president really believes this, he is thrice a scoundrel but maybe, in this rare case, also a sincere one.

Sincere in the sense that the American sociologist Peter L. Berger, a conservative and a luminary in the field of the sociology of knowledge, uses that concept: someone who believes his own propaganda.

Trump seems not only to believe his own propaganda on immigrants but also to use this bogus knowledge to try to wound those on the other side of the immigration debate. But that would only work if the target—the liberal universe—believes immigrants are a plague, as Trump appears to believe. They don’t, they know the real plague is Trump and his rabble, so Trump’s gambit will survive only as further evidence of his cynical and vindictive nature.