Let’s look first at DACA itself. President Obama established the policy to protect immigrants brought here as children from immediate deportation and allow them to obtain work permits for a period of two years that could be renewed upon re-application. In order to be eligible for the program, the applicants (referred to as “Dreamers”) must have come to the US before their 16th birthday and before 2007. They must have either a high school diploma or GED or be in school and they must have no legal record of a felony or serious misdemeanor or otherwise pose a threat to national security or public safety.
In September of 2017, President Trump announced that—while he supported the goals of the policy—he would rescind DACA as of March 2018. He urged Congress to pass an appropriate bill, which he would sign into law without preconditions. Congress, however, found it difficult to agree upon a bill. And then Trump reversed himself on the preconditions, making a demand for a $25-billion for his wall in return for his approval. Even when Democratic leaders in Congress offered to meet his demand in return for a path to citizenship for about 1.8 million DACA-eligible young immigrants, the President rejected the deal.
President Trump’s Easter morning tweets included the following (tweets in italics, facts in regular font)):
- Because the immigration situation is “getting more dangerous,” there will be “NO MORE DACA DEAL!” The truth, however, is that “illegal entry at the southwest border is at its lowest level in nearly half a century.”
- “These big flows of people [immigrants coming across the Mexican border] are all trying to take advantage of DACA. They want in on the act!” As I outline above, however, the truth is that any immigrant eligible for the program has to have been here continuously since 2007. It is not possible for current immigrants “to take advantage of DACA."
- “DACA is dead because the Democrats didn’t care or act, and now everyone wants to get onto the DACA bandwagon... No longer works.” The truth, as above, is that it was Trump who originally ended the program and refused congressionally offered deals even those that in fact met his previous conditions. He now avows “there will be no more DACA deal.”
- “Mexico is doing very little if not NOTHING at stopping people from flowing into Mexico through their Southern borders.” In truth, Mexico has a substantial program with considerable success in stopping undocumented immigrants from moving north from Central America and crossing over our border.
The point of this post is that Trump incessantly repeats incendiary untruths that speak to America’s basest instincts. Whether he is lying (that is, saying something he knows to be untrue), just uninformed, or doesn’t care is not always clear.
What is clear is that the truth is not important to him.
The impact on our democracy is profound:
- None of us who have been paying attention is the least surprised by the President’s tweets. It’s almost inevitable that behavior repeated over and over again dampens our moral outrage. It becomes normalized. Such normalization lowers the bar for politicians of all stripes.
- For those of us who see through his lies and his ability to disable politics, the tendency toward despair can be powerful. (On the other hand, there has been a powerful grass-roots political movement against these lies. We must insist that the challengers do not stoop to the President’s methods.)
- Trump supporters who believe his lies can no longer consider government, media, science, experts and so onto be sources of truth. And if we cannot have fact-based conversations with one another, we have no foundation for a free government. Our political polarization is profound.
- For partisans (in Trump’s case, partisan Republicans), even an obvious democratic ideal such as "freedom from foreign interference" or "unbiased districts" quickly diminishes in importance once the partisans notice an advantage in its erosion.”
When presidents lie, democracy suffers profoundly.
