Trump Sunday tweetstorm: DACA is through, and maybe NAFTA too

It sounds like the president started the morning watching Fox & Friends instead of going to church, although he made it to the Lord’s house eventually. Maybe it calmed him down. But he was a little worked up early, and perhaps not surprisingly considering the experience of trying to get Democrats to be serious about a solution to DACA. They were never going to do that, since the problem that is DACA gives them far too valuable a political wedge to use. Solving it would restore the rule of law and rob them of the opportunity to portray Trump as a hater of immigrants. He’s not, of course – he just wants immigration to happen legally. But when Democrats can spew this slander and the media will let them get away with it, why would they want a solution to the problem that takes the issue off the table?

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They don’t, and they won’t, and Trump’s understandably had it:

President Trump, blaming Democrats and the Mexican government for an increasingly “dangerous” flow of illegal immigrants, unleashed a series of fiery tweets on Sunday in which he vowed “NO MORE DACA DEAL” and threatened to walk away from the North American Free Trade Agreement. Minutes after wishing the nation a happy Easter Sunday, Mr. Trump denounced “liberal” laws that he said were preventing Border Patrol agents from doing their jobs. He said that Republicans should use the “nuclear option” to sidestep Democratic opposition in the Senate and enact “tough laws NOW.” It was unclear whether the president’s tweets represented any change in his immigration policy, or were just the sort of venting he is known to do after reading a newspaper article or seeing a television program. The president, who spent much of his holiday weekend golfing with supporters and watching television, was apparently reacting to a “Fox and Friends” segment on immigration that had aired minutes before. Whatever his intention, Mr. Trump’s Twitter outburst captured the fickle tendencies that have driven his policy positions on immigration. On the one hand, he has suggested at times that he is open to extending citizenship to millions of undocumented people. On the other hand, he has denounced those who have entered the country illegally as brutal criminals and raged about lax enforcement that he said had allowed immigrants to pour into the country.

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If the Times relied on more than its own spin, this seeming contradiction would make a lot more sense to them. Trump does not denounce all illegal immigrants as brutal criminals, as the Times suggests. He points out the fact that among the larger population of illegal aliens, there are brutal criminals. So it makes perfect sense that you could extend citizenship to certain undocumented people, but still feel the need to pursue criminal enforcement measures against those who represent a danger to society. As for DACA, let’s recall that DACA is not a federal statute. DACA is one president’s decision to ignore a federal statute by refusing to enforce it against an entire class of people. That is unconstitutional and a violation of the president’s oath. That president, of course, was Barack Obama. What Donald Trump has said is that this situation cannot persist in perpetuity, and that Congress has to come up with a legislative solution to the problem or the president will end DACA protection. If Democrats are now upset that DACA protection might actually end before a legislative fix is in place, they can blame themselves and only themselves because they have refused to be serious players in the pursuit of that solution. Or if they’d like, they can start taking it seriously now while it might not be too late.

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