Reports indicate that refugees at the U.S. southern border could reach the 1 million mark this year, and the Trump administration has no plan to address this crisis. No plan at all.
Other than to tell Mexico to solve the problem by intercepting these fearful, exhausted and impoverished people, and to close the door to any asylum seekers without respect to American law, this president has done nothing but rant about his own failures both privately and publicly.
Now most recently, he has fired Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen because she wouldn’t break the law any further while continuing to carry out policies contrary to anyone’s standard of decency. It is not hyperbole to say that the nation, through its top executive, has cast aside law and order in favor of despotism. The problem is that this president is not even a good despot.
Trump’s remaining leadership team, including Stephen Miller (who bears the title of “senior advisor to the president”) has no plan to assist him with these crises. By ceasing aid to the northern triangle nations, countries such as Venezuela and El Salvador will continue to fail their citizenry and internal crime will prevail, even following those who flee to El Norte. To what extent that will continue to erupt or expand within America by its own festering citizenry, is as yet undetermined.
Recently from Politico:
"Last week, as Trump threatened once again to shut down the border … Miller held a conference call with immigration activists to explain the administration’s position and answer questions.
“He has told allies that the administration is out of ideas about how to stem the migrant tide at the border, according to an internal source involved with these conversations.”
Thinking people should understand this as a threshold moment for this presidency and the nation. Even though many would turn away and resume their convenient, middle-class lives and say, “I understand that they’re tired and they’re poor, they’re running from war lords and very well-organized crime, but the U.S. economy is doing pretty well under Donald Trump and an uncontrolled flood of immigration could ruin that,” seeming to indicate that if the door is shut, the problem will go away.
Except that it won’t.
As the president stimulates and endorses internal and international unrest, he is simultaneously destabilizing his own government by side-stepping a Congress meant to provide checks and balances to his reign. Many of the senior posts within his administration remain unfilled, or when his act requires another contestant to administer his whims and take the blame for more failures, he appoints an “acting” chair, absolved of any public oversight via Senate confirmation.
These indicators of a failed and noxious presidency are there for all to see in the numerous, careening accounts that reach our subsequent awareness and conversations. The nation’s White House reality show now approaches a political primary season and ultimately a ballot to be cast for the future of a once-great nation. Could America’s political parties offer up an antidote to this writhing agony? Will the courts be able to provide further relief to a nation stricken by the conspicuous consumption of political venom and heinous misdeed? More importantly, how or will the nation emerge from all of this social pathology?
At this point, it may be far too easy and even flippant to suggest that time will tell. Because at a certain point, the damage sustained by systems vital to what America has known as democracy may become irreversible, allowing other, external pathogens to finish the job.
Without some rapid triage and effective interventions, the agony is sure to continue within the greatest test of democracy and capitalism the world has ever known.
Michael Orton
Michael Orton is an independent writer and producer who lives in central Utah.