1/In this late summer piece for @NBCNewsTHINK I predicted that the manifest failure of Trump's extremist immigration strategy would lead to him doing even more wild and dangerous things. We seem to be there now w/the caravan. nbcnews.com/think/opinion/…
2/Trump is now full on wag-a-dogging a fictional national security crisis right before our election. He/his Admin are ignoring a massive domestic terror incident to focus on a ragged group of migrants 40-50 days away fr our border. Whole thing is absurd.
3/As Trumpism was derived/informed by right wing European parties and Putinism, Trump has been desperately searching for his enemy - dangerous migrants, terrorists - from day 1. Problem is we don't really have that here in US. So his political project hasn't ever really worked.
4/Despite more than a billion tourists entering US since 9/11 we haven't had a single foreign fighter attack. Our immigrants are assimilating, productive. Crime rate is down, economy is booming, migrants commit crimes at rates lower than native born. Where's the threat/harm?
5/The European right wing model was never going to work here for we have had a different experience both with terrorism and immigration. Was always a huge flaw in the Trumpian strategy, and why his extremist immigration strategy was never going to work. And it hasn't.
6/And so the President has now finally had to make up a fictional migrant threat, complete w/Middle Easterners, MS-13, using terms like invasion. He has even mobilized the American miltary - not just Natl Guard - to fight this fictional assault on the US. apnews.com/e7ffd2d5764244…
7/What disturbs me more than anything else is that this the 4th time this year Trump has invented a fictional national emergency. The other 3 were 1) original flow of kids, moms to border 2) deficit to cut federal worker pay 3) tariffs, repeatedly. This is authoritarianism.
8/Finally, there are things Democrats can and should be doing to challenge this absurd abuse of Presidential power, and to offer a path forward on these regional issues and our own immigration challenges. I propose 3 things Dems can do right now here - medium.com/@Simon_Rosenbe…
9/Democrats have to take on Trump's immigration insanity frontally and defeat him not just for the good of the county and their own politics, but because winning this argument here will be central to any long term effort to roll back the gains of illiberal forces in the West.
