Taking babies from undesirables and giving them to agents of the state to raise as their own is a practice with a history. foxnews.com/world/2016/06/…
I didn't watch Trump's speech, but what's striking about the transcript of that passage is the framing, and what's omitted. 
There's no mention of any discussion of adoption, of what happened to the baby's birth mother, of where she is now. Her agency, her continuing existence, is erased.
An agent of the state encounters a woman in distress, and IN THAT MOMENT decides that he will take her baby, not yet born, and raise it as his own. That's the whole story.
The officer's wife agrees to adopt, but only after he tells her it's going to happen. The mother of the child vanishes—not only in relation to her child, but as someone the officer has an obligation to assist.
Again, a resonance with the stolen children of the disappeared in Argentina. 
This isn't just something that happened under Trump. This is a story—of all the stories he could have told—that his speechwriters chose to uplift and celebrate.
In the context of the full speech, of Trump's presidency, this story is a question and an answer: What do we do with the children of those we despise? If they're brown, we expel them from our land. If they are white, we take them for ourselves.
Again, read about the stolen children of Argentina's military dictatorship. newyorker.com/magazine/2012/…
We don't know what process was followed in this adoption. We don't know where the mother of this child is now, how she's doing, what her relationship with her kid is. Trump's people could have said. They chose not to. They chose to erase her.
That erasure wasn't accidental. It wasn't merely rhetorical. It was ideological. It was an expression of a specific kind of ethno-natalism we've seen before. It was fascist.
Oh. Here's a news story on the incident. Just want to highlight a couple of things. edition.cnn.com/2017/12/01/hea…
First, the story as Trump told it isn't an exaggeration: The cop decided to adopt an addict's child WHILE HE WAS INTERROGATING THAT ADDICT AS A POSSIBLE ARREST.
She was in distress, likely high, facing incarceration. He was angry, deciding whether to arrest her. When she told him she wanted to give up the child, in her words, "he became a human being instead of a police officer."
He took the woman's child instead of locking her up. Instead of getting her help. Tell me that's a freely-made choice. Tell me that's not duress and coercion.
And as for the mom? As of December, she's homeless, not in contact with her child or its adoptive parents, and receiving no assistance from her kid's new family.
Just one phrase would have transformed this story completely: foster care. Imagine if the cop had offered to care for the kid while mom got back on her feet.
Imagine a resolution to the short-term crisis that bound the two families together instead of splitting one apart.
Imagine a police officer who wanted to give the woman in distress a reason to get healthy, who wanted to give himself an incentive to help her.
People take in infants as foster children every day, helping their parents get their lives straight. There are a thousand stories like that Trump could have told. Stories about community. About care for strangers. About keeping families together. He chose this instead.
Update: I'm going to be writing about this story more soon, but in the meantime a response to some of the people who have been tweeting "corrections" at me...
Officer Holets has set up a GoFundMe for Crystal Champ, Hope's mom, and seems to have reached out to her in several ways. But from what I can tell all that happened AFTER the CNN story went viral in December, two months after they met, and six weeks after Hope was born.
And of course there's no indication in any of the coverage I've seen that Holets and his wife are planning to return Hope to the custody of her birth parents if their efforts to get clean are successful.
And again, Trump didn't mention any of this in his speech, and nothing that's happening now, months after the fact and in the wake of huge media attention, changes the impropriety of what happened that night.
