Flip. Flop.
At a bipartisan meeting with House and Senate leaders on Tuesday, Donald Trump had this to say about an impending bipartisan agreement to protect roughly 800,000 Dreamers, undocumented immigrants brought to the USA when they were children:
[W]hen this group comes back — hopefully with an agreement — this group and others from the Senate, from the House, comes back with an agreement, I’m signing it. I mean, I will be signing it. I’m not going to say, “Oh, gee, I want this or I want that.” I’ll be signing it, because I have a lot of confidence in the people in this room that they’re going to come up with something really good. […]
You folks are going to have to come up with a solution. And if you do, I’m going to sign that solution.
Then, on Thursday, in a series of tweets, Trump did a complete 180 and rejected a bipartisan proposal put before him, calling it “a big step backwards.”
“The so-called bipartisan DACA deal presented yesterday to myself and a group of Republican Senators and Congressmen was a big step backwards,” he tweeted. “Wall was not properly funded, Chain & Lottery were made worse and USA would be forced to take large numbers of people from high crime countries which are doing badly. I want a merit based system of immigration and people who will help take our country to the next level. I want safety and security for our people. I want to stop the massive inflow of drugs. I want to fund our military, not do a Dem defund. Because of the Democrats not being interested in life and safety, DACA has now taken a big step backwards. The Dems will threaten “shutdown,” but what they are really doing is shutting down our military, at a time we need it most. Get smart, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
It’s a breathtaking flip-flop given that the bipartisan gathering was intended to prove to the world that Trump is not an unstable idiot. He went so far as to allow the press into the negotiations for nearly an hour with the cameras and recorders rolling. Trump wanted to give everyone a glimpse of his negotiating prowess and dealmaking artisanship. However, with his abrupt reneging on his promise, Trump proves that he is, in fact, unstable and impulsive, just the characterization he was hoping to disprove.
Mission not accomplished, Dear Leader.
Adding… I think it’s important that we understand the dynamics of this situation because much of the commentary about the DACA/Dreamers debate and the potential failure for a bipartisan agreement to come to pass is going to center around Trump’s description of African nations, Haiti, and El Salvador as “shitholes”. Let’s be clear: any failure for this agreement to happen isn’t because our racist president disparaged other countries with such offensive and coarse language. It’s because he himself either doesn’t want an agreement or is so unhinged that he has no clue as to how to help make it happen.
