Max Boot: Trump can't dodge responsibility for the border crisis
Source: Washington Post
Trump can’t dodge responsibility for the border crisis
By Max Boot
Columnist
July 8 at 3:44 PM
This weekend, the New York Times ran an exposé of the appalling conditions at the now-notorious Border Patrol station in Clint, Tex. The facility has become a de facto prison, holding up to 700 children, including some as young as 5 months old. The Times report confirms what lawmakers, lawyers, and even Department of Homeland Security inspectors have found: namely, that conditions are “filthy and overcrowded” and “that some children had no beds to sleep on, no way to clean themselves and sometimes went hungry.” The Times report reads like a scene from Dante: “Outbreaks of scabies, shingles and chickenpox were spreading among the hundreds of children who were being held in cramped cells, agents said. The stench of the children’s dirty clothing was so strong it spread to the agents’ own clothing — people in town would scrunch their noses when they left work. The children cried constantly.”
All Americans should be ashamed and appalled that such abuses are being committed in their names. But the most powerful person in the entire country gives every appearance that he could not care less.
In a Twitter response, President Trump focused his outrage not on DHS but on the Times, which, he claimed (based on no evidence, whatsoever), “is writing phony and exaggerated accounts.” Trump tweeted that “Border Patrol, and others in Law Enforcement, have been doing a great job,” while blaming all problems on undocumented immigrants (“people should not be entering our Country illegally”) and Democrats who “won’t change the Loopholes and Asylum.” Remarkably enough, Trump even claimed vindication: “We said there was a Crisis — the Fake News & the Dems said it was ‘manufactured.’ Now all agree we were right.”
As usual, Trump is rewriting President Harry S. Truman’s motto to read: “The buck stops somewhere else.” Instead of accepting responsibility for what has gone wrong and trying to fix it, the president is intent on blaming others — from the children being held in inhumane conditions to an opposition party that exercises no power over the border. Trump’s most ludicrous claim, faithfully echoed by journalistic lapdogs such as Byron York of the Washington Examiner, is that recent events show that he was right all along about the border “crisis.”
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Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/07/08/trump-cant-dodge-responsibility-border-crisis/
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Related: Hungry, Scared and Sick: Inside the Migrant Detention Center in Clint, Tex. (New York Times)
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