Politicians Never Lied Before Trump
Politicians Never Lied Before Trump
An aide to President Obama boasted to the New York Times about lying and manipulating the media to sell the administration’s Iran policy. Mr. Obama himself proselytized for his health-care plan by saying that, despite mandatory requirements that outlawed millions of individual health plans, you’d be able to keep your existing plan. Nor is there the slightest ambiguity now: His administration deliberately lied to the American people about the origins of the 2012 terrorist attack on a U.S. consulate in Libya.
We could go on. Candidate Obama, in a formal address, explained that Detroit’s financial troubles were due to its large, gas-guzzling cars. This was ridiculous. Businesses fail because of products that don’t make money, not the ones that do. But smart pols know which fibs the media will applaud.
Lying is the other mother’s milk of politics. Political leaders are always making less-than-optimal decisions. They act within political constraints. They are often less concerned with the thing itself than how it might affect the next election or progress on some unrelated priority.
All political speech is a means to an end. Getting their priorities enacted is more important to politicians than telling the truth about them. Whether their policies even have the desired effect often is less important than racking up a “win” and avoiding a “loss.”
All this applies to Donald Trump and his signature promise, the wall.
The wall is mostly symbolic in relation to the issue of illegal immigration. It’s more important now to the president’s standing with his voter base, and to his hope of re-election. To Mr. Trump and his opponents, the current shutdown fight is a test of power. The Democrats are looking for a chance to defeat the president for the sake of defeating him.
Yet one thing is also true: As with just about everything Donald Trump does, his blunt and often grossly hyperbolic statements and gestures are in the service of deeply conventional policy.
Any immigration system is cruel: It keeps out people who want to come in, such as the opportunity-seeking Central American families pouring north at the moment. Millions would come if they could. Jeh Johnson, Mr. Obama’s homeland security chief, frankly acknowledged last year, when the child detention furor was getting started, that in such circumstances “deterrence” is the only realistic strategy—that is, unless and until the U.S. wants to fix the domestic problems of every country that refugees and migrants are fleeing.
Deterrence is the symbolic function of the Trump wall. Deterrence has been the formal U.S. game plan since “Bill Clinton’s presidency,” goes a long, accusatory wail in New York magazine, which dwells on the suffering of migrants.
Except that it extends much further back. See the 1949 film noir “Border Incident” about people-smuggling: “It is this problem of human suffering and injustice about which you should know,” intones the narrator.
The deterrent effect comes not from the risk of apprehension by U.S. border agents but from the risk of dying in the desert or being robbed, exploited or murdered by trafficker gangs.
This is the force holding back the tide.
Unfortunately the world also hears our ambivalence. As the 1949 film dramatized, smugglers peddle their services based on their knowledge of the modes and moods of U.S. border security. Mr. Trump quickly learned what Presidents Obama and Bush knew: Our legal and humanitarian inhibitions about the handling of small children are a particular lacuna. Since a 2003 immigration reshuffle, the processing of minors has been dumped in the lap of the Health and Human Services Department. It soon developed a reputation for handing children back to traffickers and sweatshop operators purporting to be their legal guardians. Happily, Sens. Rob Portman and Tom Carper, leaders of a Homeland Security investigative subcommittee, have been trying to right the mess since before Donald Trump took office.
But everything Mr. Trump does and says must now be attacked by the media in a way that didn’t apply to the lies and evasions of his predecessors. Photos of caged immigrant children shot during the Obama administration must be attributed to Trump policy. Mr. Trump must be shown to be illegitimate.
This is the flip side of Mr. Trump’s own sorry failure to continue the mystifications that power uses to conceal its dilemmas. We have long tolerated illegal immigration by those who survive the rigors of people-smuggling or exploit loopholes by towing small children along. Given enough time, Mr. Trump might also be acculturated into the virtues of keeping quiet or directing attention elsewhere. He came into office as a person who imagined his advantage was bluntness, as if this made him the antidote to what came before (it did) and provided an actual solution to dilemmas (it didn’t).
Still, give Mr. Trump and his voters credit: Our screwed-up immigration system has become harder for Congress and the public to ignore. Who knows? This might even be leading to a productive moment.
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