The most recent example of Trump contradicting himself involves Deferred Action for Child Arrivals, or DACA, the Obama-era program that spares undocumented immigrants who came to the country as children from deportation and allows them to apply for renewable two-year work permits. On Tuesday, the administration, via Attorney General Jeff Sessions, ended the program despite deafening protestations. Amazingly, though perhaps totally unsurprisingly, The New York Times reports that “as late as one hour before the decision was to be announced administration officials privately expressed concern that Mr. Trump might not fully grasp the details of the steps he was about to take, and when he discovered their full impact, would change his mind.” The impact, for those who are unaware, is that nearly 1 million people who came to the U.S. as kids and for whom the U.S. is the only home they know, will be kicked out of the country. According to Trump, who pledged to scrap DACA on the campaign trail, the rationale for the decision centered on producing “safe communities, a robust middle class, and economic fairness for all Americans.” But as economists have long said, far from helping the economy and job market for people born in the U.S., getting rid of DACA and immigrants in general will actually hurt the economy.

Naturally it should come as no surprise, given the Trump Principle elucidated above, that Donald Trump was in agreement with said economists as recently as 2012. “Obviously, the concept is that you throw everybody out and everybody else gets a job, but it doesn’t work that way,” Trump explained, correctly during an interview with Fox & Friends, the early-morning Fox News show that would become, years later, his personal presidential cheerleading squad. “A lot of the jobs these people have, a lot of other people don’t want. You know that and I know that, and you see it all the time. Whether it’s picking grapes or doing something else, you have the jobs that a lot of people aren’t going to want, so I don’t think it’s as complicated as that. We really have to come up with a solution with compassion. We have to show some compassion. We can’t just throw everybody out.”

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

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