The First Law of Trumpodynamics dictates that There Is Always A Tweet. For every position adopted by President Trump today, at some point in years past he advocated for the exact opposite—or criticized President Obama for doing the same thing. Sometimes, however, the Law takes effect through video. So it is with Trump's ghoulish and politically boneheaded decision this weekend to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which protects 800,000 young people who were brought here as children by undocumented parents from deportation and grants them work permits, provided they've gone on to high school, college, the military, or all of the above.

Thanks to archive-spelunker Andrew Kacynzski of CNN, we know that during the 2012 Republican primaries—when he was merely a reality TV star—Trump was singing a different tune. Asked on his favorite show ever, Fox & Friends, to weigh in on a squabble between Michele Bachmann and Newt Gingrich on immigration, Trump rejected the notion of throwing out a family that has been here "for 25 years" on the basis of "compassion."

Trump was noticeably more coherent here than you'll often find him today, though you can still tell it's him from phrases like, "I'm the world's most conservative person" and "I saw something on television." But he also made a lot more sense, just as he did when he spoke even more emphatically to CNBC:

Of course, the DACA program doesn't even apply to "families." It's just the young people who were brought here as children. They had no say in the matter. They did not make the decision to break our immigration laws. They have subsequently gone on to get an education, find jobs, and contribute to our society. And for many, the United States is essentially the only home they've ever known. Deporting them would mean sending them to a country they know little about, and where they know no one. In some cases, they might not even speak the language. Because they speak English. Because they are, in the words of President Obama, "Americans in every way except on paper."

Yet President Trump has, according to Politico, set a six-month timeline for DACA's demise. The move is apparently an attempt to force Congress to act on the issue, and possibly tie it to the longstanding problem of finding funding for The Wall. It is also a betrayal of the essential promise of America: that if you work hard and play by the rules, you can find success and better your station in life. DACA recipients, after all, voluntarily came out of the shadows and gave the feds their information in order to join our society. Will the Trump administration now use that to deport them?

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At the very least, the six-month timeline throws these young people's lives into chaos, and makes them pawns in a political chess game increasingly defined by the president's desperation. He is desperate to get a Win, and to uphold a series of campaign promises that increasingly look to be worthless even by Trumpian standards. A win on The Wall or ending the program—another campaign pledge—would seem to be worth mortgaging the hopes and dreams of 800,000 people.

It's even worth the very real risk that this will amount to another case of Trumpian self-sabotage. The move does not look like a stroke of political genius, which may be why The New York Times reports Trump was just last week begging his aides for "a way out" of making a decision either way on the program. An NBC News/SurveyMonkey poll last week showed two-thirds of Americans support DACA, while just 30 percent oppose it. Meanwhile, neither advocates for DACA nor opponents will be satisfied with this half-measure, and Trump will hear it from both ends of the spectrum.

"You have people in this country for 20 years, they've done a great job...they're productive. Now we're supposed to send them out of the country? I don't believe in that, Michele."

As a practical matter, it will be incredibly tough to tie this to The Wall and get it through Congress. Democrats could very well refuse to participate in any of it on the pretense that the president has created this mess himself and that The Wall is dumb. Congressional Republicans are split on DACA, and aren't exactly unified on The Wall either. Even if Trump somehow pieced together enough votes to just pass a DACA extension, it would be a blow to his base as the 2018 campaign cycle begins grinding into gear. And if nothing gets done, Trump will feel a huge amount of pressure to start deporting (essentially American) young people in six months. Will they pull kids out of their college classrooms? Will they drag 13-year-olds out of their homes and put them on the back of a truck? Will they tell a member of the military serving abroad to change their flight home from San Francisco to San Salvador? That should make for some interesting video and some crippling headlines. It will also light a rocket-fuel fire under the Democratic base heading into 2018.

If only the president could employ some of that apocryphal "compassion" we heard about in 2012. Or if only he had not embraced ethno-nationalism on the campaign trail. If only the sum total of his achievements—pulling out of the Paris Climate Accords, dismantling the Clean Power Plan, turning the clock back on Cuba—didn't solely consist of destroying the legacy of his predecessor, consequences be damned.

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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