No one has stretched the 24-hour news cycle to its limit like Donald Trump. On Tuesday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that the administration was killing Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival, the Obama-era program that gave work permits to some 800,000 immigrants who had been brought into this country illegally as children and that served as a promise that they wouldn’t be deported. Killing DACA outright, however, was too cruel even for the Trump administration, which said the Republican-controlled Congress had a six-month window to codify the policy by legislative means, a cynical move that allowed Trump to claim that he had repealed DACA while passing responsibility for an inhumane and highly unpopular policy to Congress. Then, later that evening, after a flurry of criticism from panicked members of his own worthless party, Trump all but admitted that the six-month challenge was a bluff, tweeting that he would “revisit the issue” if Congress failed to pass any legislation:

Congress now has 6 months to legalize DACA (something the Obama Administration was unable to do). If they can't, I will revisit this issue! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 6, 2017

These wild swings are a unique product of the Trump era. They come from the fact that this is a president who has no grasp of policy, does not think twice about holding hundreds of thousands of people hostage to his whims, and has no negotiating tactic other than the bombastic threat. The New York Times reported on Tuesday morning that White House aides feared that 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.” This is basically what happened.



But Trump’s approach to immigration is simply a clumsy version of what Republicans have been doing for years, showing the extent to which one of America’s two major parties has become a zombie vessel for a strident minority, so incapable at governance that their actions bleed into what can only be called anti-governance. After all, it takes a special kind of pathology to kill a program with the support of 80 percent of Americans, with no pressing need, and so many lives and livelihoods at stake.



The Trump administration’s position is head-splittingly incoherent. In his press conference, Sessions claimed that DACA was an affront to American citizens. He made a number of outlandish claims about the program, including that it “mostly” benefited adults, that it had led to a “surge of minors” streaming across the border, and that it had taken jobs away from “hundreds of thousands of Americans.” This would seem to contradict Trump’s position that all of this should be enshrined in law by Congress in six months.







The most charitable interpretation, which Trump has done nothing to deserve, is that he is trying to do things the right way. As justification for the repeal of DACA, he has taken up the conservative line that the way Barack Obama implemented the program, through an executive order, was unconstitutional. But if that were the case, Trump could have tried implementing DACA legislatively before rescinding Obama’s version, instead of holding a gun to the heads of 800,000 people and a do-nothing Congress. In truth, Republicans have used that argument to prove to their base that they loathe Obama’s amnesty and to throw some chum to the Breitbart crowd, all while maintaining the popular position that those 800,000 people—known as the Dreamers—should be allowed to stay in America, somehow. Trump blew up that delicate balance by actually following those positions to their logical ends.

