Is Trump Punking America on Deportation?

Earlier this week, President Donald Trump took to his favorite medium and tweeted that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers will begin deporting "millions of illegal aliens" next week. Opponents may see Trump's threatening tweets as hasty promises that only serve to stir his base, while supporters might see a strategy of deterrence meant to scare potential migrants from crossing over.We cannot presume to know the president's mind, or what advice might have fed his promise. We can say that Trump's words, meaning and actions too often don't follow one another..Administration officials had to quickly follow the president to clean up his tweet, to tell us what he really meant. As an unnamed administration official told the Associated Press, "millions" referred to the more than 1 million illegal residents in the United States with final deportation orders. In other words, nothing to see here. Move along.We wish, against all experience, the president would avoid redhot tweets filled with ambiguous and even misleading declarations. Instead of bringing clarity and direction, they create anger, fear and frustration among too many. Meanwhile, the tweets raise expectations that the president apparently has no intention of delivering on, even as they create unrealistic marching orders for federal law enforcement.. Whatever the Twitter bluster from Trump, the Obama administration still holds the record for deportations over a full year with 419,384 in 2012. The president would have to send more than twice that number out of the country by 2020 to live up to his tweet. We've seen this plenty of times before. Remember, Mexico would pay for the wall. Or his insistence, against all economic evidence, that tariffs are boosting the economy? This is the problem. The tweets don't represent reality. We cannot believe what the plain meaning of the words say. If we do, we're not connecting words to actions or to evidence. We are, in the vernacular of the day, being punked. Perhaps we are meant to find hyperbole in Trump's tweets instead of overanalyzing them. In that case, Trump should find a way to address the nation without depending on others for clarity. Trump's tough stance on immigration struck a chord with many Americans hoping for a secure border, but we have yet to see tangible progress on perhaps his most important issue. We hope that Trump will prioritize real solutions over preemptive campaign promises.  Continue reading...