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WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump said Thursday that he was struck by Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke’s gesticulations during the former Texas congressman’s first day on the campaign trail.
“Well, I think he’s got a lot of hand movement. I’ve never seen so much hand movement. I said, ‘Is he crazy or is that just the way he acts?'” Trump said at the White House. “I’ve never seen hand movement [like that.] I watched him a little while this morning, during I assume it was some kind of a news conference, and I’ve actually never seen anything quite like it.”
He excited many Democratic activists across the country with a campaign that turned ruby-red Texas into a competitive battleground in 2018, with Cruz defeating him by just 2.5 percentage points. But he entered a crowded field for his party’s presidential nomination and the right to take on Trump in 2020.
Trump dodged a question about whether he thought O’Rourke or former Vice President Joe Biden, who has not yet announced his intentions, would make for a tougher opponent.
“I just say whoever it is, I’ll take him on,” Trump said, repeating himself but adding “or her” to reflect the possibility that the Democratic nominee could be one of several women who are running.
While Trump likes to give his rivals derisive nicknames — he calls Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., “Pocahontas” to remind voters that she has claimed Native American heritage — the White House is instead referring to O’Rourke as “Robert Francis,” which is his given name. “Beto” is a nickname he has used since childhood.
FILE PHOTO: U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders speaks during a news conference on Yemen resolution on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., January 30, 2019. REUTERS/Yuri Gripas/File Photo
Sanders, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats, made the announcement in an interview on Vermont Public Radio (VPR). He promised a “very different campaign” in an effort to oust Republican President Donald Trump.
“The current occupant of the White House is an embarrassment to our country,” Sanders told VPR. “He is a pathological liar… he is a racist, a sexist, a homophobe, a xenophobe, somebody who is gaining cheap political points by trying to pick on minorities, often undocumented immigrants.”
The more the shutdown fight centers on the wall, the further away lawmakers get from solving the actual policy problem of the growing refugee crisis.Photograph by Guillermo Arias / AFP / Getty
The irony, in light of the continuing political deadlock, is that Nielsen and the President are right about the current situation. There is an immigration crisis at the border—it’s just not the one the President keeps talking about. In the last half decade, while immigration at the U.S. border has dropped significantly compared with earlier years, the profile of migrants has changed in ways that the U.S. immigration system has never been designed to address. Instead of young men and seasonal workers, most of whom migrated from Mexico, the majority of people now arriving are asylum-seeking families and children from Central America. In November, more than twenty-five thousand families crossed the U.S. border—the highest such monthly total on record—fleeing violence, poverty, and rampant political corruption that have made parts of Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala virtually uninhabitable. “There is a refugee crisis in our hemisphere,” Cecilia Muñoz, who served as the director of the White House Domestic Policy Council under President Barack Obama, told me recently. “You can’t fix that at our border. The countries in the region—with the U.S. as the leader—need to try to deal with this collectively.”
The rise in asylum seekers poses a complex logistical problem for U.S. authorities. By law, these migrants must be allowed to present their claims to immigration agents. At the same time, children cannot be detained for more than twenty days. When the scope of the present situation first became clear, in the final years of the Obama Administration, the government initially tried to detain families together, but a federal judge blocked the effort. Since then, the Department of Homeland Security has simply extended a practice it employed for migrant families back when their numbers seemed more manageable: it releases them with a future court date to appear before an immigration judge. The Trump Administration has panned this approach as “catch and release,” but, rather than making policy adjustments, it has spent most of the past year punishing asylum seekers and attempting to dismantle the system. These tactics, which were designed to scare families from making the trip north, did nothing to change the immigration flow, and the federal courts have halted each of the President’s signature policies, including, most recently, his proclamation banning asylum at the southern border altogether. “It’s the complete, 100 percent focus on harsher options that will deter the influx,” an official with the Department of Homeland Security told the Times. “We have a lot more families, a lot more unaccompanied children, and the focus has just been on how can we deter, rather than how can we handle.”
On Christmas Eve, two days after the federal government officially shut down, ice dropped off hundreds of families at a bus station in downtown El Paso. Local migrant shelters, which are typically contacted by ice, were not informed ahead of time. During the next four days, some sixteen hundred immigrant families were left at the bus station without food, warm clothes, or money for travel fare. In recent months, the mass releases of families—often without forewarning to local advocates—have become routine in Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas.
“These families are not trying to evade anyone. They’re presenting themselves to the first Border Patrol agents they can find,” a current Administration official told me. “This is not a border-security crisis. It’s an administrative-processing problem.” Sending more asylum officers to the border and hiring more immigration judges are obvious steps to reduce the growing queue of migrants, the official said, but the real issue is a series of deeper bureaucratic limitations. “ice is trying to get beds freed up faster so it can prepare space for the next family to come through,” the official said. “There’s a limited number of beds to accommodate families. And the agencies involved”—ice, Customs and Border Protection, and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services—“have had a hard time coördinating.” By the time Citizenship and Immigration Services is ready to conduct a preliminary asylum screening (known as a credible-fear interview), many of the families have already been released by ice. In 2017, the majority of families seeking asylum at the U.S. border were released into the country without first going through the credible-fear interview. “They weren’t detained long enough for that to happen, and ice had nowhere to put them,” the official said. “None of the solutions involve the resources the President is now talking about.”
Aside from demanding five billion dollars to build a wall, the Administration has also tried to force Mexico to house U.S.-bound asylum seekers indefinitely while their cases move through the backlogged American immigration courts. The plan, known as Remain in Mexico, will likely be challenged in U.S. federal court, but not before it upends the precarious political landscape in Mexico. “The U.S. can’t just dump people into Mexico,” Tonatiuh Guillén López, the head of the country’s immigration authority, said last week. “We’ve asked for more answers, but the U.S. government is shut down, so I guess they’ll answer when they figure that out. It’s all up in the air.”
What would it look like if the Trump Administration were actually trying to solve this problem? For one thing, it would not have rolled back programs implemented at the end of the Obama era that were calibrated to the new reality at the border. In August, 2017, the State Department cancelled the Central American Minors program, which, though relatively small, vetted children for refugee status in their home countries to prevent them from making the overland journey to the U.S. border alone. That same summer, the Department of Homeland Security ended a pilot project called the Family Case Management Program; designed as an alternative to family detention, it allowed a thousand families in five American cities to live temporarily in the U.S. under supervision while awaiting their asylum hearings before an immigration judge. Ninety-nine per cent of the enrollees attended their mandatory check-ins with ice and eventually showed up for their court dates. The population in ice detention has spiked under Trump, and, in response, D.H.S. has redirected funds to ice from other agencies, with massive increases in detention funding in the last two years from the Republican Congress. “The additional detention beds are the result of Trump’s harsh enforcement practices against adults, but family detention hasn’t increased,” Kevin Landy, the director of ice’s Office of Detention Policy and Planning under President Obama, told me. “Additional funding for alternatives to detention—and less detention—would better address the family influx, and it would also be a more humane approach for adults who pose no threat to public safety.”
No one with any immigration-policy experience underestimates the challenges of responding to a regional humanitarian crisis. In the spring of 2014, the Obama Administration was pushing House Republicans to vote on a comprehensive immigration-reform bill that had already passed the Senate when it was blindsided by the arrival of tens of thousands of unaccompanied immigrant children at the border. Their arrival became national news, and Eric Cantor, then the Republican House Majority Leader, lost his primary that year to a Tea Party insurgent who campaigned on a strongly anti-immigrant platform. “That’s really when the bottom started falling out,” Cecilia Muñoz told me
President Trump’s administration’s offer to build a “steel barrier” instead of a “concrete wall” has not washed with newly empowered House Democrats, who have blasted the whole enterprise as immoral).
The challenges of covering a shutdown marked by lies; Jon Allsop
Over the weekend, negotiations between the White House and Congress failed to make progress, with President Trump’s insistence on $5.7 billion in border funding still the principal sticking point (unsurprisingly, the administration’s offer to build a “steel barrier” instead of a “concrete wall” has not washed with newly empowered House Democrats, who have blasted the whole enterprise as immoral).
Shutdowns are always tricky stories for journalists, with complex technical negotiations often hiding behind political grandstanding. This shutdown—now the third-longest in US history—is even trickier, with lies, misleading statistics, and the volatile nature of Trump’s decision-making all thrown into the mix.
The politics of the situation, however, remain unusually fraught for news organizations, which have had to contend with a fresh barrage of misinformation emanating from the White House. While there’s nothing new in Trump and his surrogates lying to journalists, the problem has arguably intensified of late: Axios’s Mike Allen argues that Trump has committed “fake news recidivism” since announcing John Kelly’s ouster as chief of staff last month. The shutdown, as CNN’s Brian Stelter notes, has become a “fight over facts,” with the administration using a toxic cocktail of flaming immigration rhetoric and junk statistics to create a sense of national-security crisis to justify its planned border wall.
News outlets have called out the web of lies behind that picture. Differentiating himself, once again, from his boosterish network colleagues, Fox News’s Chris Wallace won plaudits yesterday for challenging Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, on her claim that thousands of terrorists are flooding into the US from Mexico. “I studied up on this,” Wallace told Sanders on air. “Do you know where those 4,000 people come, where they’re captured? Airports.” Reporters pointed out that most undocumented immigrants in the US in recent years passed into that status by overstaying visas, not by crossing the Mexican border.
As the shutdown continues, it’s vital that the press continues to bust Trump’s immigration fictions in a clear, consistent, and prominent way. While the stakes are always high with Trump’s lies, he raised them yesterday when he told reporters he might declare a national emergency to fund the wall. The consequences could be disastrous: in a piece for the latest issue of The Atlantic, Elizabeth Goitein, an expert on civil liberties and national security, writes that a state of emergency could give Trump sweeping legal powers across a range of policy areas. After Trump spoke yesterday, Goitein’s piece did the rounds among reporters on Twitter, and the mediasphere started seriously interrogating the hypotheticals. ABC’s George Stephanopoulos interviewed Rep. Adam Smith, the new Democratic chair of the House Armed Services Committee, who confirmed Trump’s emergency powers, but warned they would likely face an immediate court challenge.
Speculation about Trump’s presidential prerogative and what he might do with it has added yet another layer of complexity to the shutdown story. As it progresses, journalists must continue to separate possibility from certainty and facts from lies, then weave it all together into a comprehensible picture. Many reporters have done that well so far—in particular by asking the president and his spokespeople whether the wall is really worth all the pain for out-of-pocket federal workers. But the shutdown beat may only just be getting started.
Below, more on the shutdown:
Over the weekend, negotiations between the White House and Congress failed to make progress, with President Trump’s insistence on $5.7 billion in border funding still the principal sticking point (unsurprisingly, the administration’s offer to build a “steel barrier” instead of a “concrete wall” has not washed with newly empowered House Democrats, who have blasted the whole enterprise as immoral). Shutdowns are always tricky stories for journalists, with complex technical negotiations often hiding behind political grandstanding. This shutdown—now the third-longest in US history—is even trickier, with lies, misleading statistics, and the volatile nature of Trump’s decision-making all thrown into the mix.
The politics of the situation, however, remain unusually fraught for news organizations, which have had to contend with a fresh barrage of misinformation emanating from the White House. While there’s nothing new in Trump and his surrogates lying to journalists, the problem has arguably intensified of late: Axios’s Mike Allen argues that Trump has committed “fake news recidivism” since announcing John Kelly’s ouster as chief of staff last month. The shutdown, as CNN’s Brian Stelter notes, has become a “fight over facts,” with the administration using a toxic cocktail of flaming immigration rhetoric and junk statistics to create a sense of national-security crisis to justify its planned border wall.
News outlets have called out the web of lies behind that picture. Differentiating himself, once again, from his boosterish network colleagues, Fox News’s Chris Wallace won plaudits yesterday for challenging Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, on her claim that thousands of terrorists are flooding into the US from Mexico. “I studied up on this,” Wallace told Sanders on air. “Do you know where those 4,000 people come, where they’re captured? Airports.” Reporters pointed out that most undocumented immigrants in the US in recent years passed into that status by overstaying visas, not by crossing the Mexican border.
As the shutdown continues, it’s vital that the press continues to bust Trump’s immigration fictions in a clear, consistent, and prominent way. While the stakes are always high with Trump’s lies, he raised them yesterday when he told reporters he might declare a national emergency to fund the wall. The consequences could be disastrous: in a piece for the latest issue of The Atlantic, Elizabeth Goitein, an expert on civil liberties and national security, writes that a state of emergency could give Trump sweeping legal powers across a range of policy areas. After Trump spoke yesterday, Goitein’s piece did the rounds among reporters on Twitter, and the mediasphere started seriously interrogating the hypotheticals. ABC’s George Stephanopoulos interviewed Rep. Adam Smith, the new Democratic chair of the House Armed Services Committee, who confirmed Trump’s emergency powers, but warned they would likely face an immediate court challenge.
Speculation about Trump’s presidential prerogative and what he might do with it has added yet another layer of complexity to the shutdown story. As it progresses, journalists must continue to separate possibility from certainty and facts from lies, then weave it all together into a comprehensible picture. Many reporters have done that well so far—in particular by asking the president and his spokespeople whether the wall is really worth all the pain for out-of-pocket federal workers. But the shutdown beat may only just be getting started.
Below, more on the shutdown:
Rhetoric to reality: For The New York Times, Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Peter Baker track how Trump’s wall went from easy campaign talking point to complicated policy conundrum. “As Mr. Trump began exploring a presidential run in 2014, his political advisers landed on the idea of a border wall as a mnemonic device of sorts,” they write, “a way to make sure their candidate—who hated reading from a script but loved boasting about himself and his talents as a builder—would remember to talk about getting tough on immigration.”
The real immigration crisis: The New Yorker’s Jonathan Blitzer trains his attention on the administrative problems at the border. “There is an immigration crisis at the border—it’s just not the one the President keeps talking about. In the last half decade, while immigration at the US border has dropped significantly compared with earlier years, the profile of migrants has changed in ways that the US immigration system has never been designed to address,” Blitzer says. “The more the shutdown fight centers on the wall, the further away lawmakers get from the real policy problem.”
Going forward, House Democrats will try to keep Trump the center of attention. But Trump won’t like how they’re planning on doing it. In the run-up to the House handover, reporting focused less on the Democrats’ legislative agenda—which is practically a dead letter given Republican control of the Senate and White House—and more on their likely oversight strategy. On Wednesday, The Daily podcast of The New York Times re-upped Jason Zengerle’s interviewsfrom December with Reps. Jerry Nadler, Adam Schiff, and Elijah Cummings, three key committee chairs who intend to use their newfound subpoena powers to obtain and publish information on Trump and the investigations swirling around him.
When Republicans controlled the House, these committees—judiciary, intelligence, and oversight—played “no role whatsoever, they just haven’t done oversight,” Zengerle said. Key GOP figures used them to shield Trump from scrutiny and even to paint him as the victim of a deep-state conspiracy: last February, Devin Nunes, as intelligence committee chair, published a dubious memo painting the investigation into Russian election meddling as politically biased. Yesterday, the timer on that obfuscation ran out. “The world changed today for President Trump,” CNN’s Anderson Cooper said last night. “For the first time since taking office, President Trump is facing the prospect of real, extensive scrutiny from the opposition party led by a highly disciplined adversary.”
The Democrats’ new oversight powers are an opening for the press, of course, in that they should provide an important new stream of information about the Mueller probe and other investigations into Trump and his associates. That’s welcome news. But reporters should remember that the Democrats have their own agenda when it comes to what they might release and when they might release it. As Zengerle noted on The Daily, Pelosi and her committee colleagues have already ordered their oversight priorities by what they think will have the biggest political impact.
Below, more on the new Democratic House:Pelosi’s media flip: Before being sworn in as speaker, Pelosi told NBC’s Savannah Guthrie that she wouldn’t rule out indictment or impeachment for Trump, objecting to the Justice Department’s conclusion that a sitting president cannot be indicted. Pelosi is now aggressively setting the media agenda: she’ll appear tonight on an MSNBC town-hall-style broadcast hosted by Joy Reid. Last month, I explored how Pelosi turned months of negative coverage on its head. Schiff-ting dynamics: Vanity Fair’s Claire Landsbaum has more on the new power-brokers in Washington, including Nadler, Schiff, Cummings, and Pelosi. Last month, The New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin profiled Schiff, who told him that his priorities include finding out who Donald Trump, Jr., phoned after the notorious Trump Tower meeting in June 2016. Speculation abounds that the blocked number in his call log belongs to his father. Beyond Mueller: The Democrats won’t only train their oversight powers on the Trump investigations: they’ll go deep on policy and ethics breaches across the federal government. Last week, Nathalie Baptiste of Mother Jonesfocused on a top target: Ben Carson, the Housing and Urban Development Secretary. Other notable stories:After Scott Pelley of 60 Minutes asked Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the president of Egypt, tough questions about his human rights record, the Egyptian Embassy in the US contacted CBS and told them to pull the show. CBS refused. The interview will air Sunday at 7pm ET. For CJR, Anna Altman recaps the recent scandal at Der Spiegel, the German news weekly where a star reporter, Claas Relotius, repeatedly invented facts and sources for his stories. Critics say the magazine missed the deceptions because of its overemphasis on literary prose. “Relotius wrote in typical Spiegel style,” Altman writes, “descriptive, colorful, even purple prose that emphasizes the emotional over the factual, often going so far as to imagine a protagonist’s interior world.” Under a controversial new proposal, the Interior Department could move to cap the number of Freedom of Information Act requests it processes each month, KUER’s Nate Hegyi reports. The proposal would also make it harder to file quick FOIAs for breaking news stories. Digiday’s Max Willens has an intriguing look at artificial-intelligence efforts at Forbes, where “Bertie,” a content management system rolled out last year, recommends topics, links, headlines, and images to contributors based on their past articles. Forbes is currently testing a new tool which would draft copy for writers. After announcing her presidential intentions this week, Warren sat down for an interview with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow. Politico’s Jason Schwartz and David Siders report that Maddow’s “direct line” to the Democratic Party base makes her a sought-after interlocutor as the 2020 primary race starts to heat up: “With ratings surging at MSNBC, political strategists and communications experts say getting air time on the left-leaning network, and the Rachel Maddow Show in particular, could be crucial for candidates looking to separate themselves from what is expected to be a crowded Democratic field.” More early fodder from the Democratic campaign trail: Martin O’Malley, the former Maryland governor who ran for the party’s nomination in 2016, used an op-ed in Iowa’s Des Moines Register to rule out a repeat bid and throw his weight behind Beto O’Rourke instead. The Times opinion section is adding Jamelle Bouie, Slate’s chief political correspondent, to its columnist roster. He’ll start later this month. And with Glamour going out of print and rival titles already online-only, the Post’s Lavanya Ramanathan asks whether we’ll miss women’s magazines when they’re gone. “In their heyday, these publications offered a pipeline for the nation’s best female journalists,” Ramanathan writes. Nonetheless, they’ve long been criticized for “pummeling readers with messages that their bodies were less than desirable and that their boyfriend’s eyes probably wandered and that only products could fill the void.”
Questions or comments about what you’d like to read with your coffee? Reach today’s newsletter editor, Jon Allsop, at jallsop@cjr.org.
![WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump said Thursday that he was struck by Democratic presidential candidate Beto O'Rourke's gesticulations during the former Texas congressman's first day on the campaign trail. "Well, I think he's got a lot of hand movement. I've never seen so much hand movement. I said, 'Is he crazy or is that just the way he acts?'" Trump said at the White House. "I’ve never seen hand movement [like that.] I watched him a little while this morning, during I assume it was some kind of a news conference, and I’ve actually never seen anything quite like it."](https://i2.wp.com/aiwa.press/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/trump-viet.jpg?fit=857%2C482&ssl=1)
