Friday, February 08, 2019

NO ONE EVEN BOTHERS TO ASSUME THAT TRUMP WILL LIVE UP TO HIS OWN PRINCIPLES

The Washington Post provides more evidence -- as if any more were needed -- that Donald Trump is an immigration hypocrite:
The Washington Post spoke with 16 men and women from Costa Rica and other Latin American countries, including six in Santa Teresa de Cajon, who said they were employed at the Trump National Golf Club Bedminster. All of them said they worked for Trump without legal status — and that their managers knew....

The brightly painted homes that line the road in Santa Teresa de Cajon, many paid for by wages earned 4,000 miles away, are the fruits of a long-running pipeline of illegal workers to the president’s course, one that carried far more than a few unauthorized employees who slipped through the cracks.

Soon after Trump broke ground at Bedminster in 2002 with a golden shovel, this village emerged as a wellspring of low-paid labor for the private club, which charges tens of thousands of dollars to join. Over the years, dozens of workers from Costa Rica went north to fill jobs as groundskeepers, housekeepers and dishwashers at Bedminster, former employees said. The club hired others from El Salvador, Mexico and Guatemala....
This is just the latest of several stories about the Trump Organization's hiring practices at Bedminster. There's no ambiguity here: If you're outraged at employers who hire the undocumented at low wages, you should be furious at Donald Trump.

But I'm not seeing any suggestion, either in the mainstream press or in the right-wing media, that Trump might have trouble selling his hard-line message on immigration to the public now that we know this. I'm not seeing what we saw -- also in the Post -- when a form submitted to the Texas Bar in which Elizabeth Warren described herself as a Native American was unearthed:
The matter now threatens to overshadow the image Warren has sought to foster of a truth-telling consumer advocate who would campaign for the White House as a champion for the working class. Instead, she is now seeking to combat the portrait of someone who for years was insufficiently sensitive to a long-oppressed minority. The matter also is arising at a time when issues of racial and cultural identity are increasingly sensitive in the Democratic Party.
(As Charlie Pierce wrote, "if you can tell me how this little tidbit somehow devalues and/or calls into question everything that Senator Professor Warren has done in the field of consumer advocacy and middle-class economic equality, you're smarter than I am and can cover the campaign for The Washington Post.")

I'm also not seeing anything like this, which appeared in the Post after we learned about a racist photo on Virginia governor Ralph Northam's medical school yearbook page (via Charlie Pierce again):
But a Democratic member of Congress, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive topic, said the Northam revelation may potentially undercut the contrast Democrats are seeking in their messaging if he remains in office. “It could complicate the message,” this Democrat said.
After every bad story involving a Democrat, the media stokes the expectation of a second-order effect: Not only is Elizabeth Warren expected to be embarrassed about a decades-old form on which she called herself a Native American, she now should expect to lose credibility when talking about the disproportionate power of the wealthy, which is a completely unrelated subject. Not only is a racist photo of Ralph Northam a mark of shame for the governor, it's expected to be toxic for everyone in the Democratic Party for the next 21 months, until Election Day 2020.

But Trump? As far as I can determine, not even Ann Coulter has called him on the hiring at Bedminster. Hey, he's a hypocrite -- ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. It's okay if you're a Republican.

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