Balance of Power: Trump’s `Dreamer' Dodge Roils Republicans

Donald Trump’s decision yesterday to halt a popular Obama-era immigration program risks touching off a Republican civil war, pitting the president against the party’s business-minded base in Congress.

The program is known as DACA — short for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals — and it protects immigrants brought to the U.S. as children. Corporate leaders, everyone from Microsoft’s Bill Gates to Goldman Sachs’s CEO Lloyd Blankfein, criticized Trump’s move and said workers in the program deserve protection. Democrats say ending it is heartless. And many Republicans believe alienating the fast-growing Hispanic voting bloc is political suicide.

Stoking the anti-immigration flames is Trump’s former strategist Steve Bannon, who has used his newfound freedom to egg on Trump to pursue his nationalist impulses.

Trump is giving himself an out, leaving it to Congress to protect the so-called Dreamers by the time he ends the program in March. He suggested he might revisit the issue if lawmakers don’t.

In trying to have it both ways, Trump angered a lot of Republicans right when he needs them to avert a showdown over spending and the debt ceiling — trading leverage in those upcoming fights for a win among Bannon’s Breitbart News readers.