Scapegoater in Chief
He stoops to conquer.
Photograph: Bloomberg“I have ordered the Department of Homeland Security to create an office to serve American victims,” President Donald Trump said in his address to Congress Tuesday night. He was referring to a very specific kind of victim -- those harmed by undocumented immigrants. And his comments show that, current conventional wisdom notwithstanding, President Trump is not so different from candidate Trump.
Trump argued that American deaths at the hands of undocumented immigrants -- who commit violent crime at a lower rate than U.S.-born citizens -- have been ignored by the news media and “silenced by special interests.” Yet the murder of Kathryn Steinle by an immigrant in San Francisco in 2015, which Trump cited repeatedly in his campaign, generated national news coverage. Other deaths receive the regional news coverage that murders generally produce.