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| Fox News' Chris Wallace grills White House adviser Stephen Miller on Trump's emergency declaration |
You know things are bad for the White House when they trot the unhinged, unapologetically white supremacist policy adviser Stephen Miller out on the Sunday morning talk show circuit - as they did this morning.
Politically speaking it's actually kind of like when the twisted character Zed orders his sidekick Maynard to "bring out the Gimp" in the unforgettable scene from Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction.
Miller, who previously served in communications and advisory roles for right-wing Republican nut-jobs like former Minnesota Tea Party Congresswoman Michele Bachmann and ex-attorney general Jeff Sessions, is such a despised and divisive figure that the only real reason to put him on national television to speak is because he has the innate ability to draw media attention away from where the Trump administration doesn't want it to be.
You know how an octopus or squid has the ability to release a squirt of dark ink in the water as a way to temporarily confuse a predator to allow it to escape?
If you imagine the Trump administration as a squid, Stephen Miller is kind of like the ink.
When Fox News host Chris Wallace grilled Miller with facts and data that dispute Trump's rationale for taking the unusual step of declaring the situation at the southern border with Mexico a "national emergency", Miller simply responded as he usually does.
He launched into the predictably obtuse mix of right-wingy hate speech coupled with unhinged attacks on other politicians which usually has nothing to do with the question he was asked.
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| Trump announcing that his concocted half-truths about immigrants constitute a "national emergency" |
"former President George W. Bush's immigration policy was an 'astonishing betrayal of the American people'."
As if Trump's emergency declaration can be blamed on Bush's policy decisions 18 years ago.
In my view Trump's obsession with the wall is little more than a convenient prop that serves as something of a political cattle-prod he can use to jolt his shrinking base of support awake whenever he needs to rile up the cult of personality that surrounds him.
When the brain trust at Cambridge Analytica, with the help of Republican billionaire Robert Mercer, produced data that showed that Trump's target core audience responded enthusiastically to the idea of a "wall" to keep the perceived "threat" of immigrants at bay - Trump embraced it.
To many of the disenfranchised working-class whites frustrated over an insular Washington political elite that has left them shut them out and angry over being left out of an economic system that's largely left U.S. manufacturing out of the equation and is tilted to benefit top earners, the wall became an easy symbol to grab hold of.
When Trump starts talking about the wall, his supporters know exactly what it symbolizes to them and it's a language they can understand; they can vent their frustrations onto it.
At this point, does it really even matter that it gets built?
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| Prototype sections of Trump's border wall east of San Ysidro, California near the Mexican border |
When media headlines are filled with news of his former campaign associates pleading guilty to lying about their relationships with Russian figures associated with alleged interference in the 2016 elections, Trump starts talking about the wall.
When his popularity slips in polls, or a member of his cabinet resigns over ethical lapses, Trump starts talking about the wall.
And lets' be honest, does anyone really believe he cares about illegal immigration?
From the 200 undocumented Polish laborers hired to do demolition work on the Bonwit Teller building in New York back in 1980 to clear the site for the construction of Trump Tower, to undocumented Hispanic men and women who've been working at his various country clubs and golf courses for years, his companies have been knowingly hiring undocumented immigrants for well over a decade.
Where was his outrage about immigration when he was able to avoid the costs of hiring union workers by hiring those undocumented Polish laborers for $4.00 an hour?
The wall serves a purpose, and the cloak of bigotry needed to sell it slips easily onto Trump's shoulders - so my belief is that the government shutdown and the fake national emergency declaration were all orchestrated to distract people from the truth of the Republican tax cut.
The much-lauded (by Republicans anyway) tax reform bill was a secretive and widely-criticized piece of legislation that passed with no public hearings, and was quite literally drafted behind the closed doors of various Republican politician's offices just before Christmas in 2017.
So it's never really been out of the garage for a test drive so to speak - most Americans are seeing it for the first time this tax season - Trump certainly doesn't want any pesky questions about the ways in which the Republican tax cut benefits him and his family specifically.
Better to talk about invading hordes of drug-dealing, terrorist-rapists than how the Treasury Department under Secretary Steven Mnuchin fought to prevent high tax states like New Jersey, New York and California from getting around the $10,000 cap on deduction of state and local taxes.
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| Remember when Trump promised to simplify the tax code so the form would be the size of a postcard? |
By definition that's not a real tax cut.
It's more of a shell game that gives some Americans the temporary illusion that their taxes were "lowered" because they saw a few more dollars in their paycheck.
When in fact, that money simply translated into many Americans owing more to the IRS simply because it wasn't taken out of their paychecks.
That's something that any American could change by taking 5 minutes to go to the IRS website, downloading a blank W-4 "Employees Withholding Allowance Certificate" form, printing it out, filling in your name, address and Social Security number and simply writing in the amount you want deducted from each paycheck on Line 6 - and submitting it to your HR department or whoever handles payroll.
Want more money back in your refund at tax time? Just increase that number by a few bucks.
Want more money in each paycheck? Then just lower the number and come tax time, you'll just get less back, or owe a little more - it's not complex or some secret, Republicans just figured that many Americans don't take the time to understand how withholding works.
Remember when conservative media was pushing the misleading narrative of average Americans cheering about "seeing more in their paychecks" as a result of the Republican tax cut?
It was basically nothing more than a W-4 withholding gimmick Republicans used to try and distract Americans from the fact the REAL tax cuts were for top earners, cash-rich corporations and of course, people like Trump with "pass through" income from real estate investment holdings, rental income, s-corporations or partnerships.
By the way, the changes in "pass through" income translated to about $17 billion in tax cuts to the millionaires whose wealth allows them to receive income derived from their stakes in real estate and complex partnerships - only that income is taxed at a much lower rate than the rate that the IRS taxes the paychecks of average Americans.
It's a selective tax cut by the few, for the few - but it's easy to disguise that with intentionally overly complex tax forms, especially when you can't see past a wall that hasn't even been built yet.
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