The Commentariat -- June 24, 2018
Afternoon Update:
L'État, C'est Moi. Philip Rucker & Dave Weigel of the Washington Post: "President Trump on Sunday explicitly advocated depriving undocumented immigrants of their due-process rights, arguing that people who cross the border into the United States illegally must immediately be deported without trial -- and sowing more confusion among Republicans ahead of a planned immigration vote this week. In a pair of tweets sent during his drive to his Virginia golf course, Trump described immigrants as invaders and wrote that U.S. immigration laws ... must be changed to take away trial rights from undocumented migrants. 'We cannot allow all of these people to invade our Country,' Trump wrote. 'When somebody comes in, we must immediately, with no Judges or Court Cases, bring them back from where they came. Our system is a mockery to good immigration polic and Law and Order. Most children come without parents.' The president continued in a second tweet, 'Our Immigration policy, laughed at all over the world, is very unfair to all of those people who have gone through the system legally and are waiting on line for years! Immigration must be based on merit -- we need people who will help to Make America Great Again!'" ...
... Jay Root & Shannon Najmabadi of the Texas Tribune: "Central American men separated from their children and held in a detention facility outside Houston are being told they can reunite with their kids at the airport if they agree to sign a voluntary deportation order now, according to one migrant at the facility and two immigration attorneys who have spoken to detainees there. A Honduran man who spoke to The Texas Tribune Saturday estimated that 20 to 25 men who have been separated from their children are being housed at the IAH Polk County Secure Adult Detention Center, a privately-operated U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility for men located 75 miles outside Houston. He said the majority of those detainees had received the same offer of reunification in exchange for voluntary deportation."
Bob Bryan & Allan Smith of Business Insider: Trump's initiation of trade wars "prompted a swift response from US allies, including retaliatory tariffs and a radical departure in treatment from other formerly friendly foreign leaders.... But so far these responses have done little to deter Trump.... Op-eds in The Houston Chronicle and the Canadian news magazine Maclean's suggested the only way to quell the rising trade tensions is to strike at Trump's businesses. While some countries, such as China, have appeared to try and sway the president through treating his family's businesses more favorably, countries have not made moves to curtail the businesses' activity within their borders.... Scott Gilmore, a social entrepreneur and former Canadian diplomat, suggested in Maclean's that Canada should use anti-corruption laws to pressure Trump on trade.... 'In the spirit of the Magnitsky Act, Canada and the western allies come together to collectively pressure the only pain point that matters to this President: his family and their assets.'"
"Trump's Fascination with the Trappings of Power." Ken Vogel of the New York Times: "Donald J. Trump's presidency has yielded more -- and more elaborate — [commemorative] coins that are shinier, flashier and even bigger [than those of previous presidents], setting off a boom for coin manufacturers, counterfeiters and collectors.... One such design, which was approved by Mr. Trump and paid for by the Republican National Committee ... bears his campaign slogan 'Make America Great Again,' as well as his name -- emblazoned three times.... Concerned about running afoul of rules barring government resources from being used for partisan political purposes, the White House Counsel's Office warned staff members not to display the Republican National Committee's challenge coin, or any paraphernalia with Mr. Trump's campaign slogan, in government buildings. Outside ethics watchdogs say the 'Make America Great Again' coins shouldn't be distributed to military personnel ... since the military is supposed to be walled off from politics. And those watchdogs warn that coins featuring Mr. Trump's properties, such as Mar-a-Lago, should not be produced using government resources ... since federal ethics laws prohibit the use of public resources to promote private businesses."
Ilan Ben Zion of the AP: "... Donald Trump's son-in-law and senior adviser said in an interview published Sunday that the administration will soon present its Israeli-Palestinian peace plan, with or without input from Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. In an interview published in the Arabic language Al-Quds newspaper, Jared Kushner appealed directly to Palestinians and criticized Abbas, who has shunned the Trump team over its alleged pro-Israel bias, particularly on the fate of contested Jerusalem.... The Palestinians refused to meet with Kushner, and leaders have criticized the Trump negotiating team in recent days.... It remains unclear how the Trump administration would proceed with a peace plan without Palestinian cooperation." Mrs. McC: No kidding.
Morgan Gstalter of the Hill: "The former director of the Office of Government Ethics said on Saturday that White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders's decision to tweet about being kicked out of a Virginia restaurant violated ethics laws.... Walter Shaub, the federal government's former top ethics watchdog, tweeted that Sanders's response, which was made from her official White House account, was a clear violation of federal law." Shaub cited two laws, one that disallows using one's government position for private gain, & another that violates a ban on endorsements. Thanks to unwashed for the link.
Lisa Friedman & Hiroko Tabuchi of the New York Times: "Scott Pruitt, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, discussed hiring a friend of a lobbyist family that owned a condominium he was renting for $50 a night, newly released emails suggest. The files also show communications involving the lobbyist's client interests that have not previously been disclosed, suggesting a closer relationship between the lobbyist, J. Steven Hart, and the agency than previously known. The emails, released as part of a lawsuit filed by the Sierra Club, an environmental group, contradict early assertions by Mr. Pruitt and Mr. Hart that Mr. Hart hadn't lobbied the E.P.A. last year after concerns arose that Mr. Hart's wife had rented the condo to Mr. Pruitt. The potential hiring of Mr. Hart's family friend was discussed in emails between Mr. Pruitt's chief of staff, Ryan Jackson, and Mr. Hart, who was chairman of the Washington lobbying firm Williams & Jensen and whose wife, Vicki Hart, rented the condo to Mr. Pruitt."
*****
Nick Miroff of the Washington Post: "In a statement issued late Saturday night, the Trump administration said it has 2,053 'separated minors' in its custody, and a formal process has been established to reunite them with their parents prior to deportation. The joint declaration by the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Health and Human Services came three days after Trump signed a hastily-written executive order to quell public outcry and halt his administration's practice of taking away the children of migrant parents who cross the U.S.-Mexico border illegally. The Saturday night communique said 522 migrant children have already been returned to their parents, and the government would allow mothers and fathers facing deportation to request that their children are sent home with them.... Under the government's new plan, according to the statement, parents will receive more information about the whereabouts of their children and telephone operators will facilitate more frequent communication.... ICE will also implement a system for tracking separated family members and rejoining them before their deportation as a unit."
Trump's Big Lie. Manny Fernandez & Linda Qiu of the New York Times: "... there is evidence, in federal data and on the ground in places like Brownsville[, Texas,] that the immigration crisis Mr. Trump has cited over the past week to justify the separation of families is actually no crisis at all. There has been no drastic overall increase in the number of immigrants crossing the border, and while the rugged frontier along the Rio Grande Valley has long been a transit point for drugs and the trouble that goes along with them, the violence of Mexico's drug wars seldom spills into the United States.... Unauthorized crossings along the border with Mexico have sharply declined over the past two decades, according to government data.... Research shows that incarceration rates of both legal and undocumented immigrants across the country are lower than those of native-born Americans, and that the net economic impact of immigration is positive.... As the numbers show, there is a stark disconnect between Mr. Trump's border rhetoric and the reality of life in border cities...." ...
... Niraj Chokshi of the New York Times: "Most Americans oppose the separation of immigrant families at the border, and a larger share of people than at any point since 2001 say immigration is good for the nation. Those were just some of the findings of polls published in the past week that shed new light on attitudes toward immigration, a subject that many Americans view as a top concern ahead of this fall's midterm elections.... Despite the president's anti-immigration message, three in four Americans say immigration is generally good for the nation, according to Gallup, the polling organization.... Among Democrats and those who lean toward the party, 85 percent viewed immigration positively, compared with 65 percent of Republicans and those who lean Republican. When asked their thoughts about 'legal immigration' specifically, even more Americans, about 84 percent, said it was good for the country.... Support for reining in immigration is at its lowest level in more than half a century: Just 29 percent of Americans believe it should be decreased, the smallest share recorded by Gallup since at least 1965." Mrs. McC: Looks like the Trump Effect to me. ...
... Margaret Talbot of the New Yorker: "The theatre of cruelty unfolding at the southern border last week was the purest distillation yet of what it means to be governed by a President with no moral center.... [Even in signing the order to reverse part of his cruel policy,] Trump was transparently angry at being compelled to do so. He said, 'If you're really, really pathetically weak, the country is going to be overrun with millions of people, and if you're strong then you don't have any heart. That's a tough dilemma. Perhaps I'd rather be strong.'... It will be important to be on guard for what this Administration may try next." ...
... Anne Applebaum of the Washington Post: The dictators of the last century, like Trump, all used inflammatory language "to define an ethnic minority and to give it fictional characteristics and properties.... After the unwanted group had been defined, propaganda was used to demonize and dehumanize it.... For the past half-century, memory of where it once led has made this kind of language taboo in Western democracies.... It is worth noting how often the president repeatedly conflates refugees with illegal immigrants and MS-13 gang members. This is not an accident: He has targeted a group and given them characteristics -- they are violent, they are rapists, they are gang members -- that don't belong to most of them.... Eventually it will be impossible to discuss real immigration issues, or to talk about real immigrants, if a large part of the public has come to believe in quasi-authoritarian fictions."
Brad Heath of USA Today: "Days after Attorney General Jeff Sessions instructed prosecutors to bring charges against anyone who enters the United States illegally, a Justice Department supervisor in San Diego sent an email to border authorities warning that immigration cases 'will occupy substantially more of our resources.' He wrote that the U.S. Attorney's Office there was 'diverting staff, both support and attorneys, accordingly.'... The District Attorney's office in San Diego said Friday that the number of cases submitted to them by border authorities had more than doubled since the administration started its border crackdown.... [But] there are signs that border authorities are seeking to prosecute drug smugglers in state courts instead, even though the possible sentences typically are harsher in the federal system.... The number of people charged in federal court has dropped since the start of the administration's zero-tolerance push, said Reuben Cahn, the chief federal public defender in San Diego."
Chas Danner of New York: "White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was asked to leave a restaurant on Friday night on account of the owner [Stephanie Wilkinson] objecting to her work with President Trump. Sanders was dining at the Red Hen, a 26-seat, farm-to-table restaurant in Lexington, Virginia, which serves 'inspired Shenandoah cuisine.' Not long after she and her party sat down, however, the owner of the restaurant arrived and asked Sanders to leave, citing Sanders efforts to represent and defend the Trump administration.... Not surprisingly, an insufferable comment war has broken out on the restaurants' Yelp and Facebook pages, with trolls supporting Trump and Sanders gaining the upper hand thus far.... Sanders's father, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee..., [called] out the restaurant owner's 'bigotry' hours after he had used an image of Salvadoran gang members to make a racist comment attacking House minority leader Nancy Pelosi." ...
... Dave Weigel & Amy Wang of the Washington Post: "Hours before Mike Huckabee lamented the treatment of his daughter at a Virginia restaurant, the former Arkansas governor tweeted a photo Saturday morning of a group of tattooed gang members and suggested they made up Democrat Nancy Pelosi's campaign committee to 'take back' the House of Representatives.... Huckabee was another of many Republicans once again trying to stick the House minority leader with the image of an MS-13 gang sympathizer."
Reuters: "A US clothing company is taking a sartorial swipe at Melania Trump, selling jackets bearing the slogan 'I really care, don't you?' in response to the 'I really don't care' jacket the first lady wore to visit migrant children separated from their parents. All proceeds from the jackets, selling for $98, will be donated to a Texas-based refugee and immigrant advocacy group, said Emma McIlroy, chief executive of the Wildfang clothing company in Portland, Oregon." ...
... In a column about Ivanka Trump, Maureen Dowd puts her finger on the purpose of the jacket: "... the first lady is like her husband in one unfortunate respect: In times of national turmoil, she makes it about herself."
Tara Palmeri of ABC News: "Republican lawmakers are preparing to vote on a more narrow immigration bill that would allow immigrant children to stay in detention facilities with their parents for more than 20 days, senior White House and Hill officials tell ABC News. The bill would eliminate the so-called Flores settlement that requires that children be released from detention after 20 days, fixing a flaw in President Trump's executive order that mandates that children and parents not be separated during detention."
Alan Rappeport of the New York Times: "The effects of President Trump's trade war are beginning to ripple through the United States economy as steel tariffs disrupt domestic supply chains and global trading partners retaliate against a wide variety of American products, such as peanut butter, whiskey and lobster. The cascade of tit-for-tat tariffs has spooked corporate executives, potentially slowing investment, and the Federal Reserve suggested this week that it might have to rethink its economic forecasts if the trade wars continue. On Friday, Mr. Trump only added fuel to the fire when he threatened in a tweet to impose a 20 percent tariff on all European cars coming into the United States if the European Union did not remove its auto tariffs.... Here are the ways several American products are being affected."
Jonathan O'Connell of the Washington Post: "The government's top ethics official said some of President Trump's business dealings 'raise serious concerns' but that the office lacks the authority to launch an investigation requested last month by congressional Democrats. More than 60 Democrats, led by Rep. David N. Cicilline of Rhode Island, had written to the Office of Government Ethics in May asking that the agency investigate reported Chinese government support of an Indonesian real estate development that will include several Trump-brand properties. David J. Apol, acting director and general counsel at the ethics office, responded this week that he thought concern was warranted. But because the president is not bound by the same conflict-of-interest laws as most federal employees, he said Congress -- and ultimately voters -- are responsible for holding the president in check. 'Under the Constitution, the primary authority to oversee the President' ethics rests with Congress and ultimately, with the American people,' Apol wrote in his Monday response."
John Harwood of CNBC: "This week repeated a striking, if familiar, pattern: President Trump described a world detached from reality. On Twitter, at the White House, and on the campaign trail, Trump did more than get facts wrong. Over and over, he painted fundamentally false portraits of people and events to flatter himself, discredit predecessors and rivals, and promote his political objectives." Harwood runs down Trump's major lies of the past week. "Tony Schwartz, who ... co-author[ed the] Art of the Deal..., says narcissism warps Trump's perception of reality about himself and others. 'Every move he makes is a response to this distorted inner world he lives in,' Schwartz told me. That condition, he warns, is 'getting progressively worse.'"
Mary Jalonick of the AP: "The Justice Department says it has given House Republicans new classified information related to the Russia investigation after lawmakers had threatened to hold officials in contempt of Congress or even impeach them. A spokeswoman for House Speaker Paul Ryan said Saturday that the department has partially complied with subpoenas from the House Intelligence and Judiciary committees after officials turned over more than a thousand new documents this week. House Republicans had given the Justice Department and FBI a Friday deadline for all documents, most of which are related to the origins of the FBI's Russia investigation and the handling of its probe into Democrat Hillary Clinton's emails. Ryan spokeswoman AshLee Strong said the department asked for more time and they will get it -- for now."
Congressonal Races
Alexander Burns of the New York Times: In Nevada, where they ostensibly were campaigning for competing Senate candidates, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass) & Donald Trump exchanged words. Naturally, one of Trump's words was "Pocahontas."
David Bland of the (South Carolina) State: "Katie Arrington, a representative in the State House for the Lowcountry and a U.S. congressional candidate, was seriously injured in a fatal car wreck Friday night. Arrington, who upset U.S. Rep. Mark Sanford in the SC district 1 Republican primary, was traveling with a friend on U.S. Highway 17 when a driver traveling in the wrong lane collided with the vehicle Arrington was in. The wreck happened around 9 p.m. Friday, according to the Charleston County Sheriff's Office. Arrington 'sustained a fracture in her back and several broken ribs, as well as injuries that required Katie to undergo major surgery including the removal of a portion of her small intestine and a portion of her colon,' according to a statement was released Saturday morning via her Twitter account."
Reset the 'Number of days since reporters went on safari to a diner in Butterstick, NE to discover if Trump supporters still support Trump' counter back to zero. -- Gary Legum, in a tweet ...
... Annals of "Journalism," Ctd. Jeet Heer: "In an in-depth piece published Saturday, Times reporter Jeremy W. Peters argued that criticisms of President Trump only make Republicans who have doubts about the president like him more. His opening example was Gina Anders, a Virginia resident. 'Gina Anders knows the feeling well by now,' Peters began. 'President Trump says or does something that triggers a spasm of outrage. She doesn't necessarily agree with how h handled the situation. She gets why people are upset.' Using Anders as an example only makes sense if she's a persuadable voter who could, potentially, leave the Republican Party. But as several critics pointed out on Twitter, Anders is in fact a right-wing activist with a history of supporting confederate monuments, the Tea Party and Ron Paul. In other words, it's hardly surprising that she's sticking with Donald Trump.... The voters who are sticking with Trump are hard-core partisans like Anders and Maurer. But there might be another class of marginal Republicans who are wavering in their commitment or who have abandoned the party altogether." ...
... Mrs. McCrabbie: I did go out of my way not to link Peters' trip to a diner in Butterstick, even though it's been the top article on the NYT's online page for at least 12 hours.
Leo Shane & Victoria Leoni of Military Times: "The National Desert Storm War Memorial will be located on the National Mall just steps away from the Lincoln Memorial and Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall, after a federal commission approved the site on Thursday. The move ends a debate of more than three years over where the newest combat memorial should be located."
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Reader Comments (14)
Should one consider that kicking a restaurant patron (Sarah Huckabee Sanders) out is comparable to refusing to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple?
"Unauthorized crossings along the border with Mexico have sharply declined over the past two decades"...
This got me wondering if maybe one of the biggest pushers of Donald's zeal to incarcerate "aliens" and his "tough on crime" posturing in general doesn't come from his outmoded and grossly misguided desire to prop up the fading "legacy" industries he supposedly longs for (coal, nuclear, steel). Obviously the big push is his administration's focus on "Fuck Obama" who wanted to phase down the private prison industrial complex, but that answer still requires the 2nd most important principle for this administration: What does Donald get for it?
I'm just waiting to find out which Trump pal got the multi-million dollar government contracts after funneling millions to the Trump Org by buying condos through untraceable shell companies. And since this nightmare episode also has recurring characters, getting rich off human rights abuses and brazenly locking up children sounds like just the right line of work for one Erik Prince.
Finally, we've heard a lot about the future traumas this incarceration episode is going to inflict on the children and their parents, but I've yet to see a correlation between these traumas and the overall boogey man at the origin of all of this "American Carnage": MS-13.
So, let's see. If I were Steve "White Hood" Bannon or Steven "KKK" Miller playing the long game, and I wanted to Keep Americans White Again, what's a diabolical card I could play? If we want pasty white, low-information Americans to hate brown people and reject both legal AND illegal immigration, how about incubate a few thousand brown children in the exact same recipe that led to the creation of the notorious criminals themselves?
The MS-13 gang was born out of an alienated group of El Salvadorans coming from broken families and lacking any familiar support system. Not able to navigate a society openly-hostile to their development, they found solace in numbers in prison and went out to make the only easy money they knew how. So now Miller, Trump, Bannon, Kelly and Sessions enact a policy to push thousands of Latin@ children down the exact same path that led to the formation of these so-called "monsters". Marginalized and resentful, surely a few will become the scapegoats that the Steven Millers of the future will decry as criminal savages, knowing full well they're a product of their own making.
@Safari: Interesting theory about the deeper motivation behind the child kidnapping policy. Shall we call the gang DT-18?
@MAG: Not in my mind. The restaurant owner, with the backing of her staff, asked an individual to leave because of what she regarded as that particular individual's bad acts, acts performed while a high-ranking public official. The baker refused to bake a cake for an ordinary couple because he perceived they belonged to a minority against whom it was okay to discriminate.
One was an instance of political protest against a powerful political operative; the other was a discriminatory act in which the more powerful person discriminated against an innocent, less powerful couple. (Here the power is needs-based: the couple needed a wedding cake; the baker refused to provide the needed service.)
Safari, had the same thought, rising from the thoroughly justified paranoia that these days afflicts us all, but dismissed it because the kind of multi-generational planning such a plan would require seems far beyond this administration' capabilities.
More seriously (as you were not), I have thought about the effects of such forced separation on the children, worse it appears now that I recall a piece on epigenetics I came across in the NYReview of Books, which suggested childhood and even fetal trauma changes the way genes are chemically expressed in ways research has found are definitely linked to severe psychological problems, depression only one among them, later in life.
No Sunday Sermon this week, but thought some might like to see what I said here a few weeks ago about innies and outies eventually turned into.
http://www.thestand.org/2018/06/mirror-mirror-whos-to-blame-for-our-economic-insecurity
The Red Hen, and who will help me bake my cake?
I don't agree with the owner's decision to request Sanders' party to leave. In most cultures that came down from nomadic herding desert people ( like the Bible-writers'), hospitality to enemies and strangers, when they are in your tent, is an obligation. When your business is hospitality (e.g. restaurateur), it seems you should wait on whomever walks in.
Howsomever, my appreciation of SHB's intelligence went up. She could have insisted on her rights and stayed for dinner. But she may be smart enough to know that cooks and wait staffs can do things to your food to express their disdain, but they do it behind those swinging kitchen doors.
She is a loathsome tool, and I hate to see her get sympathy just because the staff and proprietor couldn't live with the idea that she decided to eat in their place.
Also, Lexington is one of those "blue island" cities, like Austin TX. It is surrounded by red. In 2016, Lexington voted 61% for HRC, but its county, Rockbridge, voted 62% for DiJiT. These kinds of geographical surrounds tend to exacerbate frictions, I believe.
@Patrick: As always, an interesting POV, & you're right about the hospitality tradition. On the other hand, quite a long time passed from those early days of the hospitality norms & the development of restaurants in the late 18th century (and later in the U.S.).
Also, U.S. law allows restaurateurs (and other businesses) to set limitations on service as long as they don't discriminate on the basis of race, religion, etc.: "No shirt, no shoes...." So laws supporting that principle underlie a contravening "tradition."
I don't think I'd have thrown Sanders & her party out (nor spit in their soup) because Sanders is less a policy-setter than a policy-shill. But I know if I ran a public establishment, I wouldn't serve Donald Trump or Stephen Miller or David Duke or a group of "ordinary citizens" wearing neo-Nazi garb (unless there was an extraordinary emergency need for my services). However, I don't fault a business-owner who is more principled than I & throws out a powerful politician with whom she disagrees. Wingers aren't troubled, BTW, when a baker disallows a Democrat -- Joe Biden, to be specific -- from staging a photo-op at his establishment (and presumably buying product).
Walter Schaub weighs in on SHS.
Such interesting back and forths on restaurant expellings and cake making refusals. I agree that the one is not like the other but what is similar is the taking of a stand. I, like Marie, would not have asked Sarah and her gang to leave purely on the basis of these guests not being high on the political policy ladder but perhaps instruct the waiters to serve with frowns and delay the entrees as long as possible.
Patrick's mention of "blue island cities" seems to be paramount throughout this country. We have a good friend in Austin and his description of the place is "a liberal island surrounded by Texas handlers of pans and prejudices."
Actually safari, my thoughts were similar to yours–-I put myself in the shoes of those young boys trapped in a facility, those whose parents might still be alive, and what this does to their mental health. The anger, the resentment, the feelings of "pay back" is strong and how many are going to act on it? And Ken's mention of the dire effects this kind of separation and incarceration has on the brain. We know that if even bonding does not occur in infancy a child is scarred for life––this is not to say individuals can still prosper, but that lack is always there and manifests itself in many different ways.
More false dichotomies from the little dictator. You’re either pathetic and weak or you can be a heartless strongman. Of course he chooses the latter. But there a sea of possibilities between pathetic and heartless. But not to Trump. This sort of thinking goes down well with the Trumpbots who have difficulty, it seems, with logical analysis.
I’m tempted here to call up a quote from one of the Star Wars films (one of the middle three, or the first three chronologically, I forget which) in which Obi Wan Kenobi tells his pupil, soon to become Darth Vader, that only the Sith deal in absolutes. The Sith, of course, are the Dark Side bad guys. It would seem to go well with Trump until you realize that “Only the Sith deal in absolutes” is itself an absolutist statement. So you have to be careful.
Here I’m just talking about what a fictional character says. Trump’s weak thinking and logical fallacies are applied to far more vitally important events than what Obi Wan thinks about the Sith.
And interestingly, choosing the heartless strongman path is almost always the decision of a weak, paranoid demagogue.
About the restaurant incident. I was not happy when I read about it. I think a better solution would have been for the owner to tell Sanders that of course she and her party will be served because that’s what they do at this restaurant, (because unlike Sanders and the administration she serves, they deal in professionalism and competence) but truth be told (a lost concept to Sanders and her boss), after discussing it with the staff, it must be pointed out that they do it under protest.
And no loogies in the clam chowder either.
Just my opinion.
And the Trump limbo contest continues, Hear the question; "How low can he go?" and fear the answer.
Stripping due process from anyone, citizen or not is getting damn near the level of a thin coat of paint.
Ak, I was composing that very scenario just before you posted yours. "We serve you tonight with our best dishes, properly prepared and handled. Unanimously, however, we believe you to be a person of pathetically inadequate moral sense because you willingly work for an intentionally cruel administration which is injuring thousands of people and is possibly criminal in its inception. Your meal is on the house, we don't want your money."
We cannot allow all of these trump people to invade our Country. When someone like Trump comes in and makes a mockery of our system of free and fair elections and Law and Order by colluding with a foreign adversary we must immediately, with no Judges or Court Cases, bring them back to where they came. Our election, laughed at all over the world, is very unfair to all of those people who have gone through the system legally and are waiting on line for years! Elections must be based on merit - we need people who will help to Make America Great Again!