Delusional Trump at his "best"

I know I am fixating on Trump again, and I shouldn't give him the satisfaction, but this blog feeds on outrage, and Trump is the biggest single source of outrage out there.

Yesterday, he issued an executive order cancelling his "zero tolerance" policy of this April which called for the separation of the children of illegal immigrants from their parents, a policy that has met with almost universal condemnation across the world, including even within his own Republican Party. The most notable exceptions to this blanket condemnation are members of the White House staff who are doggedly holding onto their jobs, and who appear in public expressing sycophantic paeans along the lines of "I want to thank the President for his leadership on his issue", and members of Trump's own extended family, who are probably in much the same position of having to hold onto their "jobs".

The media show around the signing of this latest executive order, which is in fact a major climb-down for Trump, was a classic of Trumpian doublethink, delusional deception and duplicitous deflection. It's worth watching. He says things like, "I didn't like the sight or the feeling of families being separated", "It's a problem that has gone on for many years, as you know, through many administrations", "We're keeping families together, which will solve that problem", "We're going to have a lot of happy people", etc. This, of course, follows on from his repeated defence of the policy, his blaming of Democrats for the law, his insistence that he was not able to change the policy even if he wanted to, and that it is the Democrats are blocking change.

Essentially, Trump attempts to portray the embarrassing about-face as a compassionate correction of a decades old policy that was mainly the fault of the Democrats (in fact it resulted from his own zero-tolerance executive order just a month or so ago). This twist of taking credit for something that is either bad or a belated correction of something that was even worse and his own fault, as well as the ploy of blaming the Democrats for pretty much everything regardless of the facts, is a hallmark of Trump's approach to politics. Whether it can truly be considered delusional depends on whether you consider that Trump actually believes the lies he utters or whether he know they are lies and utters them anyway.

Of course, just cancelling the old policy does not suddenly solve all the problems it has raised, and it remains uncertain what will happen to all the children who have already been separated from their parents by US Customs and Border Security. But fear not, help is at hand - Melania is coming to sort it all out!

UPDATE
Unfortunately, Melania turned up to a tour of an immigrant children's centre near the Mexican border wearing a Zara coat emblazoned with the words "I REALLY DON'T CARE. DO U?" God, what a family!