We begin today’s roundup with The New York Times and its editorial on Donald Trump’s disingenuous negotiating position:
Any attempt to sell Mr. Trump’s cruel immigration agenda with a veneer of humanitarian measures should be viewed with skepticism. This administration has long held that the best way to deal with asylum seekers fleeing the horrors of their home countries is to increase their suffering upon reaching the United States to discourage others from even trying. [...]
Mr. Trump’s spiteful choice to shut parts of the government is only making the situation messier. Immigration judges are being furloughed, further slowing the processing of asylum requests. Border Patrol agents are working without pay, eroding morale. In perhaps the choicest twist of fate, some $300 million in new contracts for wall construction cannot be awarded until the shutdown ends.
With Democrats now controlling the House, the president is right to assume that he will need a new negotiating approach. But the answer isn’t for lawmakers to throw good money after bad, or to try to prettify a retrograde agenda with humanitarian trimmings.
Here’s Eugene Robinson’s take at The Washington Post:
Trump knows the wall is a costly and disruptive gesture, a demonstration project for his base — and nothing more. It isn’t designed to make the nation safer. Its only purpose is to shore up his own political standing, especially with nativists who want to halt or reverse the “browning” of America.
We cannot require that our presidents be perfect. But we cannot accept the kind of divisive cynicism that Trump’s wall embodies. The new Congress faces many tasks, but its first order of business must be to fund the normal operation of the government — without wasting taxpayer money on a boondoggle whose purpose is to reinforce a paranoid fantasy of “invasion” by swarthy hordes.