Frank's Musings

President Trump has often stated that he’s a lot smarter than most others. That arrogance has led him into numerous bankruptcies. It has also made him an avatar of people who think they have been unfairly deprived of their deserved recognition or reward. Sometimes, however, even they cannot deny he has gone too far.

Trump uses immigration enforcement to captivate a large group of resentful political supporters. Indeed, they are susceptible to his message of retribution. After all, it is mainly wealthy industrialists or other entrepreneurs who are dependent on the labor and energy of refugees.

However, the domestic workers displaced by immigrant laborers often are abandoned by their employers or by new capital-strapped entrepreneurs who forsake an opportunity to build on the experience of legacy workers by investing in upgrading their skills. This simplistic definition of our democracy, that its goal is to let the majority rule, can result in the perceived discrimination against less motivated residents whose jobs and expertise are threatened by talent imported from abroad.

The definition of democracy which characterized the Weimar Republic was that same simplistic replacement model. When Hitler and his cohorts recognized an opportunity to manipulate that foundational political principle and then repress and eliminate Jews and other non-Aryans, they were able to capture control of the government and conduct the Holocaust.

Beside other measures harassing immigrants, for example, the administration now is using the processing delay for green card applications as another excuse for detaining and deporting even legal immigrants. In fact, this is only a way further to discourage any “undesirable” immigration. The whole policy smacks of ethnic cleansing.

Trump’s successes, like those of P.T. Barnum, are based on the misperception that a sucker is born every minute. In Trump’s case, those suckers are those who believe they will be better off if they are left to their own devices and continue to be exploited by snake-oil salesmen like the Donald.