Then Obama went for the jugular: "But all kidding aside, obviously, we all know about your credentials and breadth of experience. For example no, seriously, just recently, in an episode of 'Celebrity Apprentice' at the steakhouse, the men's cooking team did not impress the judges from Omaha Steaks. And there was a lot of blame to go around. But you, Mr. Trump, recognized that the real problem was a lack of leadership. And so ultimately, you didn't blame Lil Jon or Meatloaf. You fired Gary Busey. And these are the kind of decisions that would keep me up at night. Well handled, sir. Well handled.").
Another example of Trump's disregard for the rights of others concerns his attempt to abolish President Obama's DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) program. It was pure cruelty directed at "Dreamers," due to Obama-envy kicking in again.
In June, 2012, Obama issued an executive order establishing DACA largely as a constitutionally dubious expedience, due to the inability of the U. S. Congress to pass legislation to protect the Dreamers -- the undocumented immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children.
As Suzanne Gamboa wrote in a March 8, 2018, NBC News report ("What is DACA? What You Need to Know"), "the program temporarily shielded certain immigrants from deportation and made them eligible for work permits. The program allowed for infinite renewals, but was considered a stopgap measure-- According to that same news report, DACA covered about 690,000 immigrants as of Sept. 4, 2017.
Although Trump announced the end of DACA on September 5, 2017 and Attorney General Jeff Sessions declared that DACA would end on March 5, 2018, in June 2020 the Supreme Court issued a ruling that prevented the Department of Health and Human Services from implementing its plans to dismantle the program. On July 17, 2020, as CBS News reported, "A federal judge in Maryland on Friday ordered the Trump administration to fully reinstate" the DACA program."
Trump's decision to end DACA revealed his cruelty. It prompted the Los Angeles Times to publish an editorial under the title, "Ending DACA was an act of pure cruelty by Trump." Pointedly, the editorial asked: "What public good is achieved by yanking such people from their homes, families and communities and sending them to countries where they are strangers and often don't even speak the language?"
But, for the most extreme example of cruelty and evil, nothing compares with Trump's "Zero tolerance" policy that criminalizes illegal border crossings, thus creating the need to separate children from their detained or incarcerated parents. Jacob Soboroff, who has written a book on the subject, titled Separation, calls the separation of children from their parents "one of the most shameful chapters in modern American history."
Mr. Soboroff estimates that, "Since the summer of 2017, The Trump administration has taken at least 5,556 kids from their parents." Even the Obama administration, which deported more immigrants than any previous one, refused to criminalize illegal border crossings, precisely because it would require the inhumane separation of children from their parents. That refusal however, didn't prevent rogue Border Patrol zealots on the ground from "carrying out separations anyway."
As Mr. Soboroff notes, some of the separated kids wound up in cages. According to psychologists and human rights specialists, virtually all of the separated kids will suffer life-long psychological damage.
In fact, such individuals, working for and reporting to the Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), issued a report that concluded that the extreme abuse of parents and children under Trump's separation policy constituted "torture," as defined by the United Nations. According to a February 25, 2020 article by John Washington in The Intercept, "The official U. N. definition of torture is an act that causes severe physical or mental suffering, done intentionally, for the purpose of coercion, punishment, intimidation, or for a discriminatory reason, by a state official or with state consent or acquiescence."
The report to PHR adds, "U.S. officials intentionally carried out actions causing severe pain and suffering in order to punish, coerce, and intimidate Central American asylum seekers to give up their asylum claims."
Part One of Mary Trump's book it titled, "The Cruelty is the Point." She alleges that sociopath Fred Trump inculcated in his son Donald the perverted belief that "kindness is weakness." Thus, in order to avoid appearing weak, especially to his racist and white supremacist knuckle-dragging supporters, Trump's zero tolerance virtually guarantees that the innocent children subjected to his program will grow up "with higher rates of chronic medical conditions such as cardiovascular disease, cancer, and premature death"In addition there is an increased risk of psychiatric disorders such as anxiety, depression, and psychosis--
https://theintercept.com/2020/02/25/family-separations-border-torture-report/
In her interview with Rachel Maddow, Mary Trump said that it was the torture of children by the Trump administration that finally prompted her to speak out about her uncle.
Part Two of this review of Two Much and Never Enough will examine how both a specific and a broad learning disability affect Trump's aberrant behavior.
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