This Isn’t The America Trump Created. This Is The America Trump Exploited

Melania Trump meets with immigration detention center employees in Texas

 

Our Entire Online World Was Suddenly Shaken By The Jacket Melania Trump Either Threw On Or Carefully Selected, Like An Unexpected Thunderclap…

 

“Jacketgate” completely took over our Facebook feed (mostly our friends), and our Twitter feed too (mostly journalists we follow). Was Melania trying to send a message with the message emblazoned on the back of her outfit as she boarded a plane to visit detained immigrant children in Texas? And if so, what? And to whom? And if not, why was she wearing a jacket in 80 degree Washington heat?

“I Really Don’t Care, Do U?” it said, as you can see below. As with so many of these kinds of stories it was first reported by the Daily Mail, which also pointed out that particular jacket retails for $39.

 

The First Lady’s people said there’s “no hidden meaning”. But nobody was buying that. Was it a nod to Trump supporters? Some kind of “sarcasm” to enrage Liberal snowflakes? Even the President seemed to be grasping at straws when he Tweeted this bit of utter nonsense:

So question is: did we miss anything while most of our social media time was hijacked by Melania’s damn jacket?

• For one, the plight of the 2,342 immigrant children already separated from their families and now trying to find their way back with zero assistance from Trump’s folks. (Reconciliation is not part of the Executive Order Trump signed this week). As the Washington Post’s Kevin Sieff points out, much of the information required to accomplish reunification has to come directly from the child. “What kind of information can a toddler provide?” he asks. One of many reasons this part of the story is much harder to cover than the initial story of families getting pulled apart.

• Also, a mountain of new anecdotal evidence of blundering by the White House as it put a dramatic new policy into place without the infrastructure or personnel needed to pull it off. While nothing short of a heartless, unprofessional embarrassment, if mechanisms had been in place to make it go more smoothly, the fact that what was happening was so alarming might not have been as readily noticed.

• And a huge embarrassing moment for Republicans in Congress too as they failed to pass an immigration bill Trump had lukewarmly endorsed. Anyway he said Democrats were the only problem; 100% of Republicans would vote for his tough policies. They didn’t. After the vote, the President still blamed only Democrats:

Nope. The bill got 231 “no” votes. There are only 193 Democrats in the House. You needed some Republican votes too that you didn’t get.

A 2nd bill, described as a “compromise” (it isn’t really: as we’ve said it’s a compromise between Republicans, other Republicans, and the White House) was never brought to a vote by House Speaker Paul Ryan because presumably it wouldn’t have passed either. That could be revisited today.

Congress did however sneak through a new 5-year farm bill, which had previously failed. It passed by a very narrow margin: 213-211. Most significantly—since food stamps are administered by the Agriculture Department—it paves the way for severe new limits on who can receive food stamps and for how long. Trump Tweeted in celebration of that fact.

Trump also proposed that food stamps get transferred over to the Department of Health and Human Services, which administers (and also tries to dismantle) Obamacare, Medicaid, etc. He’d then form a new “Council on Public Assistance”  to administer all those programs. The White House also announced plans to combine the Education and Labor Departments.

But no one really noticed…

So y’all keep focusing on what Melania wore…

C’mon, people!

(And anyway, we think the message on Melania’s jacket was really directed at her husband…)