Unhinged tweetstorm.. Another one...

Trump's latest unhinged tweetstorm is worse than it appears

Greg Sargent

President Donald Trump lies with such frequency, and his ignorance of policy basics is so omnipresent, that it's often easy to allow the superficial absurdity of his statements to distract us from the actual underlying point he's making. In some cases, that underlying point is more reprehensible than the surface falsehoods he employed to convey it.

Case in point: Monday morning, Trump uncorked a tweetstorm about "caravans" of people making their way north through Mexico toward the southern border, adding that they want to take advantage of the protections enjoyed by the "dreamers." Everyone is focused on the obvious silliness of this rant: Those protections are only for people previously brought here illegally as children within a particular time window, and couldn't be applied to these new arrivals.

But this, while true, misses another key point: Trump actually appears to be making a very real argument about people seeking asylum in the United States that should not escape notice. Here's what Trump said:

"Mexico has the absolute power not to let these large 'Caravans' of people enter their country. They must stop them at their Northern Border, which they can do because their border laws work, not allow them to pass through into our country, which has no effective border laws. . . . Congress must immediately pass Border Legislation, use Nuclear Option if necessary, to stop the massive inflow of Drugs and People. Border Patrol Agents (and ICE) are GREAT, but the weak Dem laws don't allow them to do their job. Act now Congress, our country is being stolen!

"DACA is dead because the Democrats didn't care or act, and now everyone wants to get onto the DACA bandwagon . . . No longer works. Must build Wall and secure our borders with proper Border legislation. Democrats want No Borders, hence drugs and crime!"

Those "caravans" Trump appears to be referring to are the hundreds of Central Americans who have been making their way up through Mexico, something that has been airing on Fox News and has been nagging at the president. As a BuzzFeed reporter who has been traveling with them reports, about 80 percent of them are from Honduras and many are fleeing poverty, violence and political unrest, and many want to apply for asylum or potentially cross the border illegally.

Trump's claims about this are a jumble of lies and incoherence. Trump killed Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). Trump is why the protections for the dreamers remain "dead," as he rejected numerous Democratic offers of concessions in exchange for those protections, including money for his wall. (The battle over the dreamers' fates is tied up in the courts.) Regardless, the people in the "caravans" couldn't jump on the DACA "bandwagon" anyway, since to do so you'd have to meet all sorts of qualifications that they don't meet.

But nonetheless, Trump's insistence that Mexico should stop the "caravans," because U.S. laws won't, may actually mean something significant.

As immigration lawyer David Leopold points out to me Monday morning, under current law, it's perfectly legal for those people (with limited exceptions) to apply for asylum if they reach the U.S. border. (Whether they get granted asylum is a separate question.) Trump's rant appears to be saying this should not be the case - that they shouldn't be allowed to apply for asylum, and that U.S. law should be changed to prevent it.

After all, it's already illegal for them to try to cross illegally. Trump is saying Mexico must stop them because we cannot under U.S. law, and he's calling for a new law that would change that. The only relevant change here would be to prevent or limit their ability to apply for asylum. "He's saying that is a bad border law - that the legal way for them to enter temporarily should be ended," Leopold tells me. "He's saying that in order to have effective border laws, we need to cut out the asylum process. That's a radical shift."

Trump may not understand the legal details of what he is saying. But that's beside the point: Trump actually appears to be making a substantive, if general, point, about how we should deal with people who turn up at the border claiming to be fleeing horrific conditions in their home countries. And it is perfectly plausible that Trump means they shouldn't be allowed to apply for asylum. This is not the same as saying our process for dealing with asylum seekers should be streamlined to eliminate some legal protections for them in order to clear the courts of backlogs, which Attorney General Jeff Sessions is already doing. Trump is calling for a change in the law.

No, there isn't going to be any actual change in the law that cuts that back, even if Trump wants it. But Trump is the president, and it matters what he thinks. We should want a further accounting of this line of his thinking. As immigration scholar Hiroshi Motomura puts it, "law and popular culture have come to accept that asylum seekers are unlike other unauthorized migrants," in accordance with "humanitarian obligations" that are rooted in post-World War II international conventions and norms. It is perfectly likely that Trump believes we should no longer be beholden to such conventions and norms. And in coming days and weeks, he may start to make this point more explicitly.

* GOP LEADERS CAN'T IMAGINE TRUMP WOULD FIRE MUELLER: The New York Times reports on all the possible ways Trump could try to shut down the Mueller probe, including a direct effort to reomve him. This is an extraordinary revelation:

"Speaker Paul D. Ryan and Representative Robert W. Goodlatte of Virginia, the Judiciary Committee's chairman, have given no indication of how they would proceed, and aides say privately that Republican leaders view the possibility of Mr. Mueller's firing as too improbable to warrant hypothetical discussions."

Really? Do they not remember that Trump actually did order his White House counsel to fire Mueller and backed down only after the lawyer