Trump Takes a Dump

Sorely lacking both cajones and intellectual stamina, Donald Trump had to cower behind a hurricane to embrace a bigot after his own heart.

Only when safely esconced in his Camp David retreat on a Friday night - when every professional scold worth his or her oversize paycheck was off the air  - did Trump officially pardon former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio.

We knew this was coming. The president said as much at his Phoenix rally this week, complaining that he couldn't make his grandiose announcement just yet because "they" had put the kibosh on it. He presumably meant the military junta and the Wall Street executives who are undemocratically running the country in his permanent mental and moral absence.

  So Trump not only dumped on Latinos during the traditional Friday night news dump beloved of all presidents before him, he actually increased the chances that the people running the show wouldn't much notice or even care. That's because the show this weekend is all about another vicious monster, named Harvey, making his landfall in Texas. Still, Trump couldn't leave well enough alone. He had to dig his dull knife in further and twist it by passive-aggressively allowing the immigrant checkpoints on evacuation routes to remain open. This decision both slowed down evacuations for everybody, and ensured that at least some "illegals" would stay behind in harm's way. The only choice offered to the undocumented was between drowning, and being arrested and deported.

The checkpoints will close only when actual highways close. Checkpoints will remain open on all roads not in the direct path of the storm, officials said.

Trump and Arpaio and all their loyal fans must be so proud of themselves. Hopefully, they won't drown in their own tears of joy or worse yet, choke on their spasms of maniacal wind.

Arpaio gained national notoriety by racially targeting people of Hispanic descent and building one of the most inhumane county jails in modern history. He housed inmates in tents in the broiling heat, served them rotten inedible food and humiliated men by forcing them to wear pink underwear. After years of getting away with it, he finally was convicted of criminal contempt last month for his refusal to obey a court order to stop his racial profiling. He had not yet been sentenced when Trump gleefully pardoned him.

But Trump still wasn't done dumping. He also chose the looming hurricane as the most optimal time to officially ban transgender people from joining the military.

He will, however, still allow undocumented immigrants to fight and die for the American imperium as the only fast track to citizenship yet available to them. Trump would never allow his xenophobic principles to stand in the way of endless profits for the perpetual war machine.

Of course, if these immigrant soldiers are unlucky enough to suffer a traumatic brain injury or PTSD during their tours of duty, and subsequently get into trouble with the law when they return home, they can still be deported in a New York minute.

Furthermore, the Pentagon announced plans last month to administer "enhanced screenings" and monitoring to more than 4,000 naturalized troops upon their returns home in order to ensure that they have not become "radicalized" during their military training and service.

The Trump administration has also tightened the screws on new immigrant recruits by delaying their final orders after sign-up and thus opening them up to deportation proceedings in the interim. According to the Washington Post, about a thousand of these recruits have already seen their visas expire as they await their deployment orders.

Trump is nothing if not a consummate bait-and-switch operator. And the military itself has long been in the business of holding out the carrots of citizenship, education, a steady paycheck and free medical care to its desperate recruits from all lower classes from all countries before wielding any number of their heavy sticks - not least of which is permanent physical disability or death.