When President Donald Trump yesterday walked back his policy of separating undocumented immigrant children from their families, he did so presumably knowing full well that the executive order he was signing was a largely performative bit of nonsense. Rather than definitively end family separation once and for all, Trump’s order is a mess of loopholes and legal landmines that doesn’t say a thing about actually reuniting the more than 2,000 undocumented kids already ripped away from their parents.
This, apparently, was news to Ohio Republican and ultra-conservative House Freedom Caucus founder Rep. Jim Jordan, who went on CNN’s New Day to try to seem sympathetic to undocumented immigrant children. He failed, miserably.
Calling the administration’s gaping lack of a plan to re-unify families “news to me,” Jordan oscillated wildly from insisting that “everyone wants” families brought back together, to defending the president for, uh, not actually doing that.
“He signed an executive order yesterday,” Jordan said. “What else do you want?”
Ummmm...the return of more than 2,000 children who were taken from their mothers and fathers based solely on the racist whims of an addled chief executive? Let’s start there and see where that leads.
Jordan couldn’t even bring himself to condemn Trump’s decision to separate families in the first place, sliming out of New Day host John Berman’s question whether it was wrong to take kids from their parents by saying (emphasis mine):
I think what the president is trying to do is what the American people elected us all to do: Keep families together, certainly, but do it in a way that’s consistent with the rule of law. That’s what they were trying to do. That’s what the election was all about.
Jim. Buddy. Just admit you don’t actually give a shit about these kids, and save us all a lot of embarrassment.