If your head hurts and the government shutdown over a border wall strikes you as the theatre of the absurd, you are not alone. As much as Trump and his enablers put on straight faces and make serious-sounding arguments, this entire exercise has to do with Trump's political brand, not public policy.

As expected, yesterday’s White House celebration of ICE and CBP was an overtly political rally. It neatly captured Trump’s midterm strategy: inject race, immigration and “us vs. them” appeals at every opportunity. The purpose is threefold: 1) to excite white grievance voters in the GOP base; 2) to keep the focus off the terrible Republican record on kitchen table issues; and 3) to distract from the simple fact that the main beneficiaries of the unified Republican control of the federal government has been the super rich, not the average Joe.

July 9, 2018 – In an op-ed for the Washington Post, Mark Schneider explains the dark reality 300,000 TPS holders will face when their status expires and they are forcibly deported: separation from their 273,000 U.S. citizen children as a result of the administration's malicious termination of TPS for six countries like Honduras, El Salvador and Haiti.

“Donald Trump started his campaign by calling Mexicans rapists. Tonight, he accepted the Republican nomination by strongly implying that undocumented immigrants are murderers. “Trump's fearmongering, of course, is unmoored from the real facts. But that's not his point. He stokes fear of immigrants as a core part of his larger storyline that America is under siege from scary people of color and only a strongman like him can protect you (read: white people). His strategies, once consigned to the fringes of the white nationalist movement and unpopular with the American people, would rip apart families and communities, constitute one of the darkest chapters in American history and put at risk the American experiment.

Today, to mark the three year anniversary of the infamous RNC autopsy report, House Republicans are holding yet another anti-immigrant vote. This is the eighth by our count. But, this vote sends a message to the Supreme Court: United States v. Texas, the lawsuit brought by 26 GOP Governors and Attorneys General, is, in reality, nothing but a political exercise.

This is a big political game