The media has no trouble finding something sinister in everything President Donald Trump does. That’s not news. (RELATED: Let’s Be Clear: Journalists Wanted to Blame Trump for the Maryland Newspaper Shooting.” But were you aware that the President apparently has superpowers as well?
That’s all one is left to conclude after reading the sub-headline of a recent NBC report in which the authors conclude that Donald Trump was responsible for a federal policy back in October 2016. In case you’ve forgotten, October 2016 was before the presidential election, and when the Huffington Post was giving Hillary Clinton a 98% chance of winning. But not only could Trump defy the odds, he apparently could time travel and enact public policy as a candidate as well!
Here was the original NBC’s headline: “Trump admin ran ‘pilot program’ for separating migrant families in 2017.”
So, from the headline, we’re supposed to glean that Trump ran a program that acted as a precursor to the policy of separating families at the border.
But here’s NBC’s original sub-headline: “The numbers show the government was separating migrant kids from their parents back in 2016 and 2017.”
Now, the pilot program mentioned was an effort to test out zero-tolerance border enforcement. It was not intended to create family separations as its primary goal, and the media drew little attention to it at first. It’s those facts that this NBC report is deliberately deceptive about.
Report dated January 10,2017, before Trump inaugurated:
"As a matter of procedure and policy, border agents routinely separate family members, including intentionally, as punishment—or “consequences”-through what DHS calls its Consequence Delivery System."https://t.co/aFcT8pUv9d— Jeryl Bier (@JerylBier) May 28, 2018
For starters, you’re probably confused how they’re blaming 2016 child separations on Donald Trump. Read the fine print in NBC’s report, and we learn that they’re in fact blaming Trump for child separations that occurred under Obama’s watch. The piece begins by trying to frame this as a Trump-created problem: “The government was separating migrant parents from their kids for months prior to the official introduction of zero tolerance, running what a U.S. official called a ‘pilot program’ for widespread prosecutions in Texas, but apparently did not create a clear system for parents to track or reunite with their kids. Officials have said that at least 2,342 children were separated from their parents after being apprehended crossing the border unlawfully since May 5, when the Trump administration’s ‘zero tolerance’ policy towards migrants went into effect.”
So we’re given the impression that Trump is responsible for all this.
And in the very next paragraph, we learn that Trump couldn’t have possibly been responsible for what’s claimed. “But numbers provided to NBC News by the Department of Homeland Security show that another 1,768 were separated from their parents between October 2016 and February 2018, bringing the total number of separated kids to more than 4,100.”
So why include statistics from 2016, when speaking about a pilot program from 2017? Only to inflate the numbers in their favor, I’d assume. Regardless, that admission completely contradicts the entire premise of the report.
Topping things off, the name “Barack Obama” is mentioned zero times in the NBC report, and it’s hard to believe that’s not coincidental. That is, unless the editors over at NBC still need to figure out who was the President back in 2016.
