Clarence Page: When the president's peacemaking efforts invite more chaos

Chicago Tribune

10 hours ago

While the nation braced to see what would happen next in Los Angeles on Thursday, a surprising message appeared on President Donald Trump's Truth Social account.
A day after videos emerged of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents chasing after terrified farmworkers trying to hide in California fields, the president suggested in his post that he might not fully pursue his core policy proposal of mass deportation after all.
Or so it seemed.
A closer reading revealed his sympathy was directed not so much toward the workers as toward the agricultural industry and his fellow members of the managerial and ownership class — the bosses who need the labor that undocumented workers disproportionately provide.
'Our great Farmers and people in the Hotel and Leisure business have been stating that our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace,' he posted.
To underscore how much of a change of tone this represents, recall the language he used in 2015 at Trump Tower in New York to announce his first campaign to spin up fear, loathing and resentment as if he was ready to invade Mexico.
'When do we beat Mexico at the border? They're laughing at us, at our stupidity,' he said. 'And now they are beating us economically. They are not our friend, believe me. But they're killing us economically.'
If you're inclined to shrug this off with something like, 'Oh, that's just Trump being Trump,' perhaps repeated exposure to his rhetorical excesses has caused you, like many of the rest of us, to normalize his charged rhetoric.
So now the president is concerned that ICE raids are hurting American farming.
Right, as Seth Meyers, host of NBC's 'Late Night,' quipped. 'I hope he finds who is responsible for that policy.'
Indeed. It's not like Trump is unaware that farmers form a key MAGA voting bloc. It's not like he's never heard of the hospitality industry. He is intimately aware of its enormous immigrant labor force that goes back decades.
Trump turned his fire on a familiar foe, former President Joe Biden. As if his reelection campaign never ended, Trump blamed Biden for allowing 'criminals' to apply for jobs on farms. 'We must protect our Farmers, but get the CRIMINALS OUT OF THE USA.'
I think we can surmise that Trump has heard from unhappy farmers, a core MAGA constituency, and from unhappy members of the CEO class, and he wants to keep these people on his side.
Instead of acknowledging any negative outcomes to his own decisions, Trump did what politicians often do in a pinch: He made promises that, if necessary, can easily be forgotten or denied.
In a news conference later Thursday, Trump had this to say: 'Our farmers are being hurt badly by, you know, they have very good workers, they have worked for them for 20 years. They're not citizens, but they've turned out to be, you know, great. And we're going to have to do something about that. We can't take farmers and take all their people and send them back because they don't have maybe what they're supposed to have, maybe not.'
I'm sure Trump thought this would sound to some like a genuine peacemaking gesture. But by now we all ought to recognize the transactional subtext of such statements. I might have my agents fan out through the country, breaking up families and destroying lives and businesses, or maybe not! It depends on how much their employers mean to me.
But before his faint praise for hardworking migrants had a chance to soften the appalling face of his deportation policy, Trump was upstaged at another event.
Federal agents manhandled U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla, a California Democrat, out of the room in Los Angeles where Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem was speaking to reporters and as military troops were patrolling downtown LA streets in response to unrest fomented by Noem's department's policies.
Padilla interrupted the event to ask her a policy question regarding the sweeps of allegedly undocumented workers, but before he could ask it, he was shoved down onto his knees and handcuffed.
As an old political expression goes, it was not a good look — and Noem did not sound very congenial.
'We are not going away,' she said, referring to the National Guard and DHS presence in Los Angeles amid protests against Trump's sweeping and drastic deportation mission in the city.
'We are staying here to liberate the city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country and what they have tried to insert into the city.'
Was this a Homeland Security speech or a political speech?
And what 'burdensome leadership' did she have in mind?
Los Angeles and the rest of us don't need more burdens. We need to give peace a chance. But peace is not what Trump and Noem have in mind for the blue states and blue cities of America. I think Sen. Padilla could confirm that.