Trump Thinks Migrants Are Coming to U.S. for Disneyland

I sure hope President Donald Trump warmed up with a few simple stretches before the mental gymnastics he performed in front of the press pool on Tuesday.

Speaking on his “zero tolerance” family separation policy, Trump, who can’t wait to separate families once again, insisted that former President Barack Obama was actually the one separating children from their families, pointing to photos of migrants in holding cells taken during the Obama administration’s unaccompanied minors crisis, and provided by the Trump administration to news outlets last summer.

“Just so you understand, President Obama separated the children,” Trump said. “Those cages that were shown—I think they were very inappropriate—they were built by President Obama’s administration, not by Trump. President Obama had child separation. I’m the one who stopped it.”

A perhaps pointless fact check: While Obama wasn’t any sort of crusader for immigrants’ rights, he didn’t have a systemic separation of families for the purpose of punishing them for coming to the U.S., asylum-seekers included. But by subjecting any adult caught crossing the border to criminal prosecution and separating from their children, however, that’s exactly what Trump’s zero-tolerance policy did to thousands of families.

Trump denounced child separations, and Obama’s role in separating children, saying he didn’t want to relaunch the practice (despite reports that he definitely does). Then, he boasted about the effectiveness of the separations, stating that migrants are now coming into the U.S. without the threat of separations.

“Now, I’ll tell you something—once you don’t have it, that’s why you have many more people coming. They are coming like it’s a picnic, because ‘let’s go to Disneyland.’ President Obama separated children. They had child separation. I was the one that changed it,” Trump said. “We’re not looking to do that, no. But it brings a lot more people to the border, when you don’t do it…But President Obama had the law. We changed the law.”

So, family separation policies were bad, because/and Obama did them, and you stopped them, and you don’t want to do them again, despite thinking that more migrants are coming to have Disneyland garden parties without them? It’s a miracle we didn’t witness his nose start growing on the spot.