CRUEL AND UNUSUAL

This column, from the weekly opinion piece MATTER OF FACT, first appeared on BrooklynReporter.com, the Home Reporter and Spectator dated August 19, 2022

Since late May, busloads of migrants have been arriving in New York City. Texas Republican Governor Greg Abbott has specifically targeted New York, sending thousands of asylum seekers here since May, using vulnerable human beings as props.

The governments of New York City and Texas certainly take different approaches to refugees seeking humanitarian aid in our country, but sending hordes of migrants halfway across the country without coordinating with the municipality receiving them is cruel and dangerous. Gov. Abbott is treating these people like trash he is trying to dump somewhere far from his own home.

The bussing of migrants halfway across the country is not addressing the issue at the border Abbott claims is his reasoning for taking this step. It does gets him a lot of attention as he attempts to appeal to his base during a campaign year in which polls show his Democratic challenger Beto O’Rourke chipping away at his lead.

Abbott has said that all the migrants bussed to New York have gone voluntarily, but Mayor Adams contends that has not been the case. Officials from the Mayor’s office have confirmed that the refugees sent here are often confused and tell of having signed documents under duress that they were told were from the federal government but were actually from the state of Texas.

While a governor from Texas sarcastically questions why a sanctuary city like New York would not want to regularly receive busses filled with migrants, a needless, manufactured humanitarian crisis is developing. Those who came to the United States, declaring that they were entering the county to seek asylum, are being used as pawns in a politician’s game to gain attention for himself.

This has become a feature of GOP politicians. Nothing is too cruel if it can benefit their own political aspirations. This playbook comes right from the leader of the national Republican party, Donald Trump, and those who blindly support him. Though the doctrine named after most presidents refers to their foreign policy philosophy, likely because he never had any such coherent philosophy, there was no Trump Doctrine. However, being cruel to vulnerable people to gain publicity and project strength might as well be the Trump Doctrine.

“They were forced on the bus with the understanding that they were going to other locations that they wanted to go to, and when they tried to explain, they were not allowed to do so.”

Mayor Eric Adams, August 7, 2022, on migrants from Texas being forced to travel to New York City on buses.

It is clear that in today’s Republican party, devotion to this approach and to Trump is a requirement. Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) is a strict conservative, taking policy stances that I disagree with and believe are harmful to Americans. She ticks all the boxes of a true Republican, except for one: she refused to swear fealty to Trump and propagate the lie that the election was stolen

 Not only would she not go along with the notion that the will of the people should be subverted and Trump reappointed as president, undermining the foundations of our democracy, she actively participated in the January 6 House Committee investigation into the insurrection at the Capitol and what role Trump played in it. And for that, even after having won previous primaries in landslides, Cheney lost her primary on August 16 by nearly 40 points to a Trump loyalist who parrots his election lies.

We will see the same here locally in Brooklyn this election cycle, with Republican candidates who have embraced the MAGA mindset that Trump is infallible and the only possible way he can lose an election is for it to be stolen from him. Rep. Nicole Malliotakis is part of that camp, having voted to decertify the 2020 election results just hours after the Capitol was attacked by those who sought to overturn the certified results with violence.

Two years ago, in the summer of 2020 when she was first running for Congress, Malliotakis attended a Back The Blue rally in Dyker Heights that was essentially a Trump rally. At the event, Black Lives Matter demonstrators were spit on, threatened with violence, shoved, and women told that they should be raped. Malliotakis has still never condemned those actions by some of the event’s participants.

This behavior has become an accepted feature of the movement that has taken over the GOP, and the Republican establishment and electorate have decided that there is no place for anybody who is not on board with it.