by James M. Wall

In response to a question about Antisemitism, President Trump summarized his answer with one of his typical non sequitur closings: “you’re going to see a whole lotta love.”

What we are getting from Trump is not even remotely related to love. What we are receiving from the result of the disastrous 2016 election, is the huge package of hate Trump promised in his campaign, and now implements as president. 

Trump deports undocumented immigrants because he now has the job his White Nationalist supporters helped him win. 

The Congress, and Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, set up and oiled the  mechanism for deportation under the direction of the “U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), an American federal law enforcement agency under the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS).” (Wikipedia).

In a Democracy Now interview posted by Amy Goodman Wednesday the nation Trump rules, now has an ICE force that implements the hatred he generated in his campaign, a campaign that began, we must never forget, with Trump’s Big Lie about Barack Obama’s birth place.

The ICE is intended to carefully identify undocumented immigrants for depotation.

Under President Trump, the ICE is riding on a Trump-instigated wave of hatred to conduct “a deportation force on steroids”.

That superb summary statement came in the Goodman interview from Cesar Vargas, who is co-director of DREAM Action Coalition. He is New York state’s first openly undocumented attorney. Responding to Goodman, Vargas said:

We are seeing now a deportation force on steroids, because the fact is that the deportation force was created back, you know, with George Bush, but also strengthened with President Obama, who deported more people than any president in American history. So, Donald Trump has really taken the keys of this deportation machine, and refueling it and really aggressively pursuing and targeting every immigrant.

Congress and Presidents Bush and Obama, handed a loaded pistol of free-wheeling deportations to future presidents.

Vargas continued:

When he talks about ‘Not all. We’re just going to go after the bad ones, after the rapists, the criminals,’ well, he’s not targeting just those violent criminals, but he’s targeting potentially parents, hard-working children, students and veterans, and he claims to be a supporter of, champion of veterans.

He is now about to deport veterans and the families of these veterans. So we are seeing Donald Trump taking the keys of an aggressive deportation machine, that President Obama created, and taking it over 100 miles per hour.

Goodman also interviewed Margo Schlanger, professor of law at the University of Michigan Law School, who served in the Obama administration as head of civil rights and civil liberties at the Department of Homeland Security.

Amy Goodman asked Professor Schlanger, “talk about what you think are the critical guidelines here and what they mean for millions of immigrants in the United States?

She responded: “Well, the problem is, there really aren’t guidelines. What the president has done, and what DHS has now confirmed, is rendered basically every person who’s here out of status a prospect for deportation. And so, it’s everyone. If you read through what are supposed to be the priorities, they reach pretty much everybody.”

We had reason to be aware of the personality we elected in 2016.  He was already a public figure when the 2012 Academy Awards evoked a “from the desk of Trump” video outburst from him.

The Daily Beast shared the video of Trump’s outburst Wednesday (see below) in advance of this Sunday’s annual Academy Awards presentations.  The target in the 2012 video was Sacha Baron Cohen, who dumped ashes on red-carpet interviewer Ryan Seacrest.

The ashes event was a stunt, designed to showcase Cohen, playing the role of an Eastern European immigrant named “Ali G”. Trump did his insult-praise routine, attacking Cohen and describing Ryan Seacrest as a “great guy”.

It was disgraceful,” shouted Trump. “And the security guard that was standing to the right? He ought to be fired immediately. That guy had nothing. He is not capable. He allowed this guy to get away with so much. Believe me, if that ever happened to somebody with real security, Sacha Baron Cohen would not be in good shape right now. He’d be in a hospital. He would have been punched in the face so many times, he wouldn’t have known what happened.”

A bit of context: Trump was punked by Cohen on The Ali G Show back in 2003. He later claimed, via Twitter, “I never fall for scams. I am the only person who immediately walked out of my ‘Ali G’ interview.” Cohen later claimed Trump was full of it, saying “he was there for seven minutes” sitting in his chair while Ali G took [him down], which was “quite a long time” for a bit.

A Trump attack on the media, so prevalent now that he is President, wraps up his 2012 attack on Ali G, with a report on one of the parties surrounding that year’s Academy Awards.

Here is his video attacking Sacha Baron Cohen and Vanity Fair. This is from 2012. He was saying the same stuff then that he said as a candidate and now as a president. 

He made sure his viewers know that the “absolute worst party” of the night was thrown by Vanity Fair, “a  publication whose newsstand circulation is falling. It has lost its focus; it used to be a wonderful magazine. Right now it is boring, just like the party they had. Too bad, it was a great institution. It’s gone”.

After Citizen Trump’s attack on Vanity Fair in 2012, the magazine continued to give its annual Academy Awards party, hosted by Graydon Carter, the magazine’s editor. 

In its January 23 issue, Vanity Fair editor Carter had this to say about the nation’s new president:

Donald Trump, our 45th president, sold the electorate an America First bill of goods, when what he really had in mind was Me First. “I won,” he gloats, “therefore I can do this! I won, therefore I can do that!” In early January, our then president-elect was invited up to the offices of Condé Nast, the parent company of Vanity Fair, to meet with the editors of its magazines.

The get-together was off the record. (Not my wish. Nor was the meeting itself.) The standard practice is that, in such a context, nothing of what Trump said can be repeated. It doesn’t really matter, because I recall nothing being said that he hadn’t already said many times before.

Is there any American at this point who hasn’t heard Trump talk about pretty much everything? He always speaks lovingly about his favorite subject—himself. He spent an entire campaign talking about the size of his victories, the size of his rallies, the size of his Twitter following, the excellence of his golf game, and the greatness of his company.

The magazine’s circulation, by the way, has remained an obsession with Trump. 

On December 16, 2016, after his election as president, Vanity Fair ran a negative review of a Trump grill. The president-elect was not pleased. He was ready with a tweet. Fastcompany.com, a business-oriented outlet, reported:

Yesterday, Donald Trump tweeted that numbers for Vanity Fair magazine are “way down,” and that the Condé Nast-owned lifestyle publication is in “big trouble.” The tweet—apparently a response to VF’s skewering of Trump Grill on Wednesday—is part of a pattern for Trump, who has a history of taking to Twitter to attack media brands that write unflattering things about him.

According to Trump, Vanity Fair’s numbers are “really poor,” but what numbers is he talking about? Audience data for the magazine shows it had a pretty good year both in print and online. In fact, it’s having a pretty good decade. According to the Alliance for Audited Media, VF’s verified and paid circulation averaged 1.2 million for the first six months of 2016. That’s slightly above where it was five years ago and not too shabby for a print magazine these days.

The Daily Beast assumes the President will be glued to his television this coming Sunday night. He will most likely be sending out tweets to express his approval and disapproval. 

Meanwhile, President Trump’s ICE forces will be busy rounding up those undocumented “bad guys”, he promised his political base he would deport. 

The picture of ICE agents at top is a screen shot.