The Week's Shittiest Tweet Goes to Mike Huckabee [UPDATE: It's a Tie!]
PoliticsLest you hoped that Trump experienced a fleeting brush with emotions this week when he admitted that family separation was terrible and blamed it on the Democrats and then put his jumbo-size president signature on an executive order halting the practice, saying he “didn’t like the sight or the feeling of families being separated,” and that he was coming to a “tough dilemma”–whether “being strong” means you don’t have any heart…
NO!
On Friday, he tweeted that the “We cannot allow our Country to be overrun by illegal immigrants as the Democrats tell their phony stories of sadness and grief, hoping it will help them in the elections.” According to a Quinnipiac poll, his voter base supports family separation by 55 percent.
He then posted a video of stories from “Angel Families,” people who are grieving the loss of relatives killed by illegal aliens.
The stories are horrible. The presentation of the perpetrators as a representative swath of immigrants is misleading. A recent study published by the Cato Institute found that in 2015, relative to population sizes, the criminal conviction rate for native-born Texans was nearly twice as high as that of illegal immigrants. NPR has run a full fact-check.
The desired effect is brilliantly sinister: it grants voters permission to write off all the stories of asylum-seekers fleeing murderers by lumping them in with murderers, to shift all the blame for horrible policies onto the victims themselves while anesthetizing viewers to human suffering by selling it as fake news or Democratic propaganda.
So this brings us to Mike Huckabee’s tweet of a photo which appears to depict MS-13 calling them Nancy Pelosi’s “campaign committee.” The competition was stiff, so congrats to Mike for going above and beyond.
UPDATE 6/32: Yesterday, former Trump family event planner and current HUD official Lynne Patton posted the following on Instagram. Somehow it rivals, and arguably outdoes, Huckabee’s tweet in shittiness. Spectacular.