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White House Watch: Easter Surprise‐‐Trump Says DACA Deal with Dems Is Dead

By Michael Warren

Before heading to church on Easter Sunday, President Trump took to Twitter to complain about America’s “dumb immigration laws,” saying he was no longer interested in making a deal with Democrats to reinstate the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program and threatening to end the North American Free Trade Agreement unless Mexico stops “the big drug and people flows” across the southern border.

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Do the president’s tweets indicate a change in policy? The White House has repeatedly insisted they are still hoping to make a deal with Democrats on DACA and Mexico and Canada on NAFTA. Asked to clarify his comments as he entered church Sunday morning, Trump said that “if [Mexico’s] not going to help us at the border, it’s a very sad thing between our two countries.”

“The Democrats blew it,” Trump said, apparently referring to the prospect of a DACA compromise. “They had a great, great chance, but we’ll have to take a look, because Mexico has got to help us at the border. They flow right through Mexico. They send them into the United States. It can’t happen that way anymore.”

One More Thing—Here’s one indication the White House is taking Trump’s DACA deal withdrawal seriously: the president gave those comments to the press as he was going into Easter services, which the press pooler distributed to the rest of the media and public. But a little over an hour later, the office of the White House press secretary sent out Trump’s statements to the press under an official heading, as “remarks by President Trump before Easter church service.” That’s not the action of a White House team hoping to explain away a knee-jerk response from Trump.

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On the President’s Schedule—After attending the White House Easter Egg Roll Monday morning, President Trump will have his first meeting with Larry Kudlow, his new top economic adviser. Kudlow begins his tenure Monday as the director of the National Economic Council, taking over for former Goldman Sachs executive Gary Cohn.

Profile of the Day—At Washingtonian magazine, Elaina Plott profiles Louise Linton, the fashionable wife of Treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin who is a bit of a fish out of water among the snobby D.C. set.

In the current issue of the magazine, Stephen White reviews Ross Douthat’s new book on Pope Francis, To Change the Church. Here’s an excerpt:

In 1978, Pope John Paul II was elected. He set about restoring order after a decade of dissolution. Like a trauma doctor presented with a critical case, the young pope set about stabilizing the patient. Bleeding was stanched, bones were set, splints and casts and braces were applied. It took decades, but by the time John Paul’s successor, Pope Benedict XVI, abdicated in 2013, the patient appeared stable. There were crises, to be sure—the long-overdue reckoning on the sexual-abuse problem, notably—but the church had survived the worst of its internal injuries. Sooner or later, splints and casts and braces have to come off. Limbs that haven’t borne weight need strengthening and exercise. Joints that have grown stiff need to become flexible and limber again. If one is to become healthy, stability must sooner or later give way to a new stage of vulnerability. But if one proceeds too quickly and incautiously, old wounds can be reopened. Enter Pope Francis. From the beginning, it was clear that his style was earthier, less formal, than that of his predecessors, especially the professorial Pope Benedict. That’s part of Francis’s charm. If the Argentine pope’s politics have more of a Peronist flavor, it’s also true that he is hardly the first bishop of Rome to warn against consumerism and the exploitation of creation or to remind the affluent of their obligations to the poor, the sick, the migrants. As Douthat points out, such remarks mostly seemed to threaten “a particularly American marriage of conservative Catholicism and free market ideology, which given the state of conservative politics in America perhaps deserved a period of papal challenge and self-critique.” A pope with a moderately leftist view of the world might not be such a bad thing after 35 years of relative conservatism. As the Italians say, “A fat pope follows a thin one.”

Song of the Day—“Drown” by the Smashing Pumpkins


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