Rachel Maddow Calls Family Separation Crisis A Trump-Created Version Of Hurricane Katrina

Rachel Maddow drew a parallel on Thursday that should terrify Donald Trump as he looks to the midterm elections – and further ahead to the 2020 campaign – to strengthen his hold on the government.

The MSNBC host said that the current administration’s cruel and inhumane policy on the southern border of the United States is their version of George W. Bush’s Hurricane Katrina.

“We’re under the next Republican presidency after George W. Bush, and our current catastrophe now is not an act of god like Katrina was,” Maddow said. “This one is definitely an act of Donald Trump.”

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Maddow said:

That was 2005. Now it is 13 years later. We’re under the next Republican presidency after George W. Bush. And our current catastrophe now is not an act of god like Katrina was. This one is definitely an act of Donald Trump. But our current national harrowing moral catastrophe that is driving people to distraction is this new thing that the Trump administration started doing weeks ago, which has resulted in the mass separation of little kids and babies from their mothers and fathers. The Trump administration apparently started pursuing this policy in April. They have pursued it through yesterday. We still don’t have good numbers, but the data we do have suggests the pace at which they were taking kids away from their parents accelerated from just under 50 a day to just under 70 a day at least before they stopped yesterday. Just as in the hurricane, though, where the disaster doesn’t end when the wind and the rain stops, this catastrophe that we’ve got now of parents and kids having been taken apart, forcibly separated by the U.S. government, this is not over now either.

The parallels should terrify Trump

Like the poorly managed Hurricane Katrina disaster, the political ramifications of the Trump-created crisis at the border will be severe.

But unlike Katrina, as Maddow said, this was not an “act of God.” It was an act of Trump.

The current crisis at the border will have long-lasting ramifications, especially for the children being taken from their parents. Trump’s temporary and reluctant halt of the practice won’t change that.

And just as it will do long-lasting damage to these families, it should do long-lasting damage to Donald Trump’s electoral prospects in 2018 and 2020. This is not something from which he and his GOP loyalists should be allowed to skirt away.

The big political stories of the moment, particularly in the era of Donald Trump, tend to get forgotten pretty quickly. They often get buried under the latest Trump tweet.

Hopefully, as was the case with Hurricane Katrina over a decade ago, voters will remember this moment and act accordingly act the ballot box.


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