The grand failure of Trump's depraved hostage strategy

Holding innocent children as political hostages made millions of Trump's opponents sick. But they refused to bow to his demands.

A child, her mother, and a Border Patrol agent.
(Image credit: Illustrated | John Moore/Getty Images, Toxitz/iStock, Tatomm/iStock)

America is being run not by a president, but a mafia boss whose preferred negotiation strategy is hostage taking.

Nothing illustrates this better than President Trump's handling of the immigration crisis that has resulted in the revolting spectacle of border patrol agents ripping wailing toddlers from the arms of migrant parents and putting them in cages until Trump's immigration demands are met. More than 2,000 children have been separated from their parents in just six weeks. If you have any lingering doubt about just how heartbreaking and monstrous this is, just listen to this audio of separated children obtained by ProPublica.

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Shikha Dalmia

Shikha Dalmia is a visiting fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University studying the rise of populist authoritarianism.  She is a Bloomberg View contributor and a columnist at the Washington Examiner, and she also writes regularly for The New York Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, and numerous other publications. She considers herself to be a progressive libertarian and an agnostic with Buddhist longings and a Sufi soul.