The triumphant announcement also came complete with martial imagery. “President Trump is sending a strong and clear message to the entire world,” Leavitt announced in a tweet showing dejected and defeated migrants getting frog-marched onto military planes, declaring: “Deportation flights have begun.” Fox News dutifully blared forth the stunning news. Liberation is at hand!
It is only under Trump, you see, that we have begun deporting migrants on big, powerful-looking planes, and the entire world had better pay attention. Except this is all nonsense. As Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Counsel pointed out, the United States has been removing migrants on planes for many years, and the Biden administration, to its discredit, also drew attention to such flights. What makes the Trumpian version so galling is the suggestion that this is his innovation, and that carrying it out on military planes is something that only Trump is tough enough to undertake.
Leavitt is well known for offering comically obsequious praise for Trump, as well as for delivering the most towering of absurdities with unflappable smugness. She recently trumpeted a coming “big infrastructure announcement” from Trump, claiming he’s already “done more in less than 24 hours than his predecessor did in four years,” thus erasing Biden’s painstakingly negotiated, bipartisan, trillion-dollar infrastructure law without flinching in the slightest.
