August 9, 2019

Chris Hayes was on fire on Thursday. Watch:

CHRIS HAYES: Good evening from New York. I'm Chris Hayes.

President Trump campaigned on two distinct sets of promises. There was a group of people he was going to help and a group of people he was going to hurt. And by and large, he has kept the latter set of promises.

We see it every day. He has relentlessly demonized and insulted immigrants, Hispanics, African Americans, Muslims, and just generally people who live in cities. He has produced a climate that many view is a direct predicate for the acts of violence and harassment we've seen -- like the 22 dead in El Paso -- as just one of many examples.

He has also, and this is important, crucially followed through on policy. He tried and ultimately succeeded in instituting the travel ban on people from predominantly Muslim countries. He separated 2,000 children from their parents at the border. And after a judge told him not to, he separated 900 more. He has kept people, including children, in cages for weeks with no shower, no toothbrush. At least 24 immigrants have died in ICE custody during Trump's administration. And this number doesn't include five children who died in the custody of other federal agencies.

Now, who are two new cruelties. Yesterday ICE agents arrested 680 people they say are undocumented immigrants. The raid conducted just days after a gunman targeted Hispanic shoppers in an El Paso WalMart is the largest raid in any single state in American history. And those 680 arrests left hundreds of terrified American children alone to wonder if they would ever see their parents again.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration deported a Detroit resident to Iraq, even though he had never been there before. Jimmy al Daoud came to the US when he was six months old, legally. He was American in every conceivable way. He is a man who is a member of a persecuted Christian group in the Middle East. ICE said he had at least 20 convictions, but friends say he also suffered from schizophrenia and other mental health issues.

{video clip} I was sleeping on the street, taking diabetic shots, throwing up, trying to get something to eat. I was kicked in the back several days to get off the guy's property. I was sleeping on the ground. I begged him. I said I don't understand the language, you know.

Now that man that you just saw is dead because apparently, he was unable to get insulin in Baghdad to treat his diabetes.

So my question is this. How do any of those things help the people Trump said he would help?

Who is made better by it?

Those kids trying for their parents in Mississippi, the traumatized children, they're American citizens. The president is hurting those Americans. A dead man on the streets of Baghdad who is lonely and scared and sick. Whose life did that make better in America? Whose job did that bring back? Whose income rose because of that? Who no longer has to deal with the ravages of opioid addiction in their family because that man is dead on the streets of Baghdad? Because those kids are wailing because they don't know if they'll ever see their parents again?

The answer is no one. That's the fundamental con at the heart of Donald Trump. He says, "I'm going to hurt these people and help you." He can deliver on the first part, but he has done just about nothing on the other end.

There are hundreds of people at a closed mine in Wyoming sitting around with no paycheck. We're in the second week of the miners in Harlan County not letting the trains through because they're owed back pay, they say. And the people in Morristown, Ohio (who Trump told not to sell their homes) had their factory shut down. And farmers are struggling with unplanted fields having to make out on Trump's welfare handouts.

The economic growth Trump is so happy to tout has disproportionately happened in the same areas it was already happening before, in large metropolitan areas among people who had already participated from the boom, and has helped those who are already reaping the benefits.

In fact, there is one group of people Trump did say he would go after, where he has broken that promise, and that is the titans of corporate America and the globalist elites -- because the banks are running wild and corporate America got a trillion-dollar tax cut.

For the owners, the people who own the chicken plants in Mississippi that were raided, who employed all the unauthorized immigrants, they were not arrested. ICE won't comment. How could they be arrested? Donald Trump has been doing the same thing at his own businesses for years, exploiting immigrant labor. In fact, the 680 people detained in Mississippi was the largest such raid since 389 people were arrested in 2008. And the owner of that plant was subsequently convicted of money-laundering. But President Trump commuted his sentence in 2017.

That's the deal. You in Lordstown, you're not going to get to keep your job, but instead, you're going get real acts of savage cruelty against some struggling families in Mississippi, while Trump stuffs fat cats full of cash and parties with them in the Hamptons. Meanwhile, the great hollowing out of the industrial core and rural America and the declining life expectancy for the first time since World War II, the 70,000 people we're losing every year to opioids, all that will go on.

But Trump and his party and his donors could not care less about that. Look over here at the people he's hurting. That's all you're going to get.

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