Culture

President Trump: DACA Is ‘Not Dreamers,’ So ‘Don’t Fall Into That Trap’

While addressing House and Senate Republicans at their annual retreat in Lewisburg, West Virgina, President Trump made some rather nonsensical remarks about the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) act and so-called “DREAMers,” whose name comes from the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) act. The immigration legislation has recently become a contentious point of debate between GOP hardliners and the Democratic minority, which only agreed to end the most recent government shutdown after the majority promised to hold a vote.

The White House has since proposed a path for citizenship for dreamers in exchange for billions in border wall funding, but that wasn’t what Trump wanted to talk about on Thursday. Instead, the president characteristically interrupted himself to try and explain what he thought the difference was between DACA and the dreamers:

“I’ve been hearing about DACA for so many years. Some people call it ‘dreamers.’ It’s not dreamers. Don’t fall into that trap. It’s just much different than dreamers. And I said the other night, we have dreamers too. We have dreamers in this country too. You can’t forget our dreamers. We have a lot of dreamers here.”

Um, what? Seeing as how DACA was a legislative response to DREAM’s failure and, as a result, has everything to do with “dreamers,” Trump quite literally fell into a word “trap” with these comments. And everyone else watching took notice: