It’s been awhile since we posted a good Geraldo immigration freakout. All I want to know is this: What did this guy think he was getting by supporting Trump? If there’s anyone at Fox News who should have taken a look at Trump’s campaign rhetoric on immigration and decided “nope,” it’s amnesty fan Geraldo. Him shrieking here about cruelty on the border is like voting for Obama and then being mad about government spending.

Now that POTUS has caved on child separation, the effort among friendly media to repair his image and shift blame to others for his mistake will go into overdrive. Geraldo observes here that, yes, it would be nice if Congress acted but in the end it’s within Trump’s discretion to prosecute illegal crossers or not. (And POTUS apparently agrees, per his decision to sign an executive order changing the policy.) Soon, though, that argument will fall by the wayside and the hunt will be on for treacherous malefactors in the West Wing who swayed our poor president into turning on to a political dead end.

Or maybe the hunt is already over?

As I predicted Monday, once @POTUS got focused on the child separation issue he put an end to it. President @realDonaldTrump is a compassionate person. He was getting bad advice and info from his Chief of Staff, who started pushing this policy in March 2017 while at DHS. https://t.co/M4DDSJjSau

— Anthony Scaramucci (@Scaramucci) June 20, 2018

It’s on John Kelly, huh? What a remarkable coincidence that the guy who humiliated Scaramucci by firing him after 11 days also happens to be the chief culprit in child separation. Eventually Kirstjen Nielsen, Kelly’s protege, will be blamed too even though Trump harangued her not long ago in front of the entire cabinet for not being tough enough on the border. Both Kelly and Nielsen are expendable because they’re latecomers, people who joined the White House in administrative roles but didn’t participate in Trump’s campaign. They’re not MAGA true believers. They can be comfortably scapegoated.

Of course, there *is* an aide in the West Wing who really did champion the child-separation policy internally and influence Trump on it. If it’s the White House’s view now that the policy was an egregious political mistake, logically he should bear the brunt of the president’s ire.

But since he’s one of the few MAGA true believers still left in Trump’s employ, he, like Trump himself, will need to be protected and the buck passed to others.

Anyway, I’m not sure what Hannity’s on about here in talking about some hypothetical DACA-for-the-wall deal in Congress as part of ending child separation legislatively. Is anyone on either side pushing a deal like that? If they were, I think Democrats would be more open to it than Trumpers are. Populists don’t want to legalize DACA enrollees, and if they do they sure as hell want more for it than just the wall. Trump’s ask for a DACA amnesty is the wall and the end of child migration and the end of the diversity visa lottery. Hannity’s letting Democrats off easy by floating a deal like this.