Back on June 17, President Trump announced a big push on immigration for this weekend. Then yesterday afternoon, I saw articles emerge that said the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) is going ahead with a mass roundup.  While perusing Twitter last night, I saw some guy in Chicago invite people to seek refuge in his apartment which he claimed had excellent building security. That’s just one guy, but it shows how telegraphing your intention to do a massive sweep for undocumented people is probably not the greatest operational plan. I thought to myself that Trump really is an idiot on stilts.

Then I woke up this morning and discovered that I’m not the only person who had this thought. Greg Sargent and Paul Waldman were thinking along the same lines, as you can see in this piece about the purpose of this dragnet, which is transparently political:

Earlier this week, President Trump made a dramatic claim, saying that “next week ICE will begin the process of removing the millions of illegal aliens who have illicitly found their way into the United States.”

The idea was immediately greeted with a combination of outrage and derision…

…As Nick Miroff and Maria Sacchetti reported when word of the planned arrests first surfaced, “publicizing a future law enforcement operation is unheard of at ICE.”

So, Trump’s announcement of the operation could actually undermine efforts to round up migrants, yet he did it anyway, just before his reelection rally.

As my “some dude in Chicago on Twitter” example shows, this isn’t something that “could” undermine efforts to round up migrants. It is something that did undermine the effort.

Now, some people might think that’s a good thing. How you feel about that will depend on how you feel about the people (supposedly, those who skipped out on their status hearings) who are the targets of the roundup. It also might depend on you not realizing that ICE really has no clue where the people they’re looking for are residing, so they’ll most likely wind up doing mainly “collateral arrests” of random people they encounter in the course of their raids.

My point isn’t really about whether it’s an objectively bad thing for ICE to be less effective in deporting people. It’s about the president doing stupid things for stupid reasons. If you want to be effective at removing undocumented migrants from the country, you don’t tell everyone the exact weekend they should go to ground to avoid apprehension.

But he’s less concerned that the operation is successful or even that the people carrying it out are safe than he is about giving the perception that he’s a hard-ass on immigration.  Trump is unnaturally consumed with how he is perceived in every area but one. He seems not care one whit that he looks to all the world like Vladimir Putin’s poodle.