ANOTHER DAY. ANOTHER HISTORICAL REWRITE.

We the people know how to fact check. For a decade, President Donald Trump has expressed admiration for an Eisenhower administration program to deport Mexican migrants known at the time as “Operation Wetback.” Casual racism of the 1950s aside, Trump has never referred to the program by its offensive name, but over and over in the 2016 and 2024 presidential campaigns he lauded Eisenhower for holding the record for deportations and said he wanted to Be like Ike. “He did this. He did this with over a million people, and it was actually very successfully done, and a lot of people don’t know that,” Trump told CBS’s Sixty Minutes in 2015. In an address to Congress this year, Trump said: “We will eliminate these threats to protect our homeland and complete the largest deportation operation in American history, larger even than current record-holder President Dwight D. Eisenhower.” See how Trump praised Eisenhower for deporting more than 1 million people in one year? That number —1M— is said to be Trump’s goal as well. Trump is regarded as a master of spin, but in this case he’s falling for a previous administration’s propaganda. The Eisenhower effort was often inhumane, but it was mostly a publicity operation, aimed at a compliant press, designed to combat fears that Mexicans were taking jobs away from Americans. As for the 1M people being deported because of the Eisenhower operation? That didn’t happen. The number was much less and, contrary to Trump’s rhetoric, Eisenhower doesn’t hold the annual record for deportations. Barack Obama tops the charts, according to Department of Homeland Security records.  Just one more example of governance by misinformation presented as historical fact by a president who loves a good myth.