CNN’s Toobin: Family separations ‘worse than Katrina’ for Trump

CNN legal analyst Jeffery Toobin on Thursday said migrant children being separated from their parents at the border “is worse than Katrina” for President Trump because President George W. Bush “didn’t create the hurricane.”

Toobin’s comments come one day after the president signed an executive order to keep migrant children from being separated after facing severe backlash for the administration’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy that had led to the practice.

{mosads}“A metaphor we are starting to hear more and more is this is Donald Trump’s Katrina, a turning point in how he is portrayed,” Toobin said, referring to the deadly 2005 hurricane that killed more than 1,800 people and led to fierce criticism of how the Bush administration handled the aftermath.

“But in many respects, this is worse than Katrina,” Toobin, a regular critic of the president, continued.

“George W. Bush didn’t create the hurricane. He didn’t make it rain,” he continued. “Whereas these 2,300 [children] — there was no reason for these kids to be separated from their parents under existing government policies. But they created this problem. Now it seems like they have no real way of trying to solve it.” 

The response to Hurricane Katrina was seen as a pivotal event in Bush’s presidency.

Bush’s numbers dropped from a 45 percent approval rating in a Gallup poll before the storm to 39 percent just weeks after, with a majority of Americans blaming the president for not responding swiftly or quickly enough. 

Playboy magazine White House correspondent Brian Karem also weighed in during the CNN segment, arguing that Trump’s executive order doesn’t address how to reunite families who were separated. 

“This particular issue is a micro-encapsulation,” Karem said. “Attack the issue, mess it up even more, chaos ensues. Now you have to clean up a mess that wasn’t here before you got here and you haven’t figured out how you got here anyway.”

The family separations at the border have prompted massive media coverage and backlash from both sides of the aisle.

The images and audio, particularly that of crying children asking for their parents, has dominated coverage for days, seemingly prompting the president to backtrack and sign the executive order halting the separations.