The story the White House expects Americans to believe is that Donald Trump and his team are impervious to pressure. The president does what he wants when he wants, and the more people urge him to choose a different course, the more likely he is to stand his ground.<\/p>\n

The narrative, however, isn’t true. The Republican administration reverses course under pressure with some regularity.<\/p>\n

We saw several examples of this on trade policy last year, for example, giving rise to “TACO” mockery<\/a> (“Trump always chickens out”). More recently, the White House took steps to back off plans<\/a> for a $1.776 billion compensation fund after officials in both parties condemned the idea as an unprecedented “slush fund.”<\/p>\n

As last week neared its end, however, Americans saw back-to-back reversals on the same day that helped underscore the larger point.<\/p>\n

As June got underway, Trump administration officials announced plans to dismantle a $368 million deep-sea observation system that, as The New York Times reported<\/a>“was put in place a decade ago to monitor coastal environments, marine ecosystems and powerful currents that affect the global climate.”<\/p>\n

There was no real point to the move. The money had already been spent, and the deep-sea instruments were already anchored. But members of Team Trump decided they simply did not want the information the observation system offered, so they said they’d destroy it.<\/p>\n

At least that was the original idea. Last week, a bipartisan group of senators took steps to block the administration from dismantling the system, insisting the move would be both illegal and damaging to coastal communities. One day later, Team Trump announced the observation system would remain in place<\/a> after all.<\/p>\n

As it happens, it was not the only such reversal to reach the public on Thursday afternoon. The Times also reported that Immigration and Customs Enforcement last year moved forward with plans to purchase more than a dozen empty warehouses, which would be used to detain and effectively imprison undocumented immigrants, as part of the administration’s mass-deportation agenda. In all, ICE spent $1 billion in taxpayer money to buy 11 such facilities.<\/p>\n

That is, until plans changed. The Times reported<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n
[I]n a major turnabout, the agency is planning to offload seven warehouses purchased for more than $700 million by either giving them to other federal agencies or selling them outright, according to documents obtained by The New York Times.<\/p>\n
The decision to sharply scale back the warehouse plan is a rejection of a signature initiative under the previous homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, who pushed the boundaries of what the government can do to aggressively round up potential deportees. The new secretary, Markwayne Mullin, who had privately expressed skepticism about the plan, has said publicly that he wants the agency to be quieter about how it carries out immigration enforcement.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
The Department of Homeland Security confirmed the reporting, saying in a statement that officials intend to rely on “existing detention space.”<\/p>\n
This was clearly a significant move in its own right, but there are broader lessons here. ICE’s plans for human warehouses sparked widespread protests<\/a>even from Republican voters<\/a> generally aligned with the Trump White House.<\/p>\n
“It seems obvious that there’d be more pressure in Democratic-led states such as Minnesota against new ICE facilities,” MS NOW’s Hayes Brown noted<\/a> in February. “But a stronger-than-expected pushback from areas under Republican control underscores a widespread discontent with President Donald Trump’s deportation blitz.”<\/p>\n
The pushback from rank-and-file GOP voters mattered, as did concerns from congressional Republicans, who similarly told the administration not to utilize warehouses in their home states<\/a>to the point that Team Trump ultimately decided to start dumping the properties it had already purchased.<\/p>\n
To see the president and his team as immovable objects is a mistake. These guys succumb to pressure all the time, which reinforces the importance of engagement and activism on the part of the White House’s critics.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\n
Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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