Not since the gymnasts of the Summer Olympics have we seen a flipflop like that of Trump’s 180 on separating the children of detainees from their parents. He signed the executive order reversing the policy only hours after the Secretary of Homeland Security and Attorney General said it was impossible for the president to do so, even though they had put in place just days earlier.
Since then the enormity of the dysfunction and heartlessness has only become more apparent as the government struggles to discover where the children have been stowed and how to reunite them with their refugee parents. But another question lurks in the shadows which may be important in the future. What caused Trump to do a humiliating about face?
Was it because 1) Congressional Republicans read him the riot act, 2) Ivanka and Melania told him it was mean, 3) political advisors told him the the ugliness of the policy might imperil a Midterm win for their party, 4) longtime Republican stalwarts like the Chamber of Commerce, rightwing propaganda mills, Fortune 500 companies, and donors recoiled in revulsion, 5) polls of its unpopularity spiked, 6) moral leaders from the Pope on down to the local pulpit preached against it?
It matters since anything that succeeds in reining in the Bully-in-Chief’s baser instincts is worth adding to the arsenal of democracy. But, in fact, no deep analysis is required to discover what motivated Trump’s epic fold. He is the most transparent villain since Simon Legree. He telegraphs every punch, blabs everything he ought to be covering up, and lies as transparently as a five-year-old with his hand in the cookie jar. Trump’s inability to put a sock in it is why his attorneys don’t dare let him talk to Robert Mueller.
So, why did he back down so embarrassingly and publicly, signing the executive order with his familiar scrawl that looks like the polygraph of a guilty suspect denying a crime. He told us himself. When it came to the border you had a Hobson’s choice, according to him. If you are “pathetically weak, the country’s going to be overrun…And if you are strong, then you don’t have a heart. That’s a tough dilemma. Perhaps I’d rather be strong.”
Perhaps? Of course he chose to be “tough” and “strong,” his two favorite words, once Attorney General Sessions, Chief of Staff Kelly and inflame-the-base policy guru Stephen Miller recommended the policy. It was supposed to be so draconian nobody from South of the Border would ever come near the Rio Grande again. And, for a president who doesn’t read, can’t tell truth from fiction, trusts almost no one, and has no patience for explanations involving complexity or nuance, this cruel policy had the advantage of being impossible to misunderstand — like a punch in the face.
Sadly, for Trump, all he really cares about is video, preferably of himself. But the video of the weeping, abandoned, terrified children was God awful. Soon he was saying, he didn’t like “the sight or the feelings of families being separated.” Does that mean he has a heart, after all. No. It means the response of people who do was so swift and so negative that it looked like it would be bad for him. Thus, the U-turn.
But, too late, the bad pictures just keep coming, including of Melania, dispatched to visit a particularly photogenic, buffed up shelter to mime compassion. Alas, she wore a faux graffiti-daubed “I REALLY DON’T CARE, DO U?” coat which seemed to suggest her mission was all a fraud. And on her best day the First Lady has only about a tenth of the warmth of an Oprah. She’s more like a better dressed clone of the icy Kirstjen Nielsen. And, of course, the lost children story keeps spinning out with more horrific video of detention conditions likely to emerge.
The main lesson going forward is that in Trump’s world, and our own, it’s all about the pictures. Henceforth, those hoping to counter Trump can forget about op-eds, talking heads, panel discussions. stump speeches. logic reason, or morality. Get some video. Don’t show pictures of Scott Pruitt or Ryan Zinke but of America despoiled, children (or in a pinch the family cat or dog) poisoned by polluted water, locked out of National Parks, panting for breath due to the polluted air.
Show us the starving children of unemployed coal miners, the weeping toddler alongside the casket of her star athlete sister, dead of opioids prescribed by the team doctor. And when choosing images to unite the country in Trump’s America, great care must be taken to make all the victims of dysfunction and disruption handsome men, attractive women and darling children who are blond and blue-eyed.
I showing us the looming danger of, say, rising sea levels caused by Climate Change, polar bears won’t cut it, though they are acceptable Aryan bears. But many people look at wildlife and say “I REALLY DON’T CARE, DO U?” No, we need video of the homes of Scandinavians sinking beneath the waves as they sob on the roof as fetchingly as Liv Ullmann might. Show us people as pale as Ivanka suffering due to Trump policies, then Fade to White.