Trump reveals he's made of papier-mache

By Karen Tumulty
Columnist
June 20 at 6:04 PM

It is fitting that President Trump has been forced into retreat by babies. Cruelty should never be mistaken for strength. Trump’s own confusion on that point was evident on Wednesday, as he announced that he would be taking executive action to undo his own policy of separating migrant children from their families.

“The dilemma is that if you’re weak, if you’re weak, which some people would like you to be, if you’re really, really, pathetically weak, the country is going to be overrun with millions of people,” the president sputtered. “And if you’re strong, then you don’t have any heart.”

His reversal exposed the papier- ­mache quality of the image that Trump has so carefully crafted for himself.

The extreme tactic of separating parents from their children was in keeping with many other things that Trump has advocated to make himself look strong and tough: banning Muslims, building a wall on the border, punishing women who have abortions, killing the families of suspected terrorists, bringing back waterboarding as an interrogation method.

What was different this time was that he followed through — until the outrage began to rise. Then, doing what spineless people typically do, Trump tried to deflect and distract from the truth that Americans could see in the images of children in cages, and hear in the recorded sounds of their wails.

He made the baseless claim that Democrats were responsible for his own brutal policy, and then insisted that only Congress could change it. He argued that traumatizing babies was necessary to prevent MS-13 gang members from entering the country. He contended that adding judges to handle the staggering immigration caseload would breed graft and corruption. He invented statistics about crime in Germany that he said was driven by migrants.

more
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-has-been-forced-into-retreat-by-babies-thats-fitting/2018/06/20/52efb398-73d7-11e8-805c-4b67019fcfe4_story.html