Through the course of his presidency, no matter how far his behavior deviated from normal acceptable personal or political behavior, Donald Trump has been – as far as his most fervent supporters are concerned – the true Teflon president.
But his abrupt imperial decree that the nation must – immediately – seal its borders against riffraff may be testing that loyalty. “Riffraff,” of course, being defined as non-English speaking foreigners, especially those of swarthy complexion. Apparently Trump and his coterie of administrative enablers and cheerleaders thought that ripping children – especially brown-skinned children – from their mothers’ arms and putting them into some impenetrable gulag would go unnoticed.
Fat chance. The American public was almost at once transfixed by heart-rending photos of small and bewildered-looking children weeping as they reached toward the parents who were being handcuffed and taken from them. Videos abounded of ill-clad youngsters being herded up and led in a separate direction to unknown destinations, and a clandestine recording of frightened children in what appear to be cages crying for their mothers broke hearts across the country.
And Melania Trump, usually a rare humanizing and soothing note in the Trump cacophony, flew to the border to visit a shelter. But – without explanation – she wore a jacket emblazoned in large letters “I REALLY DON’T CARE. DO U?”
To top it all off, some brilliant governmental marketing guru decided it would be a good idea to call the warehouses for infants and toddlers “tender age” shelters.
MSNBC’s uber-rational analyst Rachel Maddow, a woman famed for her cool professorial demeanor, repeatedly broke down in sobs as she tried to report the brutal separation of mothers and children.
Bad optics all around, Donald.
Even his die-hard worshippers and the craven Republicans in Congress are having trouble swallowing this egregiously awful Trump action. But we – and they – should all have known, given his track record with children.
Let’s start with his firstborn, a son. We almost didn’t have a Donald Trump Jr. Ivana Trump – wife No. 1, who has relished in telling the story over the years – urged her husband to name the child after himself. He resisted.
“I said, ‘Why not?’ ” she remembered. “He said, ‘How about if he’s a loser?’ ”
Not that Don Sr. was a bad father, Ivana hastily reminds everyone. He was a good provider, “a loving father.” But he was apparently also mostly absentee. No walks in the park to discuss the mysteries of life or tossing a ball around on a Saturday afternoon, no trips to take in a ball game or the wonders of a museum. As Ivana told interviewers, it was not until his kids were 18 or so that “he could communicate with them, because then he could start to talk business with them.” Yep, American fatherhood at its finest.
So for several weeks – until Trump, under enormous pressure, fairly gracelessly called a temporary halt to the family fiasco – chaos reigned at the border and radiated outward. Children and adults were abruptly sent hither and yon to dozens of different states with no apparent orderly plan. And as the action is temporarily paused, it is increasingly obvious that no one really kept track of who was going where. It’s growing apparent that some children may not be reunited with their families for a long time, if ever.
This is increasingly business as usual for a president who has never tried to hide his contempt for immigrants, rarely distinguishing between those here legally and those who are undocumented. He rails against “murderers and thieves” and “animals” seeking to “infest our country.” He particularly likes to use the language of disease – “infest” – and bask in the applause of his passionate acolytes.
And it’s par for the course for a president who has increasingly taken a wrecking ball to traditional American institutions and international norms. Donald Trump campaigned as a man who gloried in his ignorance of history or policy, and he has deliberately – proudly – preserved that ignorance and paraded it to the world.
On a national level he has not tried to preserve and improve the elaborate social and economic systems that have been developed to serve and protect Americans over at least a century. Instead he has sought to starve those systems and appointed an army of ideologues dedicated to dismantling them as rapidly as possible, no matter what the human or ultimate financial cost.
Repairing the fragile structure will be, even at this point, a herculean task for future generations.
And internationally he has tried quite deliberately to blow up alliances that the United States has spent at least 70 years painstakingly developing and nurturing. He proudly, defiantly radiates contempt for our closest allies in Europe and in this hemisphere while he courts and curries favor with the world’s most despotic dictators.
I have no idea why our president thinks it’s somehow virtuous to flaunt his ignorance and his contempt for society’s norms and niceties. I can’t imagine why someone who has spent his whole privileged life in luxury wants to deny even a scrap of aid or comfort to those who have nothing.
But whatever the reason, we seem to have landed ourselves with perhaps our first president utterly devoid of the quality of empathy, the essential human ability to understand and share the problems and feelings of others, to put himself in the shoes of others.
This does not bode well for the next few years.
(“Monitor” columnist Katy Burns lives in Bow.)