“The Republicans want security and insist on security for our country. We will have that at the same time we have compassion and want to keep families together,” Trump said at the White House. “I’ll be signing something in a little while that will do that.”
In issuing an executive order suspending the policy, Trump tried to cauterize a self-inflicted political wound. It remains to be seen whether that will work or if the policy created an infection with long-lasting consequences for him and his allies.
Either way, it was a stunning about-face for a president who loves to dig in when he’s criticized. But few Republican soldiers wanted to get into the trenches with him on a moral and political crisis of his own making.
When it looked like he was holding small children hostage for policy and political gain — to force Congress to approve his broader immigration agenda, deter future migrants from coming across the U.S.-Mexico border and deliver on his immigration crackdown promise to his base — typically lockstep-loyal members of his own party balked.
They revolted because they found the policy revolting.
“We should never play with the lives of these children,” Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, said Wednesday.
And they knew it was a political loser in the midst of a midterm election run, because two-thirds of Americans — and more than two-thirds of independent voters — opposed the policy, according to a Quinnipiac poll.
Even though roughly nine in 10 Republicans approve of the job Trump is doing, only 55 percent favored the policy. Religious leaders, including some in the evangelical community at the core of Trump’s political base, condemned the administration’s actions.
Ivanka Trump told her father he had to do something, the president told House Republicans Tuesday night.
But there was nothing accidental about the policy. Breaking up families was a tactical decision.
For months, his lieutenants bragged about their gambit to discourage illegal immigration by tearing children from the arms of their parents. While that may have seemed at one time like a stroke of Machiavellian genius deep inside the bowels of the West Wing, the rest of the country cringed amid the…
