After the border fiasco, will the Party of Trump realize the emperor has no clothes?

Public outrage over President Donald Trump’s heartless corralling of small children from their immigrant parents has finally unmasked his political strategy of fake strength.

After weeks of arguing that the policy was invented by the Democrats and required that party’s members of Congress to undo it, Mr. Trump did a rare 180. He accepted that he had the power to step in and stop the moral obscenity of his own making — although some lawyers have doubted that President Trump’s vaguely worded executive order will reunite families already divided.

His swift surrender under pressure may be the first substantial evidence of a public crack in the wall of blind adherence to his avalanche of lies, intentional misrepresentations and incitements of racial and ethnic discord. It has revealed a vulnerability to public disfavor that up to now Mr. Trump has contemptuously brushed aside.

The question now is how likely this political retreat will bring about a new period of accommodation with his critics and foes in both parties, especially in his own Republican club that is well on its way to becoming the Party of Trump. The guessing here is there’s not much chance for change under an authoritarian boss convinced that, whatever challenge confronts him, “Only I can fix it.”

In this case, he “fixed” it by contradicting his own emphatic insistence that the whole warehousing of infants and preteen kids at the Mexican border was the Democrats’ doing and could not be undone by executive order. In the end, that was precisely what he purported to do, sans the usual waving of his outsized John Hancock for the television cameras.

In light of his defeat in this latest showdown with the fate of small kids caught in the middle, is the wall of congressional Republican subservience to the president showing signs of cracking?