Donald and Melania: The king and queen of cruelty

You just can’t construct prisons for babies. You can’t rip children from mothers and fathers.

You can’t use the power of the U.S. government to institute a program of state-sponsored child abuse. You can’t have a system where the process of reunification is murky and maybe futile.

You can’t do any of that and assume that decent people won’t rise up in revolt.

Donald Trump learned that this week as an avalanche of indignation came down on him and his administration for his brutal, inhumane “zero tolerance” policy at the border, which was resulting in the terrible suffering of children and their parents.

Citizens were outraged. Politicians were outraged. Corporate leaders were outraged. Foreign leaders were outraged. The pope was outraged.

This is an immoral act of an immoral man, one who saw absolutely no flaw in using the anguish of families — people he viewed as deficient and less-than, “not their best” — as pawns in a political fight to force Congress to fund his ridiculous hate symbol: a border wall between the U.S. and Mexico.

He clearly didn’t think that this was a losing battle. He thought using border agents to abduct children was a winning idea.

On Wednesday, The Associated Press reported: “President Donald Trump sees his hard-line immigration stance as a winning issue heading into a midterm election he views as a referendum on his protectionist policies.”

A Republican member of Congress told CNN that Trump said during a closed-door meeting that “the crying babies doesn’t look good politically.”

Indeed, a CNN poll conducted by SSRS and released Monday found although two-thirds of Americans overall opposed the policy, a majority of Republicans supported it.

That to me goes beyond standard political tribalism. That ventures into the territory that Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., described last week: This is cultlike.

It’s not that Trump and his family don’t see the downside of imposing even the smallest amount of stress on children. It’s that they value different children in differing degrees.

Melania Trump clearly thought that it was too traumatic to move the couple’s young son to Washington during the school year, so she stayed with him in New York, costing taxpayers tens of millions of dollars for security.

Melania Trump didn’t move to the White House until last June.

Yes, she made an unusual step in publicly condemning the family separation policy, but she did so using her husband’s false “both sides of the aisle” talking point. That was a lie. The president alone started this and had the power to end it.

Then she tweeted this tone-deaf, Marie Antoinette-ish statement, as her husband was still separating children from their parents and sending them to internment camps: “A great visit with the King & Queen of Spain at the @ WhiteHouse today. Queen Letizia & I enjoyed tea & time together focusing on the ways we can positively impact children.”

Enjoyed tea? Positively impact children?

Now some are reporting that she pressured her husband behind the scenes to reverse the policy. Is she, or is her husband, going to work for the swift reunification of every family that has been torn apart? Will either publicly apologize to the families?

Until then, I give her no laurels. Donald and Melania are a team in this terror. They have worked together to make the abhorrent normal. They deserve each other; we deserve better.