Chasnoff: Trump’s border actions no surprise.

We should be outraged but not surprised. The signs were there from the start.

Deceptive. Indifferent. Paranoid. Cruel.

These words describe President Donald Trump’s new policy requiring the separation of immigrant children, some of them infants, from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border.

They also describe President Trump.

They’ve described him for years, well before his “zerotolerance” policy at the border, long before he ever became president. His supporters have either ignored these traits or embraced them, just as those who continue to support Trump must either ignore his abuse of children or, like Sen. Ted Cruz, accept it as “inevitable.”

The policy is inhumane, but it’s not inevitable. Trump could end it as quickly as he allowed it. No one familiar with his character should expect him to do so.

This is why character matters. It determines how someone wields power.

We should not be surprised at how President Trump is wielding power at the border. We are outraged, and I suspect the president will be surprised to learn that this time he’s gone too far and the anger will outstrip his support.

Trump has made an art of courting outrage. When he’s not lying to deflect blame, he’s transparent in his cruelty — trading in shock value, using it to his advantage.

“I mean, I won’t do anything to take care of them,” he once told Howard Stern, speaking of his children. “I’ll supply funds and (Melania) will take care of the kids. It’s not like I’m gonna be walking the kids down Central Park.”

If that’s how he felt about his own children, imagine how the president feels about the children of immigrants, a class of people he attacked on Monday as “murderers and thieves and so much else.”

“Children are being used by some of the worst criminals on earth as a means to enter our country,” he wrote on Twitter, suggesting that the families he’s tearing apart — those fleeing violence in Central America only to be separated once they reach the United States — aren’t actually families.

This is where the paranoia seeps in.

Trump won’t acknowledge that most of those seeking asylum are fleeing mortal threats, instead suggesting that Americans are somehow threatened by the threatened. This justifies his cruelty. If the children who appear at the border are the pawns of criminals, then those children can become the pawns of a president in his relentless quest to build a wall.

Most Americans recognize that children are simply children.

In the end, will it matter? “I think the question is, even though people don’t like it and have drawn a hard line in the sand, is that enough to change the way they vote?” state Rep. Diego Bernal, D-San Antonio, asked Monday. “Because people will say they don’t agree with something, but they’re also willing to eat a lot and endure a lot and still vote the way they vote.”

The president has always kicked sacred cows, from POWs to Gold Star families.

His base has lapped it up. Those attacks, though, were rhetorical: Trump talking tough. This is actual suffering inflicted on children.

Child abuse isn’t tough. It’s indefensible.

On Monday, Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-San Antonio, toured two facilities in Brownsville, Casa Padre and Casa Presidente, where unaccompanied and separated children are being held.

“The youngest one I saw was a boy named Roger who was 8 months old,” Castro told me. “His sister had come to the United States with him, and his mother was deceased. … It’s jarring to walk into a room with children who are too young to walk and know that their parents are nowhere to be found.”

The congressman sounded weary, emotionally spent.

“It’s a humanitarian crisis manufactured directly by President Trump,” he said. “He’s abusing these young kids to get leverage over Democrats in Congress to pay for his border wall.

“We’re going to do everything we can to stop this,” Castro added. “The American people are in an uproar because they understand this has nothing to do with what political party you support, but it’s a fundamental question of the American conscience and American morality.”

We aren’t surprised. But we are outraged, and this time it cannot redound to the benefit of Trump.