As the flood of images, audio, and horror stories of children ripped from their parents and detained at the U.S. border grows thicker, it seems Donald Trump’s White House may be starting to realize, on some level, that it’s dealing with a P.R. crisis. Several Republican senators, including Utah’s Orrin Hatch, Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, and Arizona’s John McCain, have now spoken out against the child separation policy. More than 80 former U.S. attorneys have signed a letter denouncing it. Every living First Lady has now declared her opposition. Ivanka Trump, a supposed White House advocate for women’s issues, is being harangued for her silence. Yet White House sources have reportedly indicated that Trump will stand firm. And so, Trump allies are employing a tactic they’ve long used to obfuscate, evade, and blame-shift: they’re falling back on semantics.

The latest to engage in this round of verbal jiujitsu is Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who initially justified his “zero-tolerance” policy with a quote from the Bible. On Monday, speaking to Fox host Laura Ingraham, he was asked to respond to comparisons between the policy and deeds carried out by German Nazis. “What’s going on here?” Ingraham wondered aloud. “Well, it’s a real exaggeration, of course,” Sessions replied. “In Nazi Germany, they were keeping the Jews from leaving the country.” (This isn’t strictly true; the Nazis initially explored expelling all Jews from Europe, to the extent that they forcibly deported thousands from Poland.) “This is,” Sessions conceded, “a serious matter . . . we need to think it through—be rational and thoughtful about it,” he continued. “We want to allow asylum for people who qualify for it, but people who want economic migration for their personal financial benefit, and what they think is their family’s benefit, is not a basis for a claim of asylum—but they can make that claim, we will process it, and I will review the situation and make a decision.”

Sessions’s script-flipping was supplemented by Ingraham herself, who fractured the limits of exaggeration when she compared the bare-bones detention centers to sleepaway camps. “More kids are being separated from their parents and temporarily housed in what are essentially summer camps, or as the San Diego Union-Tribune described them today, as basically looking like boarding schools,” she declared, eschewing vital aspects of the newspaper’s report, which described the facilities’ chain-link fencing, privacy netting, and 24-hour video surveillance. “The American people are footing a really big bill for what is tantamount to a slow-rolling invasion of the United States.” (She later amended her description: “Apparently there are a lot of people very upset because we referred to some of the detention facilities tonight as essentially like summer camps,” she said. “The San Diego Union-Tribune today described the facilities as essentially like what you would expect at a boarding school. So I will stick to there are some of them like boarding schools. And I suggest that a lot of the folks who are worried about that spend more time in Central America. I have.”)

The Trump administration itself added another useful data point to the Nazi-camp (or, O.K., boarding school) continuum on Monday evening, when The Washington Post reported that Trump officials “rejected” former First Lady Laura Bush’s parallel between the border holding centers and World War II-era Japanese-American internment camps. In a hefty document entitled “Congressional Democrats’ Policies Are Responsible for the Border Crisis and Family Separation,” the White House specifically directed its advocates to counter reports that children were mistreated, calling them “bunk.”