ANALYSIS/OPINION:

Democrats are desperate, that’s for sure.

President Donald Trump has brought about a booming economy, where businesses have doled out bonuses while going on nationwide hiring sprees. The unemployment sits below 4 percent. Meanwhile, ISIS — once a daily presence in the news, in part for its members’ constant issuance of threats against Israel, the West, the White House, the pope, etc. — is barely talked about any more.

And now, with North Korea, Trump has tipped his diplomatic hat — something that neither Dems nor establishment-minded Republicans thought he had in his closet. Barack Obama was supposed to be the great diplomat. Trump? A circus act.

So if jobs and economies win elections, and national security and citizens’ feelings of safety factor in any at the voting booths, too, it’s not only Trump-like candidates who are seeing a clear finish line to election and re-election. It’s Trump.

Now come the children at the border — the teary-eyed, heart-pulling, emotionally raw children. And voila, Democrats have their new campaign wedge.

It doesn’t matter that Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen slapped back the false narratives of the media by saying the majority of children coming into America via the U.S.-Mexico border are not with parents, but rather alone.

The “vast, vast majority,” she put it.

Here’s the back-and-forth between Nielsen and a reporter during this week’s press conference.

The question to Nielsen was this, as Breitbart noted: “How is this not specifically child abuse for these innocent children who are indeed being separated from their parents?”

And Nielsen’s response: “The vast majority, vast, vast majority of children who are in the care of HHS right now, 10,000 of the 12,000, were sent here alone by their parents. That’s when they were separated.”

Good to know.

“Ten thousand of those currently in custody were sent by their parents with strangers,” Nielsen went on. “We now care for them. We have high standards. We give them meals, we give them education, we give them medical care.”

And by “we,” Nielsen of course means “us” — the taxpayers.

“There’re videos, there’re TVs,” she said.

In other words: Trump’s not the evil guy he’s being made out to be in the media.

In other words: Democrats and their left-leaning cohorts in the media are using this border issue — these children — as linchpins to political power. It’s not that the left cares so much about these kids.

It’s that these kids, particularly the ones who can cry on cue, or who are conveniently already crying while cameras are rolling, make such great political fodder for the desperate, very desperate politicos on the left.

• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter, @ckchumley.

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