Rarely has Donald Trump been on his heels as he has over the past week. Even during the hottest-burning controversies and scandals of his administration, Trump is usually the stick-and-move president: provoke, evade, pivot to the next thing. The media has a hard time keeping up, and congressional Democrats are too busy holding limp-dick press conferences like it’s still 2006. They’re about as effective as those digital finger-waggers who tweet “Sir!” at the president every time he burps. As I wrote previously for the Hive, Trump is absolutely curb-stomping his opponents in the battle for attention.

But the wrenching story of migrant children being separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border has unfolded differently. Trump has been forced to play defense. It’s not just because the policy is cruel, inhumane, and an ugly stain on our country’s moral integrity. It is all of those things. But Trump has done plenty of ugly things. What’s different this time, and the handful of times Trump has found himself losing, is that there are pictures.

Think of the handful of moments when Trump has been subjected to a sustained drubbing that’s lasted more than just a day or two: the Access Hollywood tape. Sean Spicer’s lie about the size of the inauguration crowd. The massive airport protests around the travel ban. Trump’s “very fine people” comment about neo-Nazi marchers in Charlottesville. The Rob Porter domestic-abuse allegations fiasco. (Porter has denied the allegations.) And now the gross panorama of migrant children being separated from their desperate parents. All of these stories were accompanied by images—pictures or video—that either tilted public opinion against the president or blatantly contradicted the dubious claims of Trump and his allies.

As CNN’s Jake Tapper tweeted on Wednesday, “It’s not an accident that the US government is making it so difficult for journalists, lawmakers, lawyers and others to bring you images and firsthand accounts from these separated parents and children. They are hiding the truth from you because they fear your reaction.”

The power of images is a simple concept, hardly new in politics. Popular opinion turned against the Vietnam War because television contradicted the upbeat messages coming out of the Johnson and Nixon White Houses. Gary Hart was outed as a philanderer only after that famous picture surfaced of him and Donna Rice canoodling on the Monkey Business. The New Yorker’s pictures from Abu Ghraib embodied the complicated morality of the Iraq War. And in 2008, Barack Obama’s biggest challenge arrived when ABC News showed the video of his former pastor Jeremiah Wright declaring, “God damn America!”

But these are different times. The media gatekeepers—television news networks, print newspapers, radio—used to determine how images reached the public. Thanks to Internet-connected smartphone cameras, images today are created and distributed by everyone. In the past, the written and spoken word, whether delivered by a newspaperman or a politician, had a kind of power that not longer exists. Even during Vietnam, as the culture wars were tearing us apart, there was some measure of public agreement on the credibility of news organizations and consensus around facts and the terms of debate.

Today, it’s exceedingly difficult to compete with Trump at the rhetorical level. This is in part because Trump has no shame, while most people do. But it’s also because Trump has so bent, damaged, and disfigured language to a point that we no longer have a shared vocabulary, especially in a world of open platforms and algorithm-fueled polarization. It’s easy for Trump to belittle the press and its reporting as “FAKE NEWS” because the press can’t usually provide contrary evidence other than “sources say.” But hard, concrete, visual evidence—the pictures we see from the border—seems to be the most effective antidote to Trump and his ability to dominate our mindshare. As the migrant story took hold across every channel and platform, visual media came to feel like a cure, however temporary, for our political schizophrenia.