With his I-lack-a-dream decision to rescind the Daca program, which protects young migrants from deportation, Donald Trump once again demonstrated that he has the strategic vision of a four-year-old playing Candy Land. Badly.

Forget all the self-serving leaks about the president’s anguish over the fate of the 800,000 migrants who were brought to this country as children by parents who crossed the border – or overstayed their visas – without papers. What matters is not Trump’s psyche, but the results of his actions on Tuesday, which are simultaneously mean-spirited and politically maladroit.

Remember that the Dreamers were created as a special class of those in the country without valid papers for a reason: their stories have the emotional heft of orphans climbing on Santa’s lap in a Christmas fundraising appeal.

Since they were brought here as children, the Dreamers defuse the rightwing argument that any form of amnesty would be rewarding knowing illegal behavior. Having grown up in America, many of the 800,000 speak English without a hint of the accents of the countries of their birth, which makes them seem less “foreign” to immigration foes. Also, they are all required to be working, in the military or in school under the terms of their two-year residency permits.

As a result, about the only people who want to send the Dreamers back to countries they barely remember are Jeff Sessions and his fellow immigration hardliners. A recent Politico/Morning Consult Poll found that only 15% of registered voters believe that the Dreamers should be deported.

These poll numbers are not an artifact of current media attention: a March USA Today/Suffolk University Poll found that only 22% of voters favored ending legal protections for Dreamers.

Under the Trump order, Dreamers would begin to lose their protected status in March 2018, with the precise date depending on when their residency documents expire.

What this means is that gradually these 800,000 young adults would not only lose all rights to work in this country legally, but they would also be subject to deportation at the whims of immigration officials.

If Congress doesn’t act to save Daca, the resulting news footage would be devastating for all Republicans running in districts where the voters are more diverse than the cast of a 1950s sitcom.

Again and again, Republican incumbents who want to talk about taxes and cutting government regulations would be forced to defend Congress’ inaction in the face of heart-rending deportations. And since Dreamers’ permits are all on different time clocks, the stories would continue until Election Day 2018 and beyond.

But the Republicans would not be off the hook politically even if they approve legislation to codify the protections for the Dreamers and hopefully even offer them a path to citizenship.

The 15-to-20% of the electorate who favor deportation would be enraged if a Republican Congress protected these young adults whom Sessions labeled “illegal aliens.” You can trust Steve Bannon and Breitbart News to ridicule a Republican Congress for voting to legislatively rescue the Dreamers after Barack Obama and the Democrats failed in their efforts.

To the Republican’s nativist base, it would just be another betrayal by Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell and the resulting anger would probably dampen 2018 Republican turnout.

A Trump reversal on Daca is about the best that Republicans justifiably worried about losing the House and two Senate seats in states (Nevada and Arizona) with large Hispanic populations can hope for.

The president – who is either a natural weathervane or a creature who is swayed by the last person he talked to – hinted at such a backflip when he tweeted Tuesday night that if Congress fails to act, “I will revisit this issue!”

Memo the president: even with an exclamation mark, a strong leader never threatens to “revisit” anything. You can just picture Democrats fleeing in horror from the specter of a Trump revisitation.

The incoherence of the Trump position was highlighted Wednesday afternoon as the president took a few press questions aboard Air Force One en route to North Dakota. His tone was so friendly to the Dreamers that you half expected Trump to deny that Sessions was his appointee.

As the president put it with characteristically mangled syntax: “I’d like to see something where … we have a great Daca transaction where everybody is happy and now they don’t have to worry about it anymore.”

Trump coupled these hopes with his standard rhetoric about “border security”. But many Republicans in Congress, obsessed with taxes and the budget, are bored with Trump’s wailing about a wall.

While the future for the Dreamers has become cruelly worrisome, it would be comic justice if the first legislative triumph of the Trump administration would be make Daca the law of the land.