In the face of protests at airports across the country opposing his restrictive travel ban last year, President Donald Trump defended the executive order as a necessary protection from terrorists.

When he was confronted with bipartisan outrage and criticism from his own aides after condemning violence on “both sides” of a white nationalist rally and counterprotest in Charlottesville, Virginia, last year, the president dug in his heels.


But on Wednesday, facing what has grown into the biggest moral and political crisis of his administration, the president whose default position is to double down, simply caved in.

Sitting behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office flanked by Vice President Mike Pence and embattled Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, Trump signed an executive order temporarily halting his policy of separating children from their parents at the border.

“The border’s just as tough,” Trump told reporters. “But we do want to keep families together.”

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The about-face came less than 24 hours after Trump was stridently insisting he was powerless to change the situation, instead blaming Congress for scenes of children caged in former big-box stores.

On Tuesday, speaking in front of a business group, Trump even referenced his first campaign speech, in which he called Mexican immigrants rapists and accused them of bringing drugs and crime into the country.

“Remember I made that speech and I was badly criticized?” he said. “‘Oh it’s so terrible, what he said.’ Turned out I was 100 percent right. That’s why I got elected.”

As recently as Friday, the White House circulated talking points quoting the president himself saying that his hands were tied: “We can’t do it through an executive order.”

His ultimate reversal was all the more remarkable because the immigration and border security has been his signature political issue, one that has energized his political base and helped elevate him to office.

It came as a rare combination of forces collided, ultimately moving the stubborn commander in chief: political pushback from Republicans in Congress, including typically staunch allies; private pressure from his family members, including his eldest daughter and his wife; and, most importantly, wall-to-wall media coverage broadcasting to the country images of frightened children and the sounds of their sobs from inside government-run facilities.

“Trump has proved remarkably impervious to elite and media criticism, but even he couldn’t withstand this,” said Rich Lowry, editor of National Review. “The new policy is a tactical retreat in hopes of regaining political traction, but family separations of the sort we’ve seen over the last couple of months are not going to return.”

The conservative news magazine, which has been broadly supportive of the president’s hawkish immigration policies, called on Monday for congressional action to address child separation. “This is an insane way to run an immigration system and starkly pits humanitarian concerns against enforcement,” the magazine editorialized.

But former associates said it’s not unusual for Trump to flip the script to portray himself as the savior in an impossible situation.

“Trump creates his own crises, so he can solve them, and in this case be a hero,” said Jack O’Donnell, the former president and chief operating officer of the Trump Plaza Casino in Atlantic City, who has become a critic of his former boss. “Even if that was not the original intent, he plays on the fly, turns bad optics into him looking like a hero.”

The president’s defenders are already doing just that, immediately spinning the president as a liberator of the detained children — although even they were hesitant to speak on the record.

“This is the president doing the right thing,” said one former administration official who refused to be quoted on the record. “It’s also him realizing that he certainly can’t rely on Congress. And so I think this is a big positive for him. He fixes yet another problem.”

By late afternoon, Trump himself had begun to echo that sentiment, modifying his old campaign trope, “I alone can fix it,” writing on Twitter: “Don’t worry, the Republicans, and your President, will fix it!”

He attached a video of a number of Democrats, from former President Barack Obama to the Clintons, both Hillary and Bill, pledging to secure the southern border.

The president’s executive order effectively throws the fate of the approximately 2,000 children currently in the custody of DHS and the Department of Health and Human Services, as well as those who will cross the border in the coming weeks, into the hands of the federal judiciary.

The document signed by the president directs the Department of Justice to appeal a decision from the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California to amend the so-called Flores consent decree, a 1997 settlement that the Trump administration says prohibits immigration authorities from detaining children with their parents for more than 20 days.

“This is a stopgap measure and the president is doing everything he can within existing authority,” Gene Hamilton, counsel to Attorney General Jeff Sessions, told reporters on Wednesday — though it was Sessions who set the separations in motion with his April decision to begin criminally prosecuting all migrants caught crossing the border illegally.

But Hamilton said it would be up to Judge Dolly M. Gee, who oversees the ruling, rather than Sessions or Trump, to decide whether Wednesday’s end to the separations will stand: “It’s on Judge Gee to render a decision here: Are we going to be able to retain alien families together or are we not?”

Already, Trump was congratulating himself for ending a crisis his own administration started. “I feel very strongly about it, I think anybody with a heart would feel very strongly about it,” he said at the signing of the executive order — titled “An executive order affording Congress an opportunity to address family separation.”

People who have known Trump for decades said it’s no surprise that he’s spinning his unusual reversal as a win.

The president himself gave a public admission of his own tactics last week in Singapore, when he told reporters in a news conference after his denuclearization summit with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un that he could well be wrong about his rosy assessment of the North Korean dictator but that, if so, he’s unlikely ever to cop to it. “I don’t know that I’ll ever admit it,” he said. “I’ll find some kind of an excuse.”