Thigh-High Politics is an op-ed column by Teen Vogue writer Lauren Duca that breaks down the news, provides resources for the resistance, and just generally refuses to accept toxic nonsense.

President Donald Trump is (still) gaslighting America. And now, it appears that his family and his administration are in on the tactic.

On Thursday, First Lady Melania Trump boarded a plane to visit immigrant children who had been separated from their families in Texas. Her trip alone wasn’t the news however; it was her clothing choice, which included a $38 green anorak from Zara that said, “I really don’t care, do u?”

When I saw the jacket, I was so shocked, I checked three times to confirm it was real. But it was — and her spokesperson even issued a statement doubling down on the idea that "It's a jacket. There was no hidden message. After today's important visit to Texas, I hope the media isn't going to choose to focus on her wardrobe."

Sometimes, we talk about fashion statements, and the things clothes express at some implicit, subjective level, but, no, this was written on the jacket in bold lettering. It wasn’t a hidden message — it was written right there on her back. But suggesting that we shouldn’t focus on the target so readily dangled in front of us, did hint at the Trump family’s ulterior motive: to make us mistrust our own instincts.

Gaslighting is a tactic of psychological abuse in which the victim is made to doubt their own sanity, only here the abuser is the White House, and the victim is the American people. The Trump administration is sending up so many conflicting versions of reality that they make us doubt what is and is not real. The past week alone has provided one of the most gruesome examples of this, as it seeks to confuse and distract us from the plight of about 2,300 immigrant children separated from their families with no plan for being reunited. Those children are being held in detention centers, or flown across the country, with no guarantee that they will ever see their parents again. On Thursday, Trump signed an executive order which he claimed would end family separation; it does so only in name. The so-called “zero-tolerance” policy will still be enforced, but now the Trump administration plans to hold families in detention centers together and indefinitely. They have made no statement on efforts for reuniting the families who have already been torn apart — but it doesn’t look like it will be happening anytime soon.

There was so much deception in regard to this policy, the explanations emerging from the White House began to seeing like Wheel of Fortune but for disinformation. Amid public outrage over family separation at the border, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristjen Nielsen claimed that the Trump administration had no such policy. That tweet was still on her feed when she drafted the executive order to end family separation at the border: effectively ending a policy she had claimed did not exist less than a week earlier.

Before that, there were various attempts to obliterate any reasonable comprehension of the issue. Trump said that Congress needed to act — claiming that his administration was simply upholding the laws and ambiguously (and falsely) blaming Democrats. In fact, there is no law enforcing family separation at the border. The decision to separate immigrant children from their parents comes from a policy enforced by the Trump administration in which all immigrants illegally crossing the border are prosecuted.