It’s been a strategy of President Trump, who tweet-raged against “Fake Tears Chuck Schumer” for crying over the travel ban targeting Muslim countries (and who has his own history of mocking someone with a disability). The strategy is a particular favorite of Fox opinion hosts. Tucker Carlson has pretty much built a show on it.

But the sights and sounds of the past few days have been too ghastly to sneer away. The Trump administration’s border policy had been in place for weeks. But only in the past week or so did we get the images, video and horrifying audio that push a story to the front of the news and keep it there.

There was the wailing 2-year-old in the dark, barely higher than the knees of the border agent patting down her mother. The children behind chain-link fences and huddled under foil blankets. The cartoon Trump looming at a children’s detention center (one of several illustrations of presidents), next to a quote about a real-estate battle from “The Art of the Deal.”

Most horrific were the pictures we could only imagine, hearing the audio from a detention center obtained by ProPublica: 10 Central American children pleading, bargaining, howling inconsolably for their parents.

There was a sense, by Tuesday, of both anger and anguish coming to a head. Kirstjen Nielsen, the secretary of homeland security, was captured on social media video while protesters chanted “Shame!” at her as she tried to dine out. (She was at a Mexican restaurant, the sort of real-life detail a TV producer would reject from a screenwriter as too on-the-nose.)

And that night, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow channeled the emotion of much of her audience, breaking down in tears as she tried to get through a news bulletin: that babies and toddlers were being warehoused in “tender age” facilities after being taken from their parents.