Besieged by negative press over pictures of frightened children, the president backed off. But his allies remain and the party is still his to command

Portraits of the slave-owning presidents Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson loomed over the Resolute desk, daylight reflecting off its polished surface. Donald Trump sat in a burgundy leather chair, flanked by two of his most loyal lieutenants. Mike Pence wore a grey suit and red tie, Kirstjen Nielsen was dressed in deep blue. Press secretary Sarah Sanders rested her hand on one of two cream sofas at the centre of the Oval Office. Their expressions were grave, the atmosphere sombre.



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Like the dogged defenders of a teetering regime, Trump’s inner circle had been forced to a final redoubt. The president spoke for a few minutes before bringing himself to pick up a pen and sign the terms of surrender. The man who once declared he could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot someone without losing any votes had finally met his match: the inviolable innocence of children.

Ostensibly, Trump’s executive order ended the separation of children from their parents at the Mexican border, after days of cascading outrage in America and around the world.

“He had to sign it for one simple reason,” said Michael Steele, former chairman of the Republican National Committee. “The imagery was so bad that he could no longer justify the policy. You had people out there making complete asses of themselves in front of cameras, from the attorney general to the secretary of homeland security, justifying this inhumanity and blaming the migrants who are coming here seeking asylum.”

It was the week that Trump discovered there are still moral lines that cannot be crossed. America recoiled in disgust at the sights and sounds of children in fenced cages, lying on mats under foil sheets, sobbing and wailing for parents whose whereabouts were unknown. Iris Eufragio-Mancia, an undocumented immigrant from Honduras separated from her son on his sixth birthday, told NBC News: “Those cells are full of tears.” Condemnation came from the pope, the United Nations and observers who drew parallels with concentration camps.

But what distinguished this from the regular drumbeat of Trump panics was that even some of his most devout supporters had to admit to feeling queasy. His wife went public with concerns; his eldest daughter reportedly lobbied behind the scenes. Otherwise oleaginous Republicans scented danger in the midterm elections, though they danced around criticism of Trump himself. And when a deluge of TV coverage portrayed his government as callous and cruel, the master of the medium knew the game was up.

Some polling started to show even members of his base thought, ‘Well that that may be a little bit too far – maybe' Michael Steele

Steele added: “There’s no doubt it absolutely was the critical piece that changed this around for the president because you cannot argue with the image of a three-year-old child standing at her mother’s side crying as she’s being handcuffed and taken from her no matter how much you try, no matter how much you try to rally your base around it. Some of the polling started to show even members of his base thought, ‘Well that that may be a little bit too far – maybe.’”

There were family separations before Trump but officials usually erred on the side of keeping parents and their children together. The justice department’s announcement in April that all unlawful border crossings would be criminally prosecuted changed that. Now people without documents were sent directly to detention centres and their children and babies put in separate facilities.

The hectic Trump news cycle guaranteed distractions for a while but after Democratic senator Jeff Merkley used Facebook to livestream his attempt to enter a converted Walmart at the Texas border housing hundreds of children taken from their parents, the issue became inescapable. Official figures showed that more than 2,300 children were separated from their parents between 5 May and 9 June; a secret audio recording captured some crying for “mami” and “papa”.

America looked at itself in the mirror and did not like what it saw. All four living former first ladies spoke out. Church leaders raised their voices. Liberal cable news host Rachel Maddow broke down in tears during a live broadcast. Bruce Springsteen, performing on Broadway, told his audience: “We are seeing things right now on our American borders that are so shockingly and disgracefully inhumane and un-American that it is simply enraging.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Woman and their children, many of whom have fled violence and poverty in Honduras, Guatamala and El Salvador, in McAllen, Texas. Photograph: Spencer Platt/Getty Images

The White House fanned the flames. According to a count by the Washington Post, it changed its story on family separation 14 times before Trump signed the order. Some said the policy was a deterrent to families trying to enter the US; others claimed there was no policy but rather they were enforcing a law that past administrations neglected. Homeland security secretary Nielsen, flying back from New Orleans to face reporters in Washington, declared that “Congress alone can fix it”. It was an unwitting inversion of Trump’s infamous campaign promise: “I alone can fix it.”

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One night, Nielsen went for dinner at a Mexican restaurant, prompting chants of “shame” and “end family separation” that forced her to leave with her tail between her legs. And in the week that Democratic senator Kamala Harris described “a human rights abuse being committed by the United States government”, that government announced it was quitting the UN human rights council.

Then there was the first lady, Melania Trump, who flew to a children’s detention centre in Texas but upended her mission of compassion by wearing a Zara jacket bearing the slogan: “I really don’t care. Do U?” Her spokeswoman said there was no hidden message; her husband said there was a hidden message about the media.

Steele said: “It’s fucking 90 degrees here in Washington and Texas. I’m sorry, what do you think the response is going to be if you wear a coat like that going to the place you’re going in the midst of the controversy which your husband’s administration is embroiled in? How can you not think that people would say you’re basically flipping off this whole thing?”

‘I hate what we’ve become’

As ever, Trump set the tone. He sought to blame Democrats and referred to “illegal immigrants” who “infest” the country. On Friday 15 June he claimed he was powerless to intervene, telling reporters in the White House grounds: “You can’t do it through an executive order.” Five days later, he signed the executive order to do it, claiming: “I didn’t like the sight or the feeling of families being separated.”

At first glance it was a humbling defeat, his first acknowledged climbdown since he entered politics. Even Trump had to heed the concerns of family, friends, party and prominent cheerleaders including Anthony Scaramucci, former White House communications director, and Christian evangelical Franklin Graham. Republican senator Ted Cruz, seeking re-election in Texas in November, introduced emergency legislation to end the separations. Spencer Cox, lieutenant governor of the red state of Utah, tweeted at 3.24am: “Can’t sleep tonight. I know I shouldn’t tweet. But I’m angry. And sad. I hate what we’ve become.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest In a photo provided by US Customs and Border Protection, children rest in one of the cages at a facility in McAllen, Texas. Photograph: AP

The rumblings came just as Trump’s takeover of the Republican party was being compared to a personality cult, any dissenters banished to the political wilderness. The border policy, however, was seen as a potentially catastrophic vote loser, notably among suburban women, in the midterm elections and at a time when party leaders would prefer to focus on tax cuts and the economy.

Rich Galen, a Republican strategist and former press secretary to vice-president Dan Quayle, said: “Trump got to the point where even Republicans in the House or Senate openly disagreed with him, which they have not been willing to do on almost anything before this. The Republicans were getting blistered by their constituents and starting to sense they need to establish their own personalities in their districts. If I was a Democrat woman running against a Republican man, this is all I’d run [in TV commercials].”

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The Republican rebellion should not be overstated, however. Cruz and others were careful to swerve past condemnation of Trump, who remains utterly dominant in the party. At a meeting with Republican members of the House and Senate, who are also wrestling with deportation protections for so-called Dreamers and funding for a border wall, Tennessee senator Lamar Alexander told Trump: “You may be able to do for immigration what Nixon did for China and Reagan did for the Soviet Union.”

Steele reflected: “I’m not going to give them brownie points for doing something that they should do without having to feel that they should get a pat on the back. There’s no applause for that because you’ve let so many other things go unaccounted for, uncommented on, you’ve turned your head the other way, looking in shame instead of standing straight up and going, ‘This is wrong.’ We are here because those leaders and significant numbers of our neighbours and friends have allowed us to be here. They want us to be here. This is the space we’re in. So now we have to deal with this.”

The sentiment was echoed by Neil Sroka, communications director for the progressive political action committee Democracy for America. “I don’t think they found their backbone as much as they found a level they could not withstand politically,” he said. “The last week showed they only care about the politics of the situation: it doesn’t matter how many brown lives they ruin as long as they advance Donald Trump’s agenda.

People who are saying it’s the moment the Republican party stood up to Trump are measuring moral courage in centimetres Neil Sroka

“It was a cold-blooded political decision, plain and simple. Otherwise it wouldn’t have taken six weeks for them to stop babies being ripped out of the arms of mothers. People who are saying it’s the moment the Republican party stood up to Donald Trump are measuring moral courage in centimetres.”

The executive order is, to critics, merely a tactical retreat that retains zero tolerance, keeps children detained together with their parents potentially indefinitely and includes caveats allowing the separation of families when there is insufficient detention space. It also does nothing to reunite those already separated.

Sroka said: “Something in Donald Trump’s reptilian brain couldn’t understand the morality but understood that using children as bargaining chips is politically toxic. The fallback position we’re in now is equally toxic. He went from the government kidnapping children to the Department of Defense setting up internment camps for families.”

‘Phony stories of sadness and grief’

Like the Access Hollywood tape in which Trump was caught boasting about groping women, this week’s political and moral crisis was revealing about who would be prepared to stay in his bunker and fight to the death. Vice-President Pence, attorney general Jeff Sessions, senior policy adviser Stephen Miller and former chief strategist Steve Bannon did not express a scintilla of doubt. On the ever-loyal Fox News channel, Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s former campaign manager, responded to a story about a 10-year-old girl with Down’s syndrome being taken away from her mother in South Texas by saying: “Womp womp.”

Play Video 0:31 Melania Trump wears 'I don't care' jacket en route to child detention centre – video

Steve Cortes, a CNN political commentator who serves on the Trump 2020 election advisory council, wrote in an email: “I think the president was deeply distressed by the images of children missing their parents. I also think we all need to realise that neither President Trump nor our law enforcement caused that very unfortunate circumstance; rather, these victim children were totally mistreated by their parents or guardians who chose freely to commit the serious crime of illegal trespass into our country with children in tow.”

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This, it seems, remains Trump’s own view. Hours after signing the order, he resumed his harsh rhetoric and led chants of “Build the wall!” at a rally, as of old. On Friday he railed against “phony stories of sadness and grief” and paraded the families of people killed by undocumented immigrants, drawing a pointed comparison by saying: “They’re not separated for a day or two days. These are permanently separated, because they were killed by criminal illegal aliens.”

Despite this week’s chastening lesson, the president apparently still trusts his instincts that immigration will be a vote winner in the midterms. It has been the organising principle of his political career ever since he pushed the bogus “birther” theory that Barack Obama was not born in America and launched his election campaign, at Trump Tower in June 2015, by claiming Mexico was sending criminals and rapists across the border.

Trump’s grandfather was born in Germany; his mother was born in Britain; his wife was born in Slovenia. Gwenda Blair, author of The Trumps: Three Generations that Built an Empire, said: “The moment he got aligned with the birther thing and saw the reaction, that was it. It had so many dog whistles rolled into one. Not Christian, dark skinned, the capital O ‘other’: he’s been riding on the notion of us and them, winners and losers, a binary version of the world.

“Immigration is a code, a way of embodying the idea of ‘the other’ that you have to be afraid of.”