Donald Trump seems to have a new campaign: Make MS-13 Great Again.
The posters are very effective: Hispanic and Latino children in cages; a tiny Honduran toddler with beautiful curls and a fiesta red blouse crying uncontrollably as she stands very alone between the wheel of an SUV and border agents; a tent city for detained teen boys in the desert where the temperature hovers above 100.
Even as Trump lost the fight on family separations and signed an executive order ending his administration's recent, outrageous and widely condemned practice of seizing immigrant children to split apart families caught crossing the border illegally - including those legally seeking political asylum - our president continued to rant and call these families names.
"Mexico is doing nothing for us except taking our money and sending us drugs [The immigrants we're getting] are drug traffickers, they're human traffickers, they're coyotes," he said in a televised statement before Thursday's Cabinet meeting.
The irony is that many of these immigrant families are fleeing the very gangs and crimes that Trump attributes to them.
But names aside, the president's newest order, signed Wednesday afternoon, would mean children and parents would be detained together. And, yes, just days before, Trump had said he couldn't stop the separations with an order because "only Congress" could fix it. Translation: He wanted Congress to allocate money for the unnecessary, unpopular and ineffective but outrageously expensive and for-show-only border wall he promised when he was campaigning.
But on Thursday morning, even before the Cabinet meeting, the ground shifted again.
The U.S. Border Patrol would no longer refer migrant parents who cross the border illegally with children to federal courthouses to face criminal charges, officials announced. It didn't mean the "zero-tolerance" policy was ended, they said.
"We're suspending prosecutions of adults who are members of family units until ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] can accelerate resource capability to allow us to maintain custody," the official said.
Clearly, someone in the Trump administration had finally actually read the law that Trump officials said they were merely following, but actually were breaking by detaining children longer than courts have allowed.
And besides, First Lady Melania Trump - herself an immigrant to the U.S. before she married - had landed at the border for an unannounced visit to a detention center for migrant children. In another televised meeting, she asked officials there, "how I can help" these children?" The question seemed at odds with the coat our very appearance-conscious First Lady wore. The back of the coat bore these words: "I really don't care. Do U?"
Meanwhile, Trump was on television ranting again and passing the blame to "loopholes in our immigration laws all supported by extremist, open-border Democrats." He said Democrats are responsible for a "massive child-smuggling industry" and are not providing enough resources to combat the issue of housing migrant children.
"They're causing tremendous damage and destruction and lives by not doing something about this," he said.
Wait. Previous administrations - Republican and Democratic - didn't separate families and didn't seize children and didn't arrest everyone who crossed the border - and specifically not those seeking political asylum. Remember, Trump has called their policies "catch and release." Only the Trump administration, with its "zero-tolerance" policy, detained every man, woman and child in sight - without preparations for what to do with them once they were charged.
It wasn't previous administrations that caused "tremendous damage and destruction" to lives. It was the Trump administration, but Trump, of course, never takes responsibility for anything.
All the while, over on the Hill, in the GOP-led House, a couple of Trump-backed Republican bills on immigration were headed for the trash can - not because Democrats wouldn't play, but because Republicans couldn't agree to agree.
House Speaker Paul Ryan tried to save face by calling the bills "seeds planted for an ultimate solution."
Those seeds - any seeds - are being watered by the tears of immigrants and horrified Americans.
How can anyone look at the optics of this farcical cruelty and not question what this vile administration is really trying to achieve?