For Trump, cruelty is an indicator of strength, compassion a sign of weakness. That's his message, that's what his core supporters, his base, believes, and that's what was behind the clear as can be message on his wife's jacket. "I really don't care. Do U? was Trump saying to his base "I really don't care about breaking up the families of undocumented refugees. Do U?" After all, he describes them as "infesting" the country. He dehumanizes them. They have been the scapegoat he wants his followers to focus their anger on. From the day he announced he was running, to the day his wife wore that message for his base on her jacket. This is what authoritarian demagogues do. The dynamic in place today in America is the same dynamic used by cruel and evil demagogues in other times and places. It's not hard to play on people's fears and angers. You just need someone willing to do so. We have that person in our own time and place. It's our President, and his approval rating is at its highest point.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blog...immigration-policy-is-still-incredibly-cruel/
"But no one should be fooled about what Trump is doing. His ideology and goals have not changed. He’s still vilifying immigrants to charge up his angry base. He still wants not just to stop illegal immigration but to cut back on legal immigration as well. And his impulses are as cruel as ever. Right now he and his advisers, particularly those such as Stephen Miller who have long sought to make America whiter, are not retreating. They’re devising ways to make immigration policy as brutal as they can get away with, even if they’ve been forced to take a small step backward....
.....And we have to understand that from the beginning, the cruelty of these policies was the whole point. The administration wanted to deter people from seeking asylum by showing them how horrifically they and their children would be treated if they tried to come to the United States. Trump, who describes immigrants in terms we use for insects and vermin (they “pour into and infest our Country,” he
tweeted), has over and over again made clear his own xenophobic and racist beliefs about them. He also knows that his core supporters share those beliefs, and he seeks at every opportunity to use antipathy toward immigrants to reinforce their bond with him."
