If Melania really doesn't care, then who does?
He would rather be strong -- the Trump presidency in a nutshell.
Which leaves us with Melania Trump. Is it possible that she meant to say that she didn't give a hoot about the children? But she didn't seem like someone who was being dispatched to Texas under duress -- more like someone who was signaling, as best she could, that she did not back this immoral program.
Convict Melania Trump of selfish complicity, maybe -- certainly of a relentless failure of self-awareness with her #bebest insistence that she cares about combating cyber-bullying. Say that she issued a pre-reversal statement notable for its mealy mouthed evenhandedness.
Still, that was more than Certain Others could choke out (Ivanka Trump, that means you, as my colleague Karen Tumulty noted.) And a sitting First Lady was never going to go full Laura Bush, comparing her husband's policies with the internment of Japanese-Americans.
Perhaps this is too kind to Melania Trump, and it is more accurate to understand her as calculating collaborator than prisoner in a gilt-encrusted cage. Yet one of the astonishing aspects of the family separation debacle has been that no administration official -- not a single one -- had enough of a moral compass to quit in protest.
And so we are reduced to grasping at the crumbs of compassion tossed by Melania Trump. If she really doesn't care, no one in this benighted administration does. Which may well be true but does not make it any less tragic.
========
Ruth Marcus' email address is ruthmarcus@washpost.com.
(c) 2018, Washington Post Writers Group
