The Child Separation Policy Was the Worst of the Trump Atrocities

There were so many. But that was the worst.

I try not to get too angry about politics, not because it’s not worth getting angry about — it almost always is, particularly over the last seven years — but because if you’re not careful, you’ll always be angry. And that’s no way to live, even if it’s justified. (Especially if it’s justified.) I find that I have to pick and choose my spots. Otherwise, I’ll give myself a heart attack.

While the Biden era has not exactly led to the lowering of the collective blood pressure we were all hoping for — the overturning of Roe v. Wade is the very definition of a political action to be angry about — I will confess that it has been easier to be less angry since January 2021 than it was in the four years before that. When my theoretical grandchildren ask me someday what it was like to live through the time that Donald Trump was President, the best I will be able to describe it is that everyone I knew was a combination of exhausted and furious, at all hours of the day, every day. There was so much awfulness — just normal, everyday, banal awfulness — that it was almost impossible to keep track of it all. I often refer back to McSweeney’s invaluable “Lest We Forget The Horrors,” in which every single bit of Trump monstrousness was catalogued, in intricate detail, so that it did not vanish from the public record. There were so many that the page actually had an “Atrocity Key.”

It was a relief to have a page that spelled it all out, that just listed all of it — it made you feel better knowing you weren’t imagining it. But those bulk horrors — wholesale horrors — sometimes helped to mask the true atrocities, the truly morally abhorrent, the sort of mendacities that made you fear for our nation’s soul. The stuff they’ll go to Hell for.

Of all these, the worst, to my mind, was the child separation policy. Sold as a “zero tolerance” approach to illegal immigration, the Trump administration would separate children from their families at the border — with no real plan in place to reunite them — as a way to deter future…