After vehemently insisting that Congress alone could fix his own family separation policy, Donald Trump finally decided to make a big to-do of ending his initiative via executive order when he could have just made a phone call to do it. In part, Trump's epic 180 on the issue is due to a stunning turnabout among congressional Republicans, some of whom expressed vehement support for Trump's unconscionable policy mere days ago.
“When you see Democrats saying, ‘Don’t separate kids from their parents,’ what they’re really saying is don’t arrest illegal aliens,” Texas Sen. Ted Cruz charged last week.
But by Tuesday of this week, Cruz—who is facing his toughest re-election fight to date—had done some serious soul searching and suddenly uncovered a latent sense of decency. “All of us are horrified at the images we’re seeing,” the Texas senator told the AP.
Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell underwent a mystifyingly similar conversion. Several weeks ago, as the House GOP leadership scrambled to quash a member rebellion on immigration, McConnell vowed not to let the Senate get bogged down in another immigration debate. "I'm not interested," he said, clearly keen on avoiding the issue in the run up to the midterm elections.
But by Tuesday, McConnell was born again, so to speak: “I support, and all of the senators of the Republican conference support, a plan that keeps families together,” McConnell told reporters. Sen. McConnell is nothing if not a heartless tactician and there's only one plausible explanation for the sudden revelations overtaking him and other Republicans like Cruz: polling.
Most polling has shown that about two-thirds of Americans oppose the policy, a number that only stands to get worse as images and audio of traumatized kids keeps spilling out into the public sphere. And while Quinnipiac found that 55 percent of Republicans support Trump's policy—it's a majority loser in every other demographic (party, gender, education, age, racial group). That's not a winning formula in a statewide race, not to mention many of the two dozen-some House seats Republicans are desperately trying to protect this fall.
In fact, among women, 70 percent oppose the policy, with white women opposing by 65 percent. It's also a majority loser among non-college and college-educated whites, with 52-37 percent opposition among non-college whites and 68-26 percent opposition among college educated whites.
For congressional Republicans, it’s pretty much a worst-nightmare case scenario for Trump to be prosecuting a policy that is viscerally repugnant to the vast majority of Americans in an election cycle that already historically works against the party of any sitting president.
As Democratic strategist Steve McMahon told MSNBC Tuesday, in the House, it could put another 15 to 20 seats in play for Democrats—that’s on top of about two dozen that are already considered solid flip targets.
Plus, the heart-wrenching images are a strategy killer for Republicans in a cycle where many GOP candidates have fully embraced Trump's extreme messaging, already airing thousands of nativist ads specifically targeting immigrants. Now Democratic candidates will be rebutting those ads with images of their own from these horrific separations.
"You'll see a thousand ads like what you're seeing on television coming up in the fall," McMahon said on MSNBC.
As for Trump, who's usually agnostic and even oblivious to the needs of congressional Republicans, he's likely just saving face. As Republican strategist and anti-Trumper Rick Wilson noted Tuesday, he had just received a message from a pollster for a GOP candidate who Wilson described as "one of Trump's most passionate, white-hot, flame-on ride-or-die defenders." That pollster's message:
"We have about a week before XXXXXXXX bails on Trump. The numbers are THAT bad."