How to Look Away
“These child actors weeping and crying on all the other networks 24/7 right now; do not fall for it, Mr. President.”
Ann Coulter, on Sunday, was speaking to that famed audience of one—Donald Trump—in the language whose grammar and idioms both of them understand intuitively: that of the Fox News Channel. But the pundit wasn’t informing the world leader so much as she was warning him. And she was concerned, she suggested, not so much for the presidential mind as for the American soul. You may be tempted, she noted to the president and the larger audience, to feel for the children who wail as they are torn away from their families at the American border; resist that temptation. Do not feel for them; they don’t deserve it. They’re faking it. As Coulter reiterated on Tuesday, in a follow-up interview with TMZ: “They are trying to wreck our country through a political stunt.”
The “they” in question is both unspecified and wincingly clear. And the “stunt” Coulter is referring to, of course, is the series of images and sounds and words that have been coming from America’s southern border, in a progression that has become steadily more urgent in recent weeks: images of children, separated from their families, their little fists clenched in fear. Reports. Reports of . Reports of to get “baths,” never to be returned. All those tiny people, caged like animals.
