And it may be good news for Trump too. Aside from being a cruel and heartless policy inflicted upon vulnerable people who have committed no crime in the accepted sense, making seeking asylum a crime is no more a real crime than making drinking coke a crime and especially in a nation largely built out of asylum seekers and immigrants. It was also a political blunder. Assailed on all sides on Capitol Hill and especially among leading Republicans about which Trump was irritated rather than surprised, from his close family which disturbed him, and from the international community about which he cared not a jot, Trump has issued another executive order stopping the separation of families in the border drama now unfolding.
America allows Trump to do all sorts of things for which any other president would be censured, because he was elected to disrupt the established order. One of the reasons he will escape immediate poll drain, is that very few presidents, having screwed up, will do anything about it. Trump did. Of course he dressed it up in familiar Trump wrappings, but it was a climb down. Yet he is bigger for it. What effect this will have on future electoral prospects varies from none to ‘the moment when’. In other words nobody knows.