Donald Trump’s mentor, the colorful controversialist Roy Cohn, once said: “I bring out the worst in my enemies and that’s how I get them to defeat themselves.” If this is Trump’s strategy, those who jeered Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen at a Mexican restaurant or protested at her home have been playing their part effectively. They apparently believe that intensity of conviction is demonstrated by incivility, just as Robert De Niro seems to think that conviction is proven by crudity. This is childish but not harmless. It is one more step in the personalization of political anger. One more method to turn fellow citizens into bitter enemies.

In the 1992 campaign, President George H.W. Bush created an unofficial and much-mocked motto for his administration during a town hall meeting in New Hampshire. “Message: I care,” he announced, as if reading aloud the stage directions. Melania Trump did much the same last week when she went to Texas to see some of the migrant kids who were taken from their parents under her husband’s policy. The now-famous wording on her jacket made her a human billboard for what should be the unofficial motto of the Trump administration:

Is there a psychiatrist in the house? Like so many Americans, this columnist longs for the voice of another, the great and good Charles Krauthammer, who died last week, leaving us mortals to plod through the darkness without the light of his reasoned guidance.

On the issue of child separation, President Trump had to be dragged kicking and screaming into basic humanity. His initial goal was to create terror in migrants without provoking revulsion in the broader public. He failed. Trump may be immune to sympathy, but he is not immune to pressure. His partial backdown proves he is not completely indifferent to public outrage, which hopefully will generate more of it. We have a president who is probing the limits of the constitutional order through his attempts to undermine checking and balancing institutions. He is also probing the limits of the moral order through racially charged attacks and the dehumanization of migrants. And he will continue pressing and testing until he meets firm resistance.

President Trump believes that “trade wars are good, and easy to win.” So he started one. Now the casualties are beginning to return home from the battlefield, and on Capitol Hill Wednesday, the people’s representatives presented some of them to Wilbur Ross, the president’s billionaire commerce secretary.

Over the past few days, our nation’s volatile president attended two summits – one in Canada with America’s closest allies, friends and partners; and the other in Singapore with a brutal dictator. Presented with these two incredibly diverse sets of interlocutors across the table, Donald Trump chose to call Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau “weak and dishonest,” while calling Kim Jong Un, arguably the worst leader in the world in terms of human rights, someone “very smart” and an “honorable” man whom he intends to invite to the White House.

I have some shocking news: An organization with “Trump” in its name has run into trouble with the law. Who could have imagined? Thursday, the New York attorney general’s office filed a lawsuit targeting the Trump Foundation. The Washington Post’s David Fahrenthold reports:

Well, that didn’t take long. President Trump had barely departed from Singapore when Democrats in Washington unleashed scathing attacks over his meeting with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. “What the United States has gained is vague and unverifiable at best. What North Korea has gained, however, is tangible and lasting,” Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y., fumed. “In his haste to reach an agreement, President Trump elevated North Korea to the level of the United States while preserving the regime’s status quo,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., protested. Please. Where were these complaints when President Barack Obama was enjoying peanuts and Cracker Jack with Raul Castro at a Havana ballpark? And a few months ago, Schumer was decrying Trump’s “reckless” military threats and Pelosi was complaining about his “saber-rattling.” Now, suddenly, Trump’s gone from warmonger to the second coming of Neville Chamberlain?