Showing impressive gumption, the New York Times' Amanda Taub actually blamed Trump for the factual failures among the left and its media allies, who circulated a 2014, Obama-era photo of two migrant children in a cage and blamed it on Trump.
Taub started out strongly enough in her Thursday story, "How Liberals Got Lost on the Story of Missing Children at the Border," for the paper’s “The Upshot” feature:
Over the weekend, you may have seen a horrifying story: Almost 1,500 migrant children were missing, and feared to be in the hands of human traffickers. The Trump administration lost track of the children, the story went, after separating them from their parents at the border.
The news spread across liberal social media -- with the hashtag #Wherearethechildren trending on Twitter -- as people demanded immediate action.
But it wasn’t true, or at least not the way that many thought. The narrative had combined parts of two real events and wound up with a horror story that was at least partly a myth.
But she began to hint that maybe the gullible liberals who circulated the meme weren’t really the ones who should be blamed.
The fact that so many Americans readily believed this myth offers a lesson in how partisan polarization colors people’s views on a gut emotional level without many even realizing it.
Of the “missing” immigrant children, she admitted:
The Obama administration also detained immigrant families and children, as did other recent administrations.
This past weekend, some social media users circulated a photo they said showed children detained as a result of President Trump’s policies, but the image was actually from 2014.
But then Taub began to make excuses and to subtly shift the blame off of the liberals who actually circulated the phone story, onto the shoulders of the Trump White House.
So it’s not that liberals didn’t care about immigrant children until Mr. Trump became president, or that they’re only pretending to care now so as to score political points. Rather, with the Trump administration’s making opposition to immigrants a signature issue, the topic has become salient to partisan conflict in a way it wasn’t before.
Mr. Trump’s treatment of immigrant families and children, when refracted through the lens of partisan bias, affirms liberals’ perception of being engaged in a broader moral struggle with the right, making it feel like an urgent threat. Mr. Obama’s detaining of immigrant children, by contrast, felt like a matter of abstract moral concern.
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The narrative that President Trump’s team lost hundreds of children after tearing them away from their parents combines some of the main liberal critiques of the administration: that it is racist, that it is authoritarian and that it is incompetent. The administration’s very real policy of separating families already plays to the first two archetypes. By adding in the missing children, the story manages to incorporate an incompetence angle as well.
The rapid spread of this particular story also hints at the longer-term dangers of partisan polarization.
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That departure from norms has caused tremendous suffering for immigrants and their communities. On a broader scale, it is revealing that the story of the missing children felt so true to so many people. It shows the ways that shattering norms also damages public trust.
Research shows that the loss of this trust -- particularly when combined with extreme polarization -- can weaken support for democracy over time. This story’s viral spread suggests that the administration’s treatment of immigrants could have far-reaching consequences for all Americans.
