What Trump Gets

In the 1950s, the great neo-conservative intellectual Irving Kristol acknowledged Joe McCarthy's stark failings, but famously refused to take the side of his critics. "For there is one thing," he wrote, "that the American people know about Senator McCarthy: He, like them, is unequivocally anti-Communist. About the spokesman for American liberalism, they feel they know no such thing."

The sentiment could equally apply to President Donald Trump and the issue of immigration.

Trump's team is still trying to figure out how to extricate itself from a policy of separating families at the border that...