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In the final scene of Frederick Wiseman’s landmark documentary “Domestic Violence,” police in Tampa arrive late at night to the home of a man who is drunk and a woman who is sick. The man has called the police because he is angry that the woman, who is desperate to sleep, is “neglecting” him. Minute by minute, it becomes chillingly clear that the man wants her removed from the house before his anger turns into physical violence. In his mind, the woman’s misdeeds—to be ill; to need rest; to wish to remain in her own home—transform him into an instrument of pain, one that she is choosing to wield against herself. He raises his hands over his head in a gesture of surrender. It’s all her fault. He can’t help it. One of the abuser’s most effective tricks is this inversion of power, at the exact moment that his victim is most frightened and degraded: Look what you made me do.

Look what you made me do has emerged as the dominant ethos of the current White House. During the 2016 Presidential race, many observers drew parallels between the language of abusers and that of Trump on the campaign trail. Since his election, members of the Trump Administration have learned that language, too, and nowhere is this more vivid than in the rhetoric they use to discuss the Administration’s policies toward the Central American immigrants crossing the U.S. border. Informally since last summer, and officially since April 6th, the Department of Homeland Security has been separating parents from their children at the border, taking the parents into criminal custody and handing the children over to the Department of Health and Human Services to be placed in shelters and foster families, sometimes thousands of miles away from their parents. The process is compounded in its brutality by its perhaps intentional disorder, as a Boston Globe piece detailed on Sunday: parents in custody often have no idea where their children are, how to get them back, or if or when they will see them again.

There is no question that the actions of the Trump Administration are grievously, permanently harming these children. But who made them do it? According to Donald Trump, it was congressional Democrats. “Separating families at the Border is the fault of bad legislation passed by the Democrats,” the President tweeted on the morning of June 5th. Three days later, Trump doubled down on this refrain: “I don’t like the children being separated from the parents. I don’t like it. I hate it. But that’s a Democrat bill that we’re enforcing.” (The statement is pure-cut Trumpian chaos: the blunt fiction of the “Democrat bill”; the nihilistic spite animating the “enforcement” of the nonexistent law.)

Trump is mostly alone in blaming the Democrats; others prefer to blame the families. “We do not have a policy to separate children from their parents,” the D.H.S. secretary, Kirstjen Nielsen, told a Senate committee hearing. “Our policy is, if you break the law we will prosecute you.” The White House chief of staff, John Kelly, told NPR, “The children will be taken care of—put into foster care or whatever. But the big point is they elected to come illegally into the United States and this is a technique that no one hopes will be used extensively or for very long.” The Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, said, on the conservative pundit Hugh Hewitt’s radio show, “It’s certainly not our goal to separate children, but I do think it’s clear, it’s legitimate to warn people who come to the country, unlawfully bringing children with them, that they can’t expect that they’ll always be kept together.” In a scene from Sunday’s Globe piece, a defense attorney pleads with a U.S. magistrate judge in Texas, Peter Ormsby, to order a group of immigrants in custody to be reunited with their children; Ormsby turns to the defendants and says, “I hope you understand the reason there was a separation is you violated the laws here.” Look what you made me do.