I suspect Donald Trump has a Yul Brynner complex.

It isn’t the hair. Instead of our president’s orange brush over, ol’ Yul was known for having a pate as bald and polished as a billiard ball long before the style became cool.

No, I am reminded of Brynner’s role as the pharaoh Rameses in the 1956 biblical epic The Ten Commandments.

Your ancient Egyptian pharaoh could do pretty much whatever he wanted, as illustrated by Brynner’s signature line in the film: “So let it be written, so let it be done.”

I think our president came into office with similar expectations.

With no political experience. and coming from a closely held family operation where the only acceptable response to being told to jump was to ask “how high?”, he really can’t be blamed for failing to recognize that a president is not a pharaoh.

Things have been complicated by the fact that he has surrounded himself with a coterie of Trumpophants who serve not as advisors, but as enablers, eager to do whatever is necessary to remain in the president’s good graces. This willingness to be obsequious in the extreme starts with his vice president and worms its way down through his entire administration.

Left to his own devices, he revels in the exercise of his powers, rarely, if ever, admitting that in a constitutional republic, all powers have their limits.

Until a few days ago that is.

A “zero tolerance” policy on the southern border, where the murderers, rapists, gang members, drug smugglers and a few good people cross illegally into our country, looked good on paper. It meshed well with the president’s desire to appear tough on immigration. It would play well with the base, especially since the immigrants are allegedly “infesting” our country.

What was apparently underestimated was the public’s reaction to thousands of children, some only a few months old, being separated from their families, being warehoused in cages in former Wal-Marts or transported to tent cities in the middle of nowhere, where the tab is a reported $775 per child per night.

Maybe some contractor benefitting from a fat no-bid contract was happy, but ordinary Americans of whatever political persuasion increasingly were not.

Film, and sounds of small confused and frightened children crying for their mothers, struck a chord with Americans, even as their leader doggedly stuck to his guns.

Opposition mounted, with condemnation coming from across the board, and from overseas.

Finally, the Republican caucuses in both the House and the Senate either found, or rented, some spine, and, possibly for the first time, began to peel away from their president.

Their change of heart might be the result of a political calculation of how much damage those haunting pictures and sounds might do to their reelection chances in November, but give them credit, they acted as members of Congress, and not as members of the chorus.

Give the president credit. For the first time, he publicly backed off a position. He signed an executive order that, while it preserved most of the “zero tolerance” policy, at least purported to end the separation of families—even if he had said a few days prior that the policy could not be changed by an executive order.

Perhaps he has learned that, unlike the pharaoh, what is written cannot always be done.

As always, the devil is in the details. Given the president’s track record, final judgment should be reserved until those so-called “details” are thoroughly understood.

This is not over. Those who created this mess own the responsibility of cleaning it up.  It is unclear as to the effect of the executive order on the thousands of kids already in custody and spread across the continent who need to be reunited with their family, even if the family’s ultimate fate is deportation and even if the parent has already been deported to their home country, while the child remains in custody here.

Reports, as this is written on the evening of June 20^th, are that the Department of Health and Human services have said there are “no plans” to reunite children already in custody with their parent or parents. This is totally unacceptable.

Any attempt to avoid “grandfathering” the children already in custody should be treated for what it is, an avoidance of the consequences of a bad decision that should not be allowed to be avoided.

As a country, we have a moral obligation, and likely a legal one as well, to repair, as much as we can, the damage we have done to these defenseless and innocent children.

Let that be written. Let that be done.