Portside

We all once watched a flood almost wash out the city of New Orleans and with it the presidency of George W Bush. It was the “Katrina moment”, named for the devastating hurricane of the same name in 2005, but famous for more than being a horrific storm. It was the moment when Americans recoiled from their president and the images of a struggling, mainly African American population packed into the stultifying Superdome or trekking on the city’s washed-out highways or standing on their roofs waiting for their government’s help while their leader falsely claimed that his emergency director was “doing a heck of a job”. This was not the America that people wanted the world to see.

We are now witnessing Donald Trump’s Katrina moment. The American people will not tolerate having 2,000 migrant minors, many of them young children, separated from their parents, who themselves are being held at the border in what are effectively steel cages. This is not the America that even staunch conservatives want the world to see. Three first ladies, including Melania Trump, have called for an end to the boundless cruelty. Franklin Graham, the son of the late evangelical preacher Billy Graham, is trying to rally Trump’s Christian conservative base against the border spectacle.Trump is making Bush’s same fatal mistake. For days, as the chaos in New Orleans unspooled and turned into a humanitarian crisis, Bush stood aloof, continuing his vacation at his Texas ranch. On Sunday, as Beto O’Rourke, the Texas Democrat trying to unseat Senator Ted Cruz, led a march to one of the child detention facilities in Tornillo, Texas, Trump was hitting the links at his golf club near the White House. It’s the exact same heartlessness and cluelessness.

In his book Decision Points, Bush wrote: “That photo of me hovering over the damage suggested I was detached from the suffering on the ground. That was not how I felt. But once that impression was formed, I couldn’t change it.” His political fortunes continued to slump deeper and deeper from that point on, ushering in the election of Barack Obama in 2008.

What was striking back in 2005 was that Katrina was the culmination of so many disgusting Bush policies, including torture and massive incursions on civil liberties after 9/11 and the tragic, ill-conceived war in Iraq. Katrina was the culmination of a presidency that had turned rotten and the stench was impossible to ignore any longer.

The forced separation of immigrant children at the border is the exact same phenomenon, just in a tighter time frame. The country has suffered through 18 months of a heartless, clueless presidency marked by lies, a betrayal of global alliances that have stood since the end of the second world war, the undoing of treaties and regulations that protect the environment, ceaseless attacks on the successful Obama healthcare plan and the undoing of many programs that help the poor, to name only some of the outrages. This disastrous zero tolerance immigration policy is merely the crescendo of a disastrous, young administration.

Trump’s attempt to shift the blame to Democrats is laughable. Jeff Sessions’s use of the Bible to defend family separations is only one data point undermining this narrative. The New York Times published a meticulously reported article on Monday showing the genesis of the policy in the White House. It appears to be the brainchild of Steve Bannon’s Mini-me, Stephen Miller, an immigration hardliner, and the chief of staff, John Kelly, a like-minded hardliner who was homeland security chief before coming to the White House.

Because she’s a Texas native and lived through the Katrina debacle, Laura Bush’s denunciation of the Trump policy is especially noteworthy and meaningful. Noting that 2,000 children have been sent to mass detention centers or foster care, she wrote in the Washington Post: “I live in a border state. I appreciate the need to enforce and protect our international boundaries, but this zero-tolerance policy is cruel. It is immoral. And it breaks my heart.”

Of course, her op-ed was noteworthy also because she’s a Bush and the two former presidents Bush have been noticeably quiet on the issue of Donald Trump. They are presumably observing the normal tradition of former presidents not criticizing the current one. But these are not normal times and the silence of prominent Republicans on the heinous acts of this White House has been blood-chilling.

The White House and the Congress are controlled by Republicans and they can change policy on a dime if they want to. Last week, Trump was promulgating the all-powerful presidency where he had the power to do anything he wants, including pardoning himself. How about pardoning the thousands of children who have been ripped from the arms of their parents?

Americans everywhere should be marching behind O’Rourke and his allies. This is a situation that calls for mass civil disobedience if Congress will not act. We are the people and our government answers to us. We must disrupt the machinery of the border immigration enforcement system and stop the forced separation of children.

This is not the America we want the world to see.

Jill Abramson is a Guardian US columnist

Sign up to get The Guardian's top stories delivered straight to your inbox every morning