Wearing a jacket with the inscription, “I really don’t care,” Melania Trump bordered a plane yesterday headed to the border to visit children. Not surprisingly, it has provoked a good deal of discussion as to her intentions.

In an oped column in the NYT, Michele Goldberg writes, “It’s hard to tell whether incompetence or malevolence was behind her choice (of jacket’s inscription) … ” I have to believe she had malevolent intentions. To attribute it to incompetence is just too big a stretch for me anyway. She can’t be that tone deaf or stupid not to think that it wouldn’t be taken as a statement expressing her attitude toward the crisis at the border.

But of more importance than her intentions is s in Congress, how it was received by Trump’s loyalistapologists in the media, and diehard supporters at the grassroots. After all, they, like Trump, have must have felt on their heels in the face of an outraged country, reacting to the awful sight of children and babies forcibly separated from their parents.

In this context, it’s reasonable to think that Melania’s not so subtle message had the purpose of steadying this nasty coalition of white nationalists as well as reminding them that more harsh and extreme measures will be necessary at the border to protect their “way of life” from the growing “infestation” (Trump’s word) of “darker skinned” people crossing our southern border?

Trump’s retreat was partial and incomplete. To begin with, the fate of thousands of children separated from their parents is no better now than it was two days ago. In some ways it is worse. These children are being shipped to cities around the country where they will be held involuntarily in holding centers. And there is no plan to reunite them with their families. Nor transparency. Nor is access to these makeshift shelters to outside advocates of the children and the media.

The Zero Tolerance policy also remains in place. And there is much else in the vaguely executive order that gives Trump and gang room to pursue their discredited and immoral policy by other means.

It would be ironic in other circumstances, but to see thousands of white Trump supporters in Duluth, MN at a Trump rally last night wildly cheering Trump’s most inflammatory rhetoric against immigrants from Central America is sobering, to say the least. It was as good as a visual representation as I have seen lately of the degree to which racism, nativism, and nationalism have lodged themselves in the intellectual and emotional make up of a significant group of white people, including white workers. Duluth, if you don’t know, is about as far away from the Mexican border as you can get. Moreover, it is hardly a destination point for most immigrants. In fact, It’s only a reach, albeit a long one, across Lake Superior to Canada.

Lots of people think that the conditions of underdevelopment — economic and otherwise — in the Global South in general and in Central American countries in particular where families are fleeing to our border is the handiwork of the people in those countries, period.

That there might be a connection between the Global North and the Global South that explains why the former is developed and enormously wealthy, while the latter is undeveloped and experience poverty on a broad scale goes unnoticed. At this moment when tens of millions are outraged at the treatment being meted to fleeing babies, children, and families, this connection should be part of the many conversations that are going on.

I carry you forward in more ways than one. Happy Father’s Day, Pops! You had a chrome heart and that’s no small thing.