By Edward Miller

Donald Trump has been called many things, among them: “Grandiose, impulsive, bullying, bigoted, narcissistic, dangerous, unpredictable, gauche, greedy, temperamentally unsuited and emotional unsound.”

An accurate if incomplete list. Here’s my addition: Mean.

He hurts people because he can, including all Mexicans, parents of Arab-American soldiers killed in combat, transsexuals serving in the armed forces and former POWs serving in the U.S. Senate.

Now it’s children brought into this country illegally through no effort of their own. As Jay Bookman described them in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution recently:

“The immigrants whom we tacitly invited here made homes here. They brought their children with them. Those children didn’t know legal from illegal. They grew up here; they went to school here. They learned English and played baseball and soccer and even American football. They thought of themselves as Americans like their classmates and friends, because in many cases this was the only country they had known.”

Now Trump has decided to throw them out, but not before he tortures them with uncertainty for six more months by holding out the prospect that Congress might legislate a more humane ending to the DACA story. With a Republican majority that can’t even take a firm stand against the outrage of the president’s support for the Neo-Nazis and white supremacists in Charlottesville, that a slim hope.

Polls show that that a majority of Americans decisively support the idea of shielding the 800,000 from deportation to what would be “foreign” countries. That would be the decent thing to do, but “decent” is not on the list of descriptors for Donald Trump.

As Bookman concluded his column: “It makes us a smaller, meaner country, a country that has lost both its confidence and its faith in what has made it special.”

All my life I’ve been proud to be an American, a citizen of a country that, after exhausting all the alternatives, does the right thing. Why do I now feel ashamed?

(Photo credit: ABC News)