"Womp womp" was the sound of human decency dying on live cable news

The New York Times

The "sad trombone" sound that former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski made last night on Fox news to mock the sob story of a 10-year-old immigrant girl with Down syndrome being separated from her parents looked so bad that even Lewandowski tried to reframe it this morning as an attack on the liberal pundit he was sparring with. As James Poniewozik points out, from Laura Ingraham to Tucker Carlson, Lewandowski's "womp womp" was the latest tactic used on Fox News to delegitimize emotion. "But the sights and sounds of the past few days have been too ghastly to sneer away," he adds. "The Trump administration’s border policy has been in place for weeks. But only in the past week or so have we gotten the images, video and horrifying audio that push a story to the front of the news and keep it there." Poniewozik says that Lewandowski would've done a "womp womp" in reaction to MSNBC's Rachel Maddow channeling the emotion of much of her audience by breaking down in tears to the news of "tender age" facilities. He adds: "'Womp womp' is the sound of someone telling you that this basic decency is questionable, weak, a trick, something to be mastered for the sake of the team. It’s the music of someone trying to give you permission to harden your heart to strangers while still thinking of yourself as a good person." ALSO: Maddow's inarticulacy proved more eloquent than a straight recitation of the facts that she couldn’t bear to face.