JEFF SESSIONS WAS IN his car heading to a Republican event in Mobile, Alabama, when he heard the news on the radio: Donald Trump was in town.
It was a Friday in August of 2015, about two months after the launch of Trump’s campaign, and no one had given Alabama’s junior senator a heads-up that the candidate was planning a visit to his hometown. But Sessions had been watching Trump’s campaign with growing interest. The immigration rhetoric was spot-on, he thought. Over the previous decade, Sessions had waged his lonely battles in the Senate to stop a bipartisan effort to grant amnesty to nearly 11 million illegal immigrants, a move that he believed would further devastate middle America. In floor speeches, Sessions had derided colleagues from both parties as self-anointed “masters of the universe” who wanted to do more for immigrants than for the struggling workers in the United States. Surveys showed that most Americans wanted the border secured for good before any action was taken to legalize millions of people who had entered the country illegally. Congress needed to listen to that sentiment. Sessions was also skeptical of free trade agreements, which he viewed as a giveaway to foreign countries and detrimental to workers in the United States. As far as Sessions was concerned, Trump was the only candidate who was addressing the issues that he and Miller and Bannon had talked about during their dinner years earlier—speaking boldly, and with clarity, about both trade and immigration.
If Trump was appearing in his backyard, Sessions was going to make sure he was onstage with him. He turned his car around and headed back toward home, dialing George Gigicos, Trump’s advance man and an Alabama native, as he drove. Come to the airport, Gigicos told him. Once there, Trump invited Sessions onto the plane for a pre-rally chat. A few hours later, Sessions was in the audience at the Ladd-Peebles Stadium, home to the University of South Alabama Jaguars, along with at least 20,000 people, nearly half of the stadium’s capacity. The senator could not believe that in a matter of days Trump’s staff had managed to schedule a rally of this size; it dawned on Sessions that this candidate was like no other he had ever seen. After entering the arena to “Sweet Home Alabama” and raucous applause from the crowd, Trump singled out Sessions.
“We have a great politician here. We have a man here. He’s been so spot-on. He’s so highly respected. Has anybody ever heard of Senator Jeff Sessions?” At Trump’s urging, Sessions clambered up onto the stage. “Look at him, he’s like twenty years old. Unbelievable guy,” Trump bellowed as Sessions briefly donned a white baseball cap with the words Make America Great Again. While not endorsing Trump’s nascent presidential bid, Sessions made it clear to the audience that he appreciated Trump’s rhetoric. “The American people, these people, want somebody in the presidency who stands up for them, defends their interests and the laws and traditions of this country,” Sessions said at the microphone. “We welcome you here, thank you for the work you put into the immigration issue. I’m really impressed with your plan. I know it will make a difference. And this crowd shows that a lot of people agree with that.”
There were real numbers behind Sessions’s gut feeling, he would soon learn. In the fall of 2015, Kellyanne Conway, a Republican pollster, was working for Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and publicly criticizing Trump as offensive and extreme. But she confided in Sessions that she had studied the polling data on immigration, and Trump’s message was resonating strongly. It was remarkable, she told Sessions. By the following July, Conway was working for Trump’s campaign.
For Sessions, Trump had seized on a cause that was both politically powerful and desperately needed. During the next several months, the senator from Alabama would offer informal counsel and advice to Trump. Then, at a February 2016 rally in Madison, Alabama, just outside Huntsville, Sessions delivered the formal endorsement that had been long in coming, declaring that Trump was leading a movement, not a campaign. His enthusiastic public backing of Trump was a Good Housekeeping seal of approval for many hard-line activists and voters who had yet to be convinced that Trump could succeed in taking their anti-immigration agenda all the way to the White House. But even more important was something less visible that Sessions helped to deliver to Trump in the days after his endorsement: Stephen Miller.
In Miller, Sessions had found a kindred spirit who channeled his restrictionist thinking into speeches, press releases, and a seemingly endless stream of indignant emails to reporters. The Trump campaign was also a natural fit for Miller, who began informally advising the candidate on immigration issues while still working for Sessions. Steve Bannon, who built a symbiotic relationship with Miller on Capitol Hill as the young aide fed Breitbart a steady stream of anti-immigration story lines, was relentless in urging the campaign to hire Miller full-time. Once they did, Miller became Trump’s primary speechwriter and sharpened the campaign’s immigration agenda. Before long, Miller became a mini-celebrity of sorts on the Trump campaign circuit, a fixture as an opening act at the candidate’s arena rallies. Sporting sideburns and skinny ties, Miller specialized at whipping supporters into a frenzy by reciting a litany of broken promises he said had been made to them for decades on trade, jobs, and border security and exhorting them to think about all the ways in which they had been betrayed by the political establishment. He spoke in grandiose, nationalistic terms and hyperbole. Trump’s crowds lapped it up.
At an event in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, about two weeks before Election Day, Miller told a hall full of working-class voters that the steel mills had closed and their jobs and opportunities been shipped overseas not because of globalization and a modernizing economy, but “because some politician in Washington, D.C., got a little bit of graft”—he rubbed his fingers together for effect—“and decided to look the other way when they started dumping the products into your community.” That event was personal for Miller and offered a hint of the history that shaped his political ideology. His mother, Miriam Glosser, grew up in Johnstown, where Miller told the audience his “immigrant ancestors” opened a chain of grocery stores. “It broke my heart to see what happened to Johnstown when the steel mill shut down and the jobs left and the industry died and they went to foreign countries,” Miller told the crowd. Now, he said, they only had “one chance” that would “never come again” to vote for Trump and to “show the whole, entire world that Donald J. Trump is going to save this country!” Miller concluded his diatribe as he often did, by flashing a “V” for victory sign and introducing the candidate, leaving the crowd seething with excitement and rage.
For Miller, the Trump campaign was a revelation. For years, he had felt a sense of deep disappointment with Republican politicians, who in his view repeatedly betrayed their voters, especially when it came to immigration. Republican candidates would latch on to a get-tough-on-immigrants message to win an election, often airing intense television ads in the final days of the campaign. But once in office, the tough talk would evaporate, replaced by compromise with Democrats or a desire to move on to other issues. Miller called it the “apology-retreat cycle,” and it happened again and again.
“There’s a profound disenfranchisement, which also speaks to the emotional power of the issue. In many GOP primary voters—and I relate intensely with this emotion, right?—there’s a feeling of powerlessness,” Miller said during a lunch interview in the White House Mess, the basement cafeteria, near the end of Trump’s first year in office. “And so you keep feeling like you’re winning at the ballot box and then you’re losing at the policy.”
Miller recalled knowing instantly that Trump was different. The fact that Trump said what he did at his announcement speech—calling some Mexicans “rapists,” and then refusing, amid weeks of criticism, to apologize for it—sent an unmistakable message to voters, Miller believed. It was a simple way of describing Trump’s worldview, which Miller said is rooted in a belief that it is the responsibility of leaders to provide advantages to those who reside in their countries, not to those who live elsewhere. By not using the carefully poll-tested language of other politicians, Republicans and Democrats alike, to introduce himself to voters, Trump made it clear that voters who felt disenfranchised by other politicians could trust him not to waver on his anti-immigrant agenda if he made it to the White House. “The fact that he, as I say, doubled down, breaking that apology-retreat cycle, gave enormous confidence to a lot of people,” Miller recalled.
And yet Trump’s willingness to dehumanize immigrants, his obsession with building a border wall, and his lack of understanding of policy specifics alarmed some immigration hard-liners, leaving them worried that he would be an unreliable and imperfect ally for the restrictive policies they had long championed. When it came time for NumbersUSA, the organization that advocates for less immigration, to grade Trump on his immigration agenda the month after he declared his candidacy, he initially earned a C, in part because of comments Trump made suggesting he wanted more legal immigration and might be open to legal status for some undocumented immigrants—not the “bad ones,” Trump said. Shortly after releasing the mediocre grade, NumbersUSA Chief Roy Beck got a call from Sam Clovis, who had signed on as Trump’s national campaign chairman. During a meeting with Beck in the glassed-in conference room of the NumbersUSA office suite in Crystal City, Virginia, Clovis pleaded for a better rating for Trump. I’m with you guys entirely, Clovis told Beck. I want to represent you to Mr. Trump, and help educate him, and help get him around to your point of view. Bottom line, Clovis asked: “What do we need to do to get the grade up?”
Beck was frank about what he saw as Trump’s shortcomings. “Well, there’s ten categories here,” he told Clovis, gesturing toward a sheet of paper that listed his group’s criteria for evaluating presidential candidates. “And calling Mexicans rapists actually isn’t on here. You get no points for that.” If Trump wanted the group’s support, Beck said, he would have to endorse major policy changes, things like ending chain migration, a loaded term for what immigrant rights advocates call family-based immigration, the long-standing policy of allowing immigrants to sponsor members of their extended families for citizenship in the United States. To get a better grade, Trump would have to call for eliminating the diversity visa lottery that gave away visas to tens of thousands of immigrants around the world, and for requiring every employer in the country to clear potential employees through E-Verify, the federal electronic system that checked their immigration status to make sure they were legal to work in the United States. A wall wasn’t mentioned. It wasn’t even on Beck’s list of priorities.
At the same time, establishment Republicans fretted privately that Trump’s over-the-top immigration rhetoric was damaging the party. In early December of 2015, Representative Michael McCaul, the Republican chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, watched with horror as Trump called for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” in the wake of terror attacks by Muslim perpetrators in Paris and San Bernardino, California. That idea of a ban on Muslims was antithetical to everything the party and the country stood for, McCaul told colleagues. This had to stop. The next day, McCaul reached out to Rudy Giuliani, a Trump confidant who had been mayor of New York City during the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Together with Michael Mukasey, a former Republican attorney general under George W. Bush, and Andrew C. McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor who worked at National Review, McCaul drafted a two-page memo for Trump. In it, they argued that the idea of a Muslim ban was borderline unconstitutional and would not help Trump win the White House. You don’t really want a Muslim ban, they wrote. They urged him to focus on policies that would aggressively weed out known and suspected terrorists while facilitating lawful entry. They suggested that Trump use the phrase “extreme vetting” as a way of signaling how tough he would be in protecting the country. It seemed to work. In the weeks that followed, Trump dropped calls for a complete ban on Muslims. “We dodged a bullet,” McCaul said privately.
But Miller had other ideas. He couldn’t care less what establishment Republicans thought was best for the party. Miller believed that Trump’s views on immigration and the incendiary ways in which he expressed himself on the issue were an asset, not a liability. They created the kind of stark contrast with his rivals that voters craved when they were trying to make a decision about whom to support. “The most popular message to say is that you want to grow the economy,” Miller explained. “Everybody agrees with that. Well how are you going to distinguish yourself on that? How are you going to build a coalition? How are you going to mobilize a movement? How are you going to inspire people to wait in line for ten hours? To go in the cold, the sleet, the snow, the rain?” For Miller, the obvious answer was: you can’t provide that kind of motivation with a feel-good message that all politicians deliver. There was a reason, Miller thought, that Republicans had lost the previous two presidential campaigns, and were likely to do so again. Only issues where there is absolute clarity are powerful enough to win, he said. And voters needed to know that even if he took criticism for it—especially if he did—Trump would not back down, he’d dig in further. Immigration was the perfect battleground on which to prove that.
“This issue’s potency, because it affects every other issue—health care, education, tax base, economic conditions, social conditions—has the power in ways that the GOP establishment never understood to move elections,” Miller said.
Even as Muslim activists condemned Trump for his Islamophobic statements, Trump doubled down yet again. In Cedar Falls, Iowa, he seized on the lyrics of a 1968 Motown song to drive home his fearful message about the hidden dangers of refugees. To the delight of about 1,300 Republican caucus voters, Trump read from “The Snake,” made famous by Al Wilson, in which a woman takes in an injured snake and nurses him back to health, only to have the reptile kill her with a venomous bite. In Trump’s view, vulnerable-seeming refugees might seem sympathetic and in need of help, but what if they were in fact conniving, vicious snakes, preying on the benevolence of unsuspecting Americans, only to turn on their benefactors at the first opportunity? And in case there was any doubt, Trump made it clear. “I read it and I just thought it put it together,” he said. “We have no idea what we are doing. We have no idea who we are taking in, and we’d better be careful.”
On August 13, 2016, three weeks after Trump triumphantly claimed the Republican nomination in Cleveland, Bannon sat down with him. Things were in a dark place, amid news reports that the campaign was foundering and off message. Trump was down 16 points to Hillary Clinton in internal polling, and it was getting worse. You have to simplify your agenda, Bannon counseled: bring back jobs, get out of foreign wars, and cut legal and illegal immigration to get our sovereignty back. Trump had gotten wildly off track, with unfathomable plans on education, women’s empowerment, and entrepreneurship. Bannon told Trump that the only way to salvage his shot at the presidency was by returning to the themes that helped win him the nomination. Four days later, Trump named him the chief executive of the campaign.
But Trump continued to struggle. While he loved to talk tough at rallies, Trump was by nature a pleaser; he hated face-to-face confrontations and often told people what they wanted to hear, saying whatever would get him through the next five to ten minutes. During a private meeting with Hispanic evangelical leaders at Trump Tower on a Saturday afternoon, Trump said he was open to granting legal status to undocumented immigrants who had not committed crimes beyond their immigration offenses. The statement was at odds with his promise one year before to employ a large “deportation force” to quickly remove undocumented people. The following day, Kellyanne Conway went on CNN’s State of the Union and was pressed about the inconsistency. Was Trump going to stand up a deportation force or not? It was, Conway said, “to be determined.” Trump’s base was up in arms. “Are you flip-flopping?” Trump was asked on Fox News the following morning. “No, I’m not flip-flopping,” he insisted. “We want to come up with a really fair, but firm answer. It has to be very firm. But we want to come up with something fair.”
Behind the scenes, Trump’s team knew he had created a big problem for himself. The candidate was scheduled to give a major immigration speech in Colorado that Thursday, and Miller had been toiling away on it for weeks. Now Trump was facing new questions about what his policy actually was, and he was casting about for a way to back off of the idea of mass deportations without alienating his core supporters. With forty-eight hours’ notice, his staff summoned three prominent immigration hard-liners—NumbersUSA’s Roy Beck, Steven Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies, and George Borjas, the Harvard labor economist—to an emergency meeting at Trump Tower in Manhattan to strategize with the candidate on how to get him out of the box in which he had put himself.
They gathered on a Monday morning on the fifteenth floor, with Trump at the head of the table along with Beck, Camarota, Borjas, and his campaign brain trust: Bannon, Conway, Miller, and Sessions. For an hour, Trump aggressively quizzed the immigration hawks about what he could say in his speech that wouldn’t look like he had abandoned the grass roots. What would the troops be willing to tolerate? he asked. How could he square this circle? Borjas spoke first, giving a lengthy and dry, academic answer that seemed to bore Trump. “No,” the candidate said, with an emphatic shake of his head. Camarota was next. “That’s not it,” Trump responded, his frustration mounting. Then it was Beck’s turn. Trump was still not satisfied, and he was starting to act angry, snapping at his guests. He seemed to want them to say it was okay not to insist on a deportation force. Sessions intervened, imploring Trump to tone it down. “Donald, you dug this hole,” Sessions said to him, pointing out that none of them had pushed for mass deportations. “These people didn’t make you do it.” All the while, Trump barked orders at Miller, who was typing away furiously on a laptop as he made late revisions to the speech. “Stephen, you gotta write that!” Trump kept saying. But it soon became clear that the candidate was nowhere near ready to deliver the speech. We’re going to have to postpone this, Conway said, as heads nodded around the table. You can stop working on that one, Trump told Miller, gesturing at his computer. He would have to write an entirely new speech.
Sessions and Miller got to work rewriting the speech, adding specific proposals drawn from the hard-core agenda that they had pursued for years, packaged in a ten-point plan. They included Trump’s wall, but they went further. Trump would call for an end to “catch and release” policies at the border, an embrace of “zero tolerance” when it came to prosecuting illegal border crossers, the elimination of funding for so-called “sanctuary cities”—those that limited their cooperation with federal immigration authorities—and an overhaul of legal immigration that would prioritize the admission of people with certain skills rather than those whose family members were already living legally in the United States. Trump insisted on calling for an end to Obama’s “illegal executive amnesties,” now targeting the Dreamers he had met with at Trump Tower years earlier. He would keep the idea of a deportation force, but it would be a team of agents within existing immigration enforcement agencies that would focus on the most violent criminals. And Trump would reassure his base there would be “no amnesty” for undocumented immigrants.
The speech was rescheduled for the following week in Phoenix, immediately after Trump was to return from a trip to Mexico City where he would meet with Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto. On Trump’s jet on the way back, Sessions made the case that he should seize the opportunity to make it clear that he would prioritize the deportation of criminals, not the removal of undocumented immigrants who had lived in the United States for years or decades without incident. What he needed to emphasize, Sessions told Trump, was that the fate of those people would only be addressed once his restrictive and punitive policies—the rest of the ten-point plan—were in place. The conversation turned into an argument. It was too complicated, Trump complained, and it would sound like a retreat. Other politicians are for amnesty, and I’m against it, Trump told Sessions. He said he didn’t want to muddle his message. But Sessions persisted, and in the end, they reached a compromise of sorts. Trump would use his signature tough rhetoric, but he would also say that his first order of business would be to kick out criminals and secure the border against future illegal immigration, stopping short of saying he would immediately deport other undocumented immigrants. “Then and only then will we be in a position to consider the appropriate disposition of those individuals who remain,” Trump said toward the end of the speech, speaking to 7,500 people at the Phoenix Convention Center.
Some news accounts described Trump’s speech that day as a characteristic doubling down by Trump on his hard-core anti-immigration rhetoric, but others had precisely the take that he had told Sessions he feared. The Washington Post noted that Trump never clarified whether he meant to forcibly remove the nation’s 11 million undocumented immigrants, and The New York Times even used the word Trump had on the plane ride to Phoenix, saying that the candidate had “muddled” his message. Still, for Miller and Sessions, it was a triumph. They had finally gotten Trump to lay out a point-by-point plan for what he would do on immigration if he was elected. It was the roadmap they needed.
Just hours after CNN declared Trump the winner at 2:47 a.m., on November 9, 2016, Mario Diaz-Balart was on American Airlines flight 1533 for the short trip back to Washington from Miami.
A Cuban American whose aunt had been Fidel Castro’s first wife, the Republican congressman from Miami had spent more than a decade in the House working to forge consensus on immigration issues and watching two presidents fail miserably to solve the problem. George W. Bush had made a run at a deal with Ted Kennedy, the Senate’s liberal icon, that would have given millions of illegal immigrants a path to citizenship, but ran into a buzz saw of opposition from conservative talk radio hosts and hard-liners like Sessions. When Congress blocked Barack Obama’s efforts at a similar deal, he gave up on legislation and tried to use the power of his office to protect millions of immigrants from deportation, only to be stopped by the courts. Now, the nation had elected as its president a man who won the office by trashing immigrants. In their early-2013 post-election autopsy, Republican leaders had concluded the party needed to repair its image with Hispanic voters if they had any hope of winning back the presidency. Trump had not just rejected that approach; he had obliterated it.
But Diaz-Balart was an optimist by nature. As he waited at Washington’s airport to be picked up after the flight, he ran into Doug Rivlin, a top aide to one of his Democratic colleagues. Rivlin, the communications director for Luis Gutiérrez of Chicago, was also rushing back to Washington after staying up all night watching Hillary Clinton lose to Trump. He was tired and despondent, and Diaz-Balart could see it all over his face.
“No, no, no. This could work out. He’s a dealmaker,” Diaz-Balart told Rivlin. Overhauling the nation’s outdated, broken immigration system had always failed in large part because conservatives demanded harsh measures to secure the border in exchange for anything that might look like amnesty for the illegal immigrants already living here. Trump wouldn’t need to bend over backward to prove he’s tough. He comes into office with the credibility among immigration hard-liners that Bush and Obama never had, but also with the hubris of a billionaire-celebrity-mogul-turned-politician who is certain he can succeed where his predecessors had failed.
“Think Nixon going to China,” Diaz-Balart told Rivlin. “He wants to make deals that no one else can make.”