In September 2018, The New York Times published an anonymous article in its opinion section with a provocative headline: “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration.”
The Times described the author as “a senior official in the Trump administration whose identity is known to us and whose job would be jeopardized by its disclosure.”
In the article, the anonymous official, who appeared to be a high-level Republican political appointee, described a president who was erratic and unstable but who was prevented from doing serious harm to the country by his own top advisors.
“[M]any of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations,” the anonymous official wrote.
“I would know. I am one of them.”
The article set off a mad and unsuccessful frenzy to find the source of the betrayal. Two days later, the president declared he wanted Attorney General Jeff Sessions to hunt down the anonymous author of the op-ed article.
“Jeff really should be investigating who the author of that piece was because I really believe it’s national security,” the president told reporters traveling with him on Air Force One.
“Is there an action that should be taken against The New York Times for publishing it?” a reporter asked him.
“Well, we’re going to see,” he answered. “I’m looking at that now.”
Putting aside the president’s suggestion that a newspaper could be punished for publishing an editorial, one of the most striking things about it was the timing: The op-ed appeared just as whatever “resistance” there was in the Trump inner circle appeared to be gone or fading away.
The words of the op-ed sounded familiar. During that first year of the Trump presidency, I heard several of the president’s senior advisors say essentially the same thing. Looking back, I count a half dozen senior White House officials saying to me some variation of this: If you think what’s happening is out of control, you should see the things we stop from happening.
But by the fall of 2018, it was clear that Chief of Staff John Kelly’s attempt to impose order on the West Wing had failed. The president had come to resent his efforts to limit who could get into the Oval Office. And others who had been willing to challenge him were gone, including economic advisor Gary Cohn and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. White House Counsel Don McGahn, who had refused the president’s demand to have Special Counsel Robert Mueller fired, was on the way out too and would be officially gone within a month. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis was still at the Pentagon, but his ability to influence the president suffered a severe blow after the publication of Bob Woodward’s book Fear, which came out in early September. Woodward reported that Mattis had told associates the president acted like “a fifth or sixth grader” and that “secretaries of defense don’t always get to choose the president they work for.”
After Woodward’s book came out, the president’s first instinct was to go after the author, tweeting, “Isn’t it a shame that someone can write an article or book, totally make up stories and form a picture of a person that is literally the exact opposite of the fact, and get away with it without retribution or cost.” But while he was musing about getting retribution against Bob Woodward, he never again trusted Mattis.
If there had been a “resistance” inside the Trump administration as described in the New York Times op-ed, you might think it would have thwarted the “zero tolerance” policy on illegal immigration that led to one of the biggest stains on the Trump presidency: the forced separation of young children from their parents at the border.
Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen is often portrayed as the architect of the child separation policy, but she was not. The policy was put into effect with little fanfare on April 6, 2018, with a memo from Attorney General Jeff Sessions. The Sessions memo declared, “Illegally entering this country will not be rewarded, but will instead be met with the full prosecutorial powers of the Department of Justice.”
In the past, most of those who crossed the border illegally and had no criminal record would be given a summons to appear in court and released until the court date. Now the attorney general had decreed that every single person crossing the border illegally should be arrested and detained. Because of a 1997 court ruling, however, children could not be detained for more than twenty days. That meant the children had to be taken away from the adults and sent elsewhere while their adult family members were held in detention facilities as the lengthy legal process played out.
Sessions had long been a hard-liner on immigration, but this policy was driven from the very top. From his first days in office, President Trump regularly asked to see numbers on illegal border crossings. For the first year of his presidency, those numbers went down. But by the spring of 2018, border crossings were on the rise.
Two weeks after the Sessions memo, a front-page article in The New York Times detailed gut-wrenching stories of young children being taken away from their parents at the border. The article described the ordeal faced by a young woman from Honduras and her eighteen-month-old son.
On Feb. 20, a young woman named Mirian arrived at the Texas border carrying her 18-month-old son. They had fled their home in Honduras through a cloud of tear gas, she told border agents, and needed protection from the political violence there.
She had hoped she and her son would find refuge together. Instead, the agents ordered her to place her son in the back seat of a government vehicle, she said later in a sworn declaration to a federal court. They both cried as the boy was driven away.
Back at the White House, however, the president was focused on the numbers. And the number of migrants crossing the border illegally was still going up.
On May 9, the president convened a cabinet meeting to talk about the situation at the border. The meeting went off the rails quickly when the president called on Attorney General Sessions to speak.
“The problem at the border, Mr. President, is that we are not being tough enough,” Sessions said.
Nielsen and others had called for hiring more immigration judges to deal with the backlog of asylum cases. Sessions said that was not the problem.
“I think it is ridiculous to have more judges,” Sessions said. “We have to be stronger at the border and just not let them in.”
The president turned and glared at Nielsen.
“Why are we letting them in?” he demanded.
Nielsen started to explain that anybody who sets foot on US soil has a right to ask for asylum and to have that request heard in a court of law. And, obviously, border patrol agents can’t go into Mexican territory to intercept migrants before they enter the United States.
“Why can’t you just be tougher like Jeff is saying?” the president said, his voice rising. “He just said we can send them right back.”
Nielsen continued to explain the limits of what she could do under current law.
Nobody can be sent back until a judge determines whether they have a legitimate reason to seek asylum in the United States. If a judge rules they are not eligible for asylum, they can be deported. But because there are so many cases and not enough judges, it takes months for those cases to be processed.
“I’m sure the attorney general would acknowledge that anybody who touches US soil has a right to due process,” she said.
As Nielsen tried to explain the basics of immigration law, the president got more and more angry. He was now screaming at his secretary of homeland security. And she kept trying to explain.
“The problem is you are too weak!” the president thundered.
Nielsen calmly continued to explain. One solution, she said, was to get an agreement with Mexico to hold migrants from Central America while they wait for their asylum requests to be processed in the United States.
Every time Nielsen spoke, the president got angrier. Jared Kushner, who was in Nielsen’s line of sight, started shaking his head, signaling to her to stop talking. Others in the meeting did too, but she kept talking and the president kept getting angrier.
The outburst made everybody uncomfortable. The president was humiliating a cabinet official, and nobody spoke up to defend her or push back in any way.
Nielsen had seen the president angry before, but this was different. Another official at the meeting told me the president was so agitated there was legitimate concern about his health—as if he might literally have a stroke right there in the Cabinet Room.
After the cabinet meeting ended, Nielsen went to see Vice President Pence to ask him what she should do. She didn’t see how she could continue doing her job under those circumstances. If she did what the president demanded, she would be breaking the law. Pence downplayed the president’s outburst. He didn’t see any problem at all. The president is just frustrated and blowing off steam, he told her. He’ll calm down. It will be fine, he said. Just do your job.
One month later, as the horrific stories of family separations mounted, Nielsen got a call while she was flying back to Washington from an event in New Orleans. It was Press Secretary Sarah Sanders. She told her the White House wanted her to publicly address the outcry over what was happening with the children at the border.
As soon as she landed in Washington, Nielsen went to the White House. When she got there, Sanders told her they wanted her to have a press conference right away, right there in the White House briefing room. Nielsen didn’t think it was a good idea. Chief of Staff John Kelly said she shouldn’t do it because Sessions was the one behind the policy, not her. She went in to briefly see the president in the Oval Office.
“Just go out there and be tough,” he said.
The decision had already been made. And with that, Nielsen went into the White House briefing room for an utterly disastrous press conference that solidified her image as the public face, and villain, of the policy behind the separation of children from their parents at the border.
Her staff didn’t prepare her for it. Nobody in the White House press office prepared her for it. Shortly before she walked into the briefing room, ProPublica had posted a shocking video of a detention facility in McAllen, Texas, filled with children. Their faces were blurred, but on the video you could clearly hear the anguished cries of the children separated from their parents. But Nielsen had not seen the video and did not even know about it. Nobody had told her.
As the press conference got under way, my ABC News colleague Cecilia Vega asked her about the video of the children.
“Have you seen the photos of children in cages?” Vega asked. “Have you heard the audio clip of these children wailing, that just came out today?”
Nielsen’s response was clinical—and ice cold.
“I have not,” she said. “But I have been to detention centers. And again, I would reference you to our standards. I would reference you to the care provided not just by the Department of Homeland Security but by the Department of Health and Human Services.”
“But is that the image of this country that you want out there,” Vega asked, “children in cages?”
“The image that I want of this country is an immigration system that secures our borders and upholds our humanitarian ideals. Congress needs to fix it.”
The answer sent a chill through the White House briefing room; she expressed no concern for the children. The child separation policy would finally be revoked two days later—but only after the public outcry became so intense that First Lady Melania Trump weighed in against a policy that the president’s own top advisors had done nothing to rein in.
Over the course of the next several months, the president would tell Nielsen two dozen times that the zero-tolerance policy—and with it family separation—needed to be reinstated. On two occasions Melania Trump was present.
“Darling, we cannot do that,” the First Lady said.
Nielsen remained secretary of homeland security for a total of sixteen months. As secretary, Nielsen had oversight of a vast agency of more than 240,000 federal employees responsible for everything from aviation security to natural disasters to cybersecurity. Only about 20 percent of the Department of Homeland Security is focused on immigration and border security, but those issues represented nearly 100 percent of Nielsen’s conversations with the president.
On one crucial issue—protecting US elections from another hostile attack from a foreign power—Nielsen had only one substantive conversation with the president. It did not go well.
The conversation came on July 27, 2018. With mounting evidence that Russians were poised to interfere in another American election, the national security team convened a meeting about it in the situation room. As Nielsen began to speak about what her department was doing to combat a cyberattack on election systems in the United States, she reassured the president that everybody agreed that there was no evidence that the Russians or any foreign power had hacked into voter systems and changed votes.
The president interjected and told her to make sure everybody knew that nothing the Russians did in 2016 affected the results of the election. He had beaten Hillary Clinton fair and square.
As Nielsen continued to speak about the threat in the upcoming elections, the president changed the subject. Enough about election security. He wanted to talk about his border wall. The meeting ended after about twenty minutes. Only five minutes were spent talking about securing American elections against another hostile attack by a foreign power. Five minutes. Although there would be other lower-level meetings on the issue, the subject of election security never again came up in a meeting of the president and his secretary of homeland security.
There are few issues more important than protecting America’s elections from foreign interference. But Donald Trump saw any mention of the issue—even a discussion of protecting the next election—as an attempt to question the legitimacy of his victory in 2016.
If there was any doubt that President Trump did not see foreign interference as a legitimate concern, it was erased when he was interviewed by George Stephanopoulos in June 2019. Asked what he would do if a foreigner offered him information on a political opponent, he said, “I think I’d take it.” Not only would he take it, a month later he would seek it out, asking the president of Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden and setting in motion the events that could lead to his impeachment.