April 9, 2019
Sunday night, we learned that distaff Goebbels, Kirstjen Nielsen was forced to resign by Trump for the crime of being “insufficiently brutal,” (“Kirstjen Nielsen Enforced Cruelty at the Border. Her Replacement Could Be Worse,” by The Editorial Board, The New York Times, 4/8/19). Consider for a moment what it means that the person responsible for the family separation policy that ripped 3000 children from their parents and placed them in cages; the person responsible for detaining migrants in facilities so frigid that the migrants call them “hieleras,” (iceboxes); the person apparently undisturbed by the deaths of 22 immigrants in CPB custody over the past two years , was not cruel enough.
As the day unfolded, it became clear that the source of Trump’s rage was Nielsen’s apparent unwillingness to flagrantly break the law, rather than merely skirt it. Nielsen may have been a callous, gaslighting racist functionary, but her ouster was merely the first of many dominoes to fall in what is clearly a purge designed to leave a hollowed out Department of Homeland Security with only powerless Trump toadies at the helm. By Monday’s end, Trump had fired Secret Service Director Randolph Alles, in the process being sure to leak the derisive nickname he gave Alles because of his physical appearance. The leak was strategically designed to obscure the revelation that not only did Yujing Zhang attempt to bring four cellphones and a “thumb drive infected with malware” into Mar-a-lago, but that she also had nine USB drives, 5 sim cards and a device to detect hidden cameras in her room (Source: “Chinese Woman Arrested at Mar-a-Lago Had a Hidden Camera Detector, Prosecutors Say,” by Frances Robles, The New York Times, 4/8/19).
Since it would violate the law of succession for Trump to install his preferred DHS pick, Kevin McAleenan, we learned that Trump plans to simply fire Clare Grady, the woman in the line of succession at DHS. Although the press is touting McAleenan’s service during the Obama administration in an effort to paint him as a moderate, the fact is that McAleenan is the literal author of the child separation policy, which he suggested in a memo to Nielsen in April 2018. Under McAleenan, CBP agents not only separated families, but also denied entry to asylum seekers, telling them that the country was “full” or illegally forced them to wait in dangerous Mexican border towns for their asylum hearings, (Source: “New DHS Boss is the Guy Who Led Family Separations,” by Justin Glawe, The Daily Beast, 4/8/19).
These moves mark the ascendance of Stephen Miller, a loathsome, self-hating racist who is “personally responsible for the most xenophobic policies of the most xenophobic presidency in modern history.” Yet when Ilhan Omar correctly called him a “white nationalist,” she was immediately attacked as an anti-Semite by Republican Congressman, Lee Zeldin, (Source: “If You Are Defending Stephen Miller, You Are An Ally of Anti-Semitism,” by Eric Levitz, NYMag.com, 4/9/19). The political media, far from recognizing the dark implications of these developments, is still trafficking in shopworn tropes of winners and losers. Witness Chris Cilliza’s piece, “The Secret of Stephen Miller’s Success,” (CNN.com, 4/9/19). Given America’s long history of ignoring, and then erasing grievous harm done to those of its citizens who aren’t white, perhaps those pundits couching incipient genocide in sports metaphors don’t perceive themselves to be at risk. The scariest thing is, they may be right.