THE FACTION
The process of election affords a moral certainty, that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications.
—ALEXANDER HAMILTON, FEDERALIST NO. 68, 1788
THE SHIELD
Energy in the Executive is a leading character in the definition of good government. It is essential to the protection of the community against foreign attacks… the steady administration of the laws… the protection of property… [and] the security of liberty against the enterprises and assaults of ambition, of faction, and of anarchy. —ALEXANDER HAMILTON, FEDERALIST NO. 70, 1788
PART I March 28, 2019
The large wooden desk had seen thousands of moments like this, moments of decision. It had been in the Oval Office for more than a hundred years, a gift from Britain to the United States fashioned from the timbers of an abandoned naval vessel, the HMS Resolute. The desk was a national stage for presidents to pronounce formidable words, a platform for celebrating triumphs, and in certain tumultuous periods, a graveyard of bad decisions. Seated behind the iconic helm of American power, Trump weighed his options. He squinted his eyes as a bevy of advisors took turns speaking about the issue at hand. On the Resolute desk, his fingers hovered near a red button—prepared to make a fateful decision. The mood was tense as aides argued with each other. But it became clear by the look on his face that he’d made up his mind. His finger was now on the button. The president pressed it, decisively. Click. The door to an anteroom swung open almost instantly, and an attendant strode into the Oval Office, placing an ice-filled glass on the desk and popping open a Diet Coke. “Does anyone want anything?” the president asked insincerely. No one was stupid enough to answer. The waiter poured the soda into the tall glass. When it was full, the president waved him away and Trump resumed the heated conversation. It was late in the day. Donald Trump was growing impatient with the strictures of the office. His team was trying to talk him off a ledge, but he was really ready to jump this time. I sat on one of two couches in the center of the Oval Office, alongside Mick Mulvaney, the acting chief of staff; Pat Cipollone, the president’s lawyer; Kirstjen Nielsen, the embattled homeland security secretary; Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state; Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law; and, of course, Stephen Miller. The meeting had been scheduled as a quick fifteen-minute sync, but as it approached two hours, Trump meandered between grievances. At present, his ire was trained on the border and the increase in crossings of undocumented immigrants. He seethed. “I can’t believe we are doing so badly. This is not a strong response. This is not General Patton. By now, General Patton would be killing the enemy.” Trump turned to Jared. “Mexico is full of shit. They are totally full of shit. Stop groveling to them. They are swindling us, Jared.” Trump wanted to cut off all assistance to Mexico and the Northern Triangle governments because they were “busing their worst people into our country.” Jared tried to reason with him, clarifying that U.S. funds actually helped those governments manage the migrant flows and weed out criminals. Trump interrupted. “I don’t give a shit. Close the fucking border. Seriously, close it.” The conversation had been months in the making, though no one in the room seemed ready for it. Trump had mused about closing the entire border and now he seemed serious. I sat taking copious notes. I didn’t know what I was going to do with them, but as the Trump presidency devolved, “Anonymous” loitered subconsciously. My alter ego wanted me to act. “Shut it down, okay?” We were three months into the new year, which had already started off badly in January. The government shutdown dragged from the holidays well into 2019, throwing the Trump administration deeper into turmoil. Everything was on hold. Whether it was DHS operations, Trump’s plans to gut his own administration, or—to my frustration—unfulfilled discussions about exit planning, nothing moved forward. Kirstjen had heeded Defense Secretary Mattis’s parting recommendation, much to my chagrin. She remained in office to provide a voice of reason in the cabinet, seeing herself as one of the few who could end the shutdown and reopen the government. Meanwhile, I was supposed to leave for my wedding in Latin America in January. With everything falling apart, I felt stuck. Anabel had already dealt with a dozen canceled vacations, lost weekends, and my near-total absence, seven days a week. But I was now officially the chief of staff of a massive department with hundreds of thousands of employees, who wouldn’t be able to pay their bills if we didn’t get Trump to cut a deal with Congress, fast. In any other administration, someone would have covered for me. In this one, the bench was thin. I was forced to shorten my absence and punt the honeymoon down the road to an undetermined date. As if that wasn’t enough, someone broke into our home before we left. The intruder picked the locks of two doorways into the Capitol Hill row house, including an iron grate and a thick wooden front door that I found ajar. In the process, the individual somehow disabled the alarm system and the video doorbell, both of which went dark during the incident—blacked out for about five minutes. Even stranger, the inside of the house was undisturbed. Not a single possession was moved, broken, or stolen. I contacted the police, but I didn’t think this was any ordinary burglar. Neither did DHS. The department dispatched security personnel to do a sweep of my house, particularly because of the sensitive communications equipment installed in my residence. My own reasons for alarm were different. After the unsigned essay was released, I suspected that a foreign intelligence service might try to unmask Anonymous.
The fastest way for world leaders to ingratiate themselves with Donald Trump was to flatter him, or attack his enemies. How better to curry the president’s favor than to hunt down and expose the dissenter in his midst? Luckily, nothing in my house tied me to the op-ed. There was no paper trail anywhere, save for a single signed document affirming my authorship, which the Times kept in a locked safe at their headquarters. Still, I felt uneasy about home security. We upgraded our alarm system, replaced the deadbolt with a keypad lock, and added more video cameras which ran on batteries even if the power was cut off. I knew also that I needed to share the truth with Anabel. She didn’t know I was the author of the piece. But after the intruder broke in, I felt like I couldn’t keep the information from her any longer. Anabel reacted the way I’d expected. While she was no fan of Trump, she knew that vocally opposing him as a nameless internal objector was risky and guaranteed to result in retribution if I revealed myself. I had bought a gun in the aftermath of the decision to blow the whistle. When I casually asked a military buddy, he advised me to purchase a Sig Sauer P365, the perfect concealed weapon. That’s what I did. The thin, lightweight pistol held ten rounds and boasted a tritium night sight that allowed it to be aimed with deadly accuracy even in the dark. I needed a refresher on how to shoot. An off-duty Secret Service agent (I’ll call him Mitch) took me to an outdoor range on a chilly winter afternoon to practice. I’d gone shooting a few times growing up in Indiana, but it had been years since I fired a weapon. You couldn’t easily get approval to keep a gun in Washington, D.C. Buying the wrong box of ammunition was proof of my inexperience. “These are full metal jackets,” Mitch explained. The agent emptied my new box of ammo, pointing to the smooth tips. “Round nose. You can use these for practice, but if you really want to stop a bad guy, you want these.” He placed one of his cartridges on the counter. The tip of the projectile was a tiny crater, not a smooth edge. “These are hollow-point rounds. For home defense.” Mitch did a demonstration. Twenty or so feet down the firing lane, a paper target was suspended from the track. A 1950s-era bad guy stared back at us in a blazer, pointing a pistol in our direction. We were about to obliterate him. First, Mitch retrieved a gallon of water from his trunk. He tied it up so that it hung in front of the target. I was confused. He loaded his pistol with my round-nose ammo and pointed it downrange. He fired. Two small streams of water poured from opposite ends of the jug. “See? Straight through. Entry wound, exit wound.” Then Mitch reloaded, this time with his ammo. He shoved the magazine back into the pistol and racked a round. He fired again. The jug exploded. All that remained was a mangled piece of plastic, dangling on a string of yarn, and behind it the fifties goon was drenched. “That’s hollow-point. If you want to stop somebody in their tracks, this is your buddy.” Mitch explained that the bullet would mushroom inside a target, rather than pass straight through. He warned that if I fired one of the round-nose bullets at a burglar, it might keep going into another room or a nearby house and hit an innocent person. “Got it,” I told him. The gun weighed a pound-and-a-half and felt good in my hand. My aim was poor at first. Bullet holes dotted the paper target randomly, without any clear pattern. By the end of the afternoon my groupings were tight and on target. We practiced until the tips of my fingers burned with cold. Afterward, we went to a brewery to warm up. On the way home from my truncated January wedding in Latin America, I hoped to find normalcy back at the office. Little had changed while I was away. The government remained shuttered, and the situation at DHS was dire.
We held emergency meetings at the White House. The secretary and I used the looming deadline of missed paychecks to force Trump’s hand, raising the visual specter of DHS families standing in food lines—something the president knew would be deeply harmful to his re-election. He finally blinked. Congress passed a budget without the billions in border funds Trump had demanded. The president had nothing to show for the debacle except for thirty-five days of political wreckage and an exhausted federal workforce. Up to that point, I thought I’d seen the nation’s chief executive unglued. But after he lost the showdown with Congress, his remaining reservations (if any) were gone. In the three months that followed, China could have launched a nuclear strike on the United States, and Trump wouldn’t have cared. Everything was about the southern border. The best way to describe the mayhem of that period is merely to recount Trump’s words and actions, which proved—once and for all—that quitting the administration was the only appropriate option. On a January flight down South, the president demanded that we involve him in negotiations with contractors over the border wall. “Two things matter to me,” he said, leaning back in the chair in his Air Force One office. “Price and beauty. I want it to be cheap, and I want it to be fucking beautiful.” It was legally problematic for a president to engage directly in bidding wars with federal contractors. His involvement could ruin the entire selection process. I explained this to Trump, who ignored me, waving his hand for silence so he could unmute a Fox News segment about himself. He smiled back at his own smiling face on the television. A week or so later, the president called the secretary with a different order. He wanted to “bus and dump” all illegal aliens picked up at the border into Democratic cities. He wanted to punish those localities for protecting undocumented immigrants by trying to stir up mayhem. Trump later told us he wanted to send the worst ones—the “murderers, rapists, and criminals”—into the cities to create even more instability. I consulted our lawyers, who reached the obvious conclusion that this would probably be illegal for any number of reasons. I put several of Trump’s aides on an email and told them our position. None of them responded. The next week, Trump called again to submit more instructions about the design of the border wall (which had long since been designed). In a rambling conversation, he told us to paint the wall “matte black”—he didn’t want it shiny—and complained that the contractors building it were “filthy fucking rich, having lunch with each other every week and deciding how they are going to divvy it all up.” I wasn’t sure what he was talking about. We muted him for most of the rant. Painting and repainting the border wall was the conversational equivalent of Trump’s pre-naptime coloring book. We would let him go and go, until he wore himself out. On February 19, Kirstjen and I met with the president about a diplomatic issue. During the meeting, he asked yet again about the U.S. aid money being sent to countries in Latin America’s Northern Triangle and instructed that the funds be shut off until those nations started arresting more migrants. Once more, we told him it was unlawful to cancel funds that Congress had already appropriated to be spent. He couldn’t veto something that was already signed into law. Trump pretended not to hear the explanation by changing the subject, venting about a comment Lindsey Graham had made on cable news. Two weeks later, we were summoned by the president to the White House to talk about—what else?—immigration. This time he was mad that DOJ lawyers had resisted his ideas for how to take control of the situation. “Jeff Sessions is the dumbest human being ever created by God,” Trump spat, deriding his former attorney general, whom he blamed in part for the situation. The president insisted that we use his “magical authorities” to keep more people out of the United States, a reference Trump sometimes made to a loose assortment of emergency presidential powers and special immigration authorities that can only be invoked in extreme circumstances, such as a global health crisis or an armed foreign invasion. “Mr. President,” Kirstjen explained patiently, “you’ll get enjoined by the courts if you do that.” “What the fuck happened to the good old days when someone arrived at our borders, and we told them to just get the hell out?” Trump protested, harking back to an era I wasn’t familiar with. “The Northern Triangle countries are sending us the worst. They stick their shittiest people in the flows and send them up. These are robbers and rapists, okay?” (I made a mental note. He really did bring up “rape” and “rapists” a lot.) For the umpteenth time, I chimed in to remind him we didn’t have much flexibility beyond working with Congress to close legal loopholes and undertake immigration reform. Trump chafed at the suggestion. He wanted to act unilaterally. On March 7, we were back in the Oval Office because Trump wanted to continue the conversation on the border wall. This time, the president told us he had received a letter from Senator Kevin Cramer of North Dakota about a company that could build the wall cheaper than anyone else. The firm proposed constructing it with concrete. Trump had called for a concrete wall during the presidential campaign, but he’d begrudgingly changed his mind when border agents said the material was unsuitable. “I don’t care anymore,” Trump said. “Let’s do concrete.” A Pentagon official in the room from the Army Corps of Engineers reminded the president that the wall design had been finalized a long time ago. The structure was already being built so that law enforcement agents could have visibility to the other side. “I don’t care. Tell them to put cameras on top or drill holes to see through it. I like concrete. Politically, concrete is better for me.” Out of nowhere, Trump complained that ranchers in Texas were being allowed to open doors in the wall to allow their cattle to reach the Rio Grande River. “No doors. I don’t want doors,” he said. “How crazy is this? There are doors in the border wall? It’s stupid. They can just walk up, open the door, and thousands of [illegals] rush in.” Kirstjen told him that wasn’t exactly true. Border Patrol monitored the gates. And there were very few of them. The president didn’t care and said that in order to end the practice for good DHS needed to acquire any land where ranchers had access to the Rio Grande. “Just buy the land. I know more about land than any other human on Earth. Let’s do it, okay? Give the ranchers ladders. They can use ladders to get to the other side, but not doors. You could use small fire trucks. Call the local fire stations, and use the ladders on their trucks to help them get over.” Hold on, I thought. We’re going to tell Texas ranchers not to use the gates, borrow fire trucks instead, lean the ladders against the border wall, walk their cattle up the ladders (and over the other side, somehow?), let the animals drink from the river for a little bit, and then hoist them back over? It was so incandescently stupid I couldn’t laugh. “You know why we need this?” Trump continued, pointing to a photo of the border wall on his desk. “Mexico is a hellhole. Have I said that yet? Because it is. It’s a hellhole, and no one fucking wants that place. Forty thousand murders. Can you believe it? Sheesh.” No one said anything. On the way out, Trump asked me if he should use the word “apprehended” or “captured” when talking about migrants arrested at the border. “Well, apprehended is the appropriate legal and operational term—” I explained before he cut me off. “Eh, come oooon. No one knows what that means. I want to say ‘captured’ because it sounds tougher. What do you think?” He polled others. Vice President Pence, who had stood there quietly for the meeting, spoke up to agree with the president. The secretary sided with me. “We’ll see,” Trump retorted. “I like ‘capture.’ I think we should start using that.” On Saturday, during the president’s weekend tweet storm, he posted: “Border Patrol and Law Enforcement has apprehended (captured) large numbers of illegal immigrants at the Border. They won’t be coming into the U.S. The Wall is being built and will greatly help us in the future, and now!” The afternoon of March 15, we returned for another immigration meeting. The Oval Office lights were off. “Oooh.” The president smiled as he entered. “Dark in here. Kind of sexy.” As he settled into his chair behind the desk, Trump told us he wanted to get creative with immigration policy. In particular, he wanted us to revisit the travel ban. He was still fuming that we’d convinced him to pare it back, and thought the latest iteration was “too watered down.” “We just need more countries,” Trump insisted. “We need to ban more countries, okay?” There was a process, I told him. The Supreme Court had only upheld the limited travel restrictions because they were designed by career officials after an impartial review based on intelligence community threat assessments, not politics. We needed to defer to the experts. Stephen Miller corrected me, noting that the president had the ultimate say and could overrule his agencies. Trump preferred Miller’s analysis. “Imagine the headlines!” the president mused. “ ‘Trump’s Newest Travel Ban’—it will be beautiful.” He told us to come up with a bigger list of countries. I dutifully documented the order in my notebook, along with a doodle of a man (me) jumping off of a three-dimensional box. The president went back to his greatest hits—“a big, big border wall!” “cut off the cash!” “screw the Mexicans!”—and we sat there listening to the diatribe that had begun to sound like a Broadway sing-a-long from hell. We left without any clear direction about what was happening next. Two days later, on March 19, he did the song and dance for us again. The Oval Office meeting was supposed to be about combating opioid addiction, but we didn’t spend more than a few minutes talking about the millions of Americans suffering from the drug epidemic. Why would we do that, when we could use the valuable time to talk about immigration again? Trump steered the briefing to his favorite subject. He ran through his list of cruelly imaginative immigration policies once more. This time there was a tangent to the already tangential conversation, as he paused to pay homage to the MyPillow CEO. “This guy, you’ve seen him? He’s unbelievable! The pillow guy. He buys all the airtime, it’s so brilliant. He’s also a Trump supporter, you know.” The pattern continued until the end of the month. Meetings. Phone calls. Late-night tweets. More meetings. Trump’s border obsession was consuming him—and as a consequence—consuming us. The month concluded with a volcanic tirade in the Oval Office on March 28, 2019, which brought the situation to a head. The president went from steaming hot to full eruption over the crisis at the southern border. DHS was standing in his way, he said, and he was sick of it. Why was the department stonewalling all of his requests? The president told us to reinstitute his family separation policy. Trump was angry that we’d persuaded him the year before to shut down DOJ’s disastrous zero-tolerance program. Disaster is what he wanted. “Now we just get these women coming in with seven children saying, ‘Oh, my husband he left me.’ ” The president had briefly switched into a high-pitched Mexican accent. “They are useless. They don’t do anything for our country. At least if they came in with a husband we could put him in the fields to pick corn or something.” If we didn’t do something fast, he’d look politically weak. Immigration was his signature issue, he said. “Close the border, and they’ll kiss our asses!” Trump barked at Kirstjen, who remained silent. “These countries are horrible,” he fussed, referring to Latin American nations. “They are—I’ve used a term before, you know the term.” He was alluding to his controversial “shithole countries” comment without saying it, although he’d used “hellhole” days prior. Trump complained that the troops he’d sent to the border were ineffective. They needed to use deadly force. “But we can’t do that,” he said ruefully as an afterthought, recalling that the Pentagon had told him to stop talking about “shooting migrants.” Trump scanned the room and stopped at me. “What the fuck are you doing?” he asked. “Excuse me, sir?” I replied. “You’re taking notes! I don’t want any fucking notes. Stop taking notes.” I slowly closed my legal pad and sat there, hands folded on top. Trump’s admonishment was two years too late. I had paper notes and mental notes he couldn’t touch. I just didn’t know what to do with them yet.
He moved on to poll numbers. “I’m at 55 percent, this is crazy.” He was corrected by a communications staffer who joined the meeting late. Rasmussen said 49 percent today, she updated him. No, no, he assured her, the real numbers are higher. Then he was back on the border. “Man, we are fucking this up, you guys,” he fumed. He said his friend Kim Jong Un knew how to do it better at the Korean DMZ. “Have you seen his border? Guns. Tanks. Barbed wire. Land mines. Am I right? Hard-ass. Look at North Korea—that is border security.” Trump turned again to Kirstjen and Mike Pompeo, who were seated opposite each other in armchairs in front of the desk. “Close the border, I mean it. Do it immediately.” Kirstjen was deflated. “Mr. President, we’ve been over this. Closing the whole border is impractical and possibly illegal.” “Fine, do one port,” he shot back. “Let’s just close one land crossing. It’s really bad in Texas. Do El Paso and tell them we are closing it in twenty-four hours.” The communications aide interjected. For political purposes, it would be better to seal a crossing into California. Texas loved Trump, and the Democrats in California hated him. The president thought it was a great idea. “You’re right. I don’t want to hurt Texas.” Meanwhile, a staffer entered to let the president know his helicopter was waiting. Trump was slated to speak to a rally in Michigan. I turned to Mick Mulvaney and Jared Kushner on the couch, as the room was overtaken by pockets of conversation. “We can’t do this for partisan reasons,” I said. “We’ll get killed for it.” Jared agreed. Despite his flaws, the young real estate scion was one of the few reliable checks on his father-in-law, when no one else could be. “Mr. President,” Jared jumped in, “closing a port will not stop the migrant flows. They can just go around the port. It won’t stop the actual flows. It will just hurt U.S. businesses and tourism.” “Jared, I don’t care. That’s not the point! The point is it will make Mexico hurt. It will make California hurt. Kirstjen, announce it. Tomorrow at noon.” After that, he said, the plan could be scaled to the entire southern border. Pompeo and others nodded in agreement. Kirstjen knew it was pointless to protest, though Trump seemed to anticipate an objection. “That’s it! No more excuses. Shut it down, okay? You heard me, noon tomorrow.” With that, a red-faced Trump stood up and walked out the door to the Rose Garden, stalking off in a huff to Marine One. Neither Kirstjen nor I said anything on the way out of the West Wing. We were slated to fly to Europe in a few days to meet with allies about cyber threats. Given the president’s blowup, I feared Kirstjen would scrap the entire trip and prove my point: that Trump’s insatiable border fetish was preventing us from doing our day jobs.
As we exited the side door to the West Wing, dark purple clouds were pressed against a pink sky. Rush-hour traffic hummed in the distance beyond the compound walls. “Madam Secretary,” I implored her, “we’re losing here.” “I know,” she replied, getting into the waiting SUV. “Let’s talk this weekend.” An agent closed the door, and she was whisked through the White House gates and out of view. The situation was enough to drive anyone to drink. It certainly did that to me. I went out for a cocktail near the White House and ended up having a lot of them, which was becoming the norm. I browned out at the bar, so a colleague drove me home. I stumbled upstairs to put myself to bed in the guest room, where I was staying frequently. I didn’t want to disturb a sleeping Anabel down the hallway. In the morning, I would quietly slip out for work before sunrise—and do it all again. “April Fools” The firm knock at the door wasn’t housekeeping. I opened it, coming face-to-face with one of the secretary’s military aides, Nick. “Chief, I’m sorry to bother you. The president was trying to get in touch with the secretary last night. I thought you should know.”
It was April 1, 8 a.m. in London and 2 a.m. in Washington. “Did you tell the switchboard we’re overseas?” I asked. “Yessir. I told them she was asleep and that we’d have the secretary call back when it was morning, D.C. time.” In the lobby, I updated Kirstjen. She was as anxious as I was to hear that Trump had called overnight. We piled into our car, flanked by British police officers on motorcycles. The armored convoy snaked through the streets of London toward the U.S. Embassy, lights and sirens clearing the way. The secretary’s decision to go forward with the trip had been a small act of defiance—a signal that DHS had other work to do besides monitoring the border—but the decision was about to be tested. By leaving the country, we were calling Trump’s bluff about sealing the border. To go forward, he needed us. And he knew it. After a morning of preparatory meetings before visits to the Home Office and UK Parliament, we broke for lunch, dining at a chic restaurant nearby. The military aide’s phone rang just as we ordered our entrees. POTUS was awake and wanted to talk. Secret Service agents cleared a quiet area in the basement of the restaurant for us to take the call. “Good morning, Mr. President,” Kirstjen said, forcing a cheerful tone. “What the fuck are you doing in Europe?” Trump demanded, his voice audible from her ear. “The border is fucking melting down, and you’re on vacation?” “Sir, it’s not a vacation. There’s serious—” “No, Kirstjen. This is your job. Get the fuck back here right now. I want to see you on TV at the fucking border, do you understand?” The secretary tried to calm him, but Trump wasn’t having it. He reiterated the demand—“get your ass to the border”—and abruptly ended the call. I broke the silence. “Let him fire us. Seriously. This is more important.” “He seems like he’s going to do something erratic,” she responded. “So what?” I made my most forceful case yet. Whether or not we tried to prevent another crisis, Trump was well beyond being contained. The best move we had was to sacrifice ourselves. If we tempted him to fire us for doing our jobs, we could call more attention to the president’s perilous mismanagement of the government. Kirstjen and I were at loggerheads, but I knew I’d lost the dispute before the secretary made up her mind. “Let’s call the vice president,” she said, “and we’ll see what he thinks.” If it was about Donald Trump, Mike Pence wouldn’t present a contrary point of view or alternatives. When we called him, his advice was unsurprising. If the president wanted us to come home, the vice president said, we should come home. It was “April Fools Day,” and fittingly the White House was making a mockery of us. Through inch-thick glass, I watched orange dust clouds envelope our line of Chevy Suburbans. The motorcade roared through the desert as if it were fleeing an attack. In a sense, it was speeding toward one. The president was flying to the border to meet us. Donald Trump wanted to ensure that his Homeland Security team knew that we served at his pleasure, and apparently it wasn’t enough to make us do an embarrassing about-face and return from Europe. He wanted to send the message personally. The White House had leaked the humiliating news. I saw a Fox News Alert on the television behind the secretary’s head on the plane ride back. “BACK TO THE BORDER,” the headline read. And below it: “HOMELAND SECURITY SECRETARY CUTS SHORT TRIP TO EUROPE.” While we were enroute back across the Atlantic, I got a frantic text message from a senior official at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico. The envoy had seen Trump’s public threat to seal the border, and our team in Mexico City was caught off guard. It was the first they’d heard of it. We hadn’t briefed the U.S. diplomats because we intended to bury Trump’s stupid idea before it came to fruition. Clearly we were failing. The embassy warned that the move would severely rupture relations with our southern neighbor, as Trump’s self-imposed deadline loomed. Anabel was surprised to see me come home. I warned her it wouldn’t be for long, as I barely had time to switch clothes and shower before leaving the house again. Coast Guard One was refueled and ready to hit the skies within hours. I returned to Reagan National Airport, this time bound for the American Southwest on what felt like a suicide mission. Kirstjen organized a phone call of the whole cabinet to seek help from other agencies. The appeal was little more than a performance because none of them could fix the underlying problem—the president. I was beyond ready to quit, but for anyone to pay attention, the secretary herself needed to resign. This trip needed to be the final one. On the ground in Arizona, I asked the Secret Service to floor it. We needed time to get organized before the president arrived. Our next stop was Yuma, where we would hold meetings and calls before driving an hour away over the state line to join the president in Calexico, California. The last thing we needed was an unsupervised Trump wandering the facilities, giving errant directives to DHS agents. We were going fast. The armored SUV creaked and moaned painfully as the motorcade tore across the uneven dirt road. Outside the only sign of life was a multitude of camouflage-green saguaros standing motionless on the desert floor. The cacti were like soldiers who’ve just realized the war is lost, their spindly arms surrendering to the sun. I considered them through the window. Up front, the dust-crusted windshield was getting harder to see through, so our driver turned on the wipers. Just then, we struck a sizable rut, launching us from our seats. Neither Kirstjen nor I had seat belts on and—for a moment—she seemed to float in midair. She was small enough that her head only grazed the ceiling before coming back down. I was thrust into the roof of the vehicle and thrown to the floor, as the car came to a halt. The detail leader whipped around from the front seat. “Is everyone all right?” “Yes, but can we slow the hell down?” Kirstjen responded, visibly annoyed. She turned to me. “Are you okay?” “Yeah, yeah, I’m fine,” I offered, pulling myself back into the bucket seat and scooping up papers that had flown from my briefing book. The car started rolling again. I buckled my seat belt and knew immediately that I had a concussion—nauseous, disoriented, dizzy. We reached a border patrol facility and were escorted to a conference room that had been converted into a miniature command post for us. No one was there yet, and silence was a welcome sound. I excused myself to the restroom and vomited, crouching on the floor in a daze. I don’t know how long I was kneeling there when one of the agents, Mike McCool, entered. “Hey, the secretary needs you. The president is on the line,” Mike said, noticing I was doubled over. “You all right?” I steadied myself and nodded. I brushed past the man with a football player’s frame, whom I should have asked for help, and hobbled back to the conference room. The scene was no longer tranquil. A familiar voice—like an indignant drunk with a working-class Queens accent—filled the room on speakerphone. Despite the pounding headache, I reflexively grabbed a pen and paper and sat down. “Kirstjen, did you watch Lou Dobbs the other night, like I asked you?” Trump quizzed her. “Yes, Mr. President. I told you I did.”
“Well then why the hell aren’t we doing what Kris Kobach said?” He was referring to the controversial GOP Kansas secretary of state, whose anti-immigrant views were often touted during the program. We had heard credible rumors that Trump was considering replacing Kirstjen with Kobach. “He’s got ideas for securing the border.” “Most of what he said is out of our lane—like taxing the money people send back to their home countries, the remittances,” Kirstjen told him. Trump wanted to find a way to keep migrants from sending money back to relatives abroad. The move would be a way to punish them and their families and discourage others from coming to the United States to work. We didn’t think it was possible, and it might not be lawful. “Those goddamn remittances. Every time I ask [Steve] Mnuchin about this, he’s got another excuse. ‘We can’t do this, we can’t do that.’ What good is he? I thought we had the right guy at Treasury. But now I don’t know. Maybe not so much. What do you think—personnel mistake?” The question was actually a veiled threat, as if we were personnel mistakes, too. He shifted gears to illegal border crossings. “The numbers are too high, Kirstjen. They are too high. You’re not doing your job.” “Mr. President I am doing everything possible. We have tried every option, but it’s the law—” “I don’t want excuses. That’s what you always give me. Just do it, okay? How many times have I told you to stop them?” “Sir, with respect, I’ve said it a million times, and so have you. It’s the laws. I cannot legally stop them. The laws prevent me from detaining and removing people who claim asylum.” “What do you need?” “I need Congress to fix loopholes in the law that are exploited by the traffickers. It’s the same loopholes we’ve been talking about for years.” Nielsen listed off the ways the immigration system was broken, but she was cut off again. “Why are we still talking about it? Why haven’t you given Congress the bill, Kirstjen?” “We’ve written text to reform the immigration system, Mr. President. But it’s been stuck in your White House. No one seems to think this is an emergency.” He exploded at the comment. There was chatter in the background, and we realized other people were in the room with Trump. He was clearly in the Oval Office and, thankfully, not yet in the skies headed our direction. “Goddamnit! Stephen, tell them to get that bill done today. Send the fucking bill to Congress today, you understand? It needs to fix the loopholes. And we need to get rid of asylum. Just get rid of it. We are full, and no one should be able to claim asylum.” The background cross-chat around Trump grew louder. The secretary rolled her eyes. Getting “rid” of asylum—which allowed people to seek humanitarian protection in the United States—was not part of the draft bill, nor was what Trump said next. “And it needs to get rid of the fucking immigration judges. There should not be any judges at all. These guys are unionized, when the fuck did that happen?” “Many years ago, sir,” Kirstjen said. “All right, well just do it. Get the bill sent. I just need you to do your job.” “Mr. President, I’m doing everything within my power—everything—to respond to this emergency. I’ve sent requests over and over to the White House for help, and I don’t get anything. You need to order other departments to assist.” “Oh, so now it’s on me? You’re saying it’s on me, Kirstjen, the President of the United States?” “Sir, I have asked your staff for more space to hold migrants, a supplemental appropriation to Congress to build bigger and more humane facilities, legislation to fix the loopholes, a single person to be in charge at the White House—” “Space? Kirstjen I told you to tell DOD to build some goddamn tents!” “Sir, I am not the Defense Department. I cannot order them what to do. You are the commander in chief.” “So now it’s my fault? I have 100—130—140 fucking things I’m supposed to do. I’ve got North Korea. China. You should just do your job!” “What do you want me to do that I am not already doing? Tell me, Mr. President. Tell me what I am legally allowed to do that I’m not doing.” “Keep them out. That’s your job.” “Sir, I just, I just don’t know what you want. You have said it yourself so many times that our hands are tied because of the loopholes and the court decisions. I can’t just keep everyone out. I can’t break the law.” “Why are you telling me all this shit now?” “I have been telling you for months what problems we have. Months. And your staff every single day. Stephen, have you told DOD what we need? Have you made these asks on behalf of the president?” Trump started yelling at the people seated around him. “Sir,” the secretary interjected. “SIR! I even had to call your cabinet together myself this week because the White House is so disorganized—” Trump hung up. “Fuck!” Kirstjen threw her cell phone, which hit the floor and slid to a halt across the room. We sat for a long time, saying nothing. I avoided eye contact and answered emails. This wasn’t the time to say, I told you so. I hoped it was glaringly obvious that this man couldn’t be fixed. He couldn’t be managed. He certainly couldn’t be convinced to do the right thing. The time spent trying to put bad ideas back into the box was over. Whether she was thinking the same or not, I didn’t know. “Okay, let’s go,” she sighed and walked across the room to pick up her phone. There was a small silver lining to the day. Trump concluded that a diplomatic crisis was risky for him, politically. So, without telling Kirstjen, he decided to back down off the threat to close the U.S.-Mexico border. An aide handed me a copy of USA Today on the way to meet Air Force One. A modestly reassuring headline on the front page—“TRUMP TO KEEP BORDER OPEN”—was tempered by my knowledge of the man. The president surely had another heedless idea up his sleeve. When Trump landed on April 5, our cars merged with his motorcade en route to a public event with border patrol agents. The room was packed with reporters, sweltering under the hot glare of TV lights. They weren’t interested in the scripted roundtable discussion. Everyone was waiting to see what would happen with Trump’s on-again, off-again border threat. Would he seal the roads? Would he halt cross-border trade and travel?
A rush of anxiety hit me in the crowded room. My hands got sweaty, and I felt the now-familiar darkening in my peripheral vision. I sought refuge backstage. Moving past Secret Service agents, I got to the green-room area. The president was mingling with the border agents. And Kirstjen was looking on from a distance, warily. “We are full,” Trump told a border official. “Tell the judges we are completely full—‘the bins are full’—and we can’t let anyone else in.” Oh no. He was back on it. The president was pressuring agents to seal the border. “Just say, ‘Sorry, Judge, I can’t do it. We don’t have the room.’ ” He was telling them to ignore federal judges and deport people anyway, even if they had a right to be in the United States. I strained to hear what the agents were saying to the president. A Customs and Border Protection leader tried explaining to him why that would be unlawful. “Seriously, keep them all out,” Trump countered. “Don’t let anymore in. If you go to jail for it, I’ll pardon you.” The president left the holding area and went onstage. I was bewildered. Had I heard that right? Trump offered a presidential pardon in exchange for an illegal act. When the roundtable was done, I went straight to the CBP official to confirm the president’s wording. I also wanted to make sure that no agents were planning to follow the order. Yes, the man recounted, that’s what Trump said. The two of us met the secretary back in the motorcade. “Wait, are you serious? What the actual fuck,” she muttered. “What exactly did he say?” The CBP chief recounted the episode. “We need to document this,” I responded, composing an email to the department’s lawyers with a real-time summary and a question. Did the president just break the law? The secretary got a notification from one of her Secret Service agents. She was being summoned to Stagecoach, the nickname for the president’s limousine. Kirstjen disappeared for a few minutes and then returned to the car. She said nothing when she got back in, and we started moving to the next location. I got a text from her in the seat in front of me—something she didn’t want to say out loud. “This is far and away the most abusive relationship I’ve ever had or ever will have,” she wrote. Trump had excoriated her in his limo once more for not shutting down the border, making no reference to the fact that he’d decided to stand down on the threat himself. It felt like the film Groundhog Day, where Bill Murray keeps reliving the same events over, and over, and over. But Trump wasn’t fooling us with his unpredictable mood swings and flip-flopping. We were the idiots for enduring it. I paid little attention at the final stop. Standing in front of his border wall, Trump backslapped law enforcement officers. He posed for photos and did a self-congratulatory interview with Fox News to tout the wall, during which he declared that “the country is full,” presumably laying the predicate for his border agents to lie to federal judges about being unable to process any more immigrants. My head was elsewhere. I stood on the sidelines and drafted two resignation letters on my cell phone, making sure no one was peering over my shoulder. One was for me and the other was for Kirstjen, though she hadn’t officially asked for it. In my mind, Trump had given us a gift—a reason to resign and shine a light inside his haunted house of a presidency. This was all about to end. The ride back to the airport had the feeling of finality. For months, we’d watched Trump cross our supposed redlines. If a pardon offer to break the law wasn’t enough to justify quitting, then we deserved the label assigned to Trump officials who stayed too long: enablers. A day after the border trip, Kirstjen went to the White House. She told Trump she was unable to do what he wanted. She couldn’t violate federal statutes to repel what he termed an “invasion” at the southern border. There was no permanent fix if the president didn’t want to pursue immigration reform through Congress. He fired her on the spot. The news leaked before she even left the White House. And not long after, another story rocked Washington. Media outlets revealed that the president had proposed a pardons-for-lawbreaking scheme to his DHS lieutenants. A vengeful Trump denied it and launched a wider purge, ridding DHS of officials who were seen as insufficiently MAGA.
The White House removed the acting deputy secretary, the heads of multiple immigration agencies, the director of the Secret Service, and eventually the DHS general counsel, who had provided the legal basis for resisting most of the president’s outlandish ideas. The alliance of officials who had come in to run DHS was broken. John Kelly was gone. Kirstjen Nielsen had been fired. Chris Krebs and Elizabeth Neumann had burrowed into the bureaucracy, where they hoped to protect important operations from Trump’s whims. Gene Hamilton had decided to join the Justice Department and lean into the MAGA agenda. And Chad Wolf remained on the DHS leadership team. At the time, I didn’t understand why. I remained for a few weeks to provide the thinnest sinew of an orderly transition. Members of Congress panicked that DHS was falling apart and that Trump’s firings had decapitated the nation’s domestic security apparatus. But there was no sense in putting back together what the president wanted to break. I submitted my resignation letter to the temporary DHS secretary, Kevin McAleenan, a border official who Trump hoped would be a hard-liner. “Mr. Secretary,” I wrote, “the American people are depending on you to do what is right.” The entreaty was meaningless. Right and wrong were lost in the fog of war that was the Trump administration. Morality is an extravagance for people huddled in trenches, bracing for the next attack. Survival is the only necessity. I felt clarity return on that April border trip. Maybe it was from the shock of what I’d witnessed—or just the throbbing concussion headache that was like a siren in my mind. But as Air Force One took off in the glinting sunlight, I knew what I had to do. One way or another, I would help burn Donald Trump’s presidency to the fucking ground.
EPILOGUE November 1, 2022 We drove fast out of Washington, but not in a hurry. As we entered Virginia, the light ignited the countryside. It was the week—or maybe the final day—before the trees would begin shedding until they became skeletons. The last time I’d seen an autumn afternoon like this, my life was different. I was alone and looking over my shoulder and had just been assigned a bodyguard. Now a passenger with flowing red hair sat next to me as we drove home. We appreciated the scenery, knowing we might not see it again for a while. A drifting melody called “Harmonia’s Dream” played on repeat, and she said I was running it into the ground. Back home, I got a message from my younger brother. He was in Mexico City with friends for el DÃa de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead. The holiday was a celebration of the departed, and Patrick sent photos of his cohort in a rainbow of spectral costumes, their faces painted as bone. It gave me an idea for how to mark the evening, so I made a trip to the corner store to pick up firewood. At dark I scouted the map for an open field. I found a place that looked like it might give us almost as much open air as land, and I packed the car with supplies. I convinced my companion to bring the dog, ironically named Martini. I’d gotten sober since then. On the road, the once-colorful trees had become tall silhouettes, forming a nocturnal hallway to our destination. We drove for a while in contentment but quiet. The hum of the motor was a steady white noise behind my thoughts. “What guardrails protect us against vices?” The question was on my mind, as I relived the past few years and conducted a sort of spiritual accounting. Had I been a healthier person, I would’ve been safeguarded by the faction of my subconscious that raised doubts; the moral deputy who cautioned me; the judge who knew I was at my limit; the assembly of confidants who held up a mirror; a thin shield of inhibitions; the sword of self-defense; and the citizen in my soul that served a final notice. But I wasn’t. I was distracted by secrets that I kept from others and from myself, which almost ended up destroying me. An angel on overwatch—the truth—saved my life. I thought about the woman next to me. She spent many months gently helping me build myself back up and was now living a clean life with me. Her ring pressed against my skin as we held hands, the way it probably would on long drives like this to come. Earlier in the day, we had decided that we would soon embark on a yearlong journey across the country. We pulled up to a dark field, parked the car, and unpacked. I carried a fire pit into the expanse, as a distant circle of maple trees stood sentry. My passenger set up two folding chairs in the grass, and Martini scouted the area in zigzag fashion with the aid of clear skies. I arranged the kindling and wood in an upright pile. Kneeling down, I placed the tinder in the center and lit it. The blaze warmed my face as it grew, and I stepped back to take my seat. We talked for a long time, as we always did. About our parents and siblings. The future. The dog. And as you do around a campfire, we found ourselves reminiscing about the past and the peculiar fact that the lights we were peering at above were thousands of years old. When I look at art, I don’t want to be thinking about the artist, but it’s not the same way with nature. Mysticism is for people who can’t make sense of the world. I spent two years directly coming to terms with my own impermanence and finally accepted it. The conclusion caused me to treat my life with greater care than ever before and to better understand its foundations, which made me grateful for—and almost reverent of—the pain that it took to get there. I wasn’t mourning past losses. Tonight was a celebration. I got up from my chair and walked across the leafy park back to the car. In the trunk, there was a briefcase. The metal box was cold to the touch as I scrolled the combination on two separate dials. The password was the answer to a math problem from school—why I still remembered it, I didn’t know. I slid the buttons to the side and popped open the latches with a soft click. I lifted the lid. Inside, there were several loose papers, a few charging cords, and the corners of cash peeking out from beneath it all. What I wanted was on top. A newspaper clipping yellowed with age, and a hardback book with a sparse white cover. I pulled them out and closed the lid, snapping the latches shut. I walked back over and told my fellow traveler what they were. She asked if I was sure about it. I said I was, and she smiled. I placed the only copy of the newspaper clipping that I had into the fire pit and watched it curl up and disappear within seconds. The second item took longer. I set it on top of the pyre, and for a moment it didn’t catch. A thin circle of flame lazily enveloped the cover. Like the border of a closing wound, it shrank toward the center until the words were gone. The blaze caught hold of the spine and consumed the book from within, causing the pages to flutter in the heat like butterflies. They fell away in charred flakes. “Nobody ever tells you that books burn so pretty,” she said. The remaining pages became fire, and after a while, the last wooden support collapsed into the heap. Briefly, the embers blended with the stars as they drifted into the night sky.
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This post is created for historical documentation, and for providing access to an important book that doesn't need a review, in my opinion... It was written by "Anonymous." Some of you may remember when this man first wrote an op ed which was published during the first term... If you are not aware of this activity, then you need to learn about that time period. It was the beginning of people pointing out the lawlessness being attempted even during the first term of DJT. There are additional interview videos with Miles Taylor if you wish to gain more insight without reading the book. With the audiobook preview--about 5 chapters and epilogue--and what I've shared here, you can see why this whistleblower made his choice to begin speaking out...The epilogue reminded me of just how far he (and I during my career) can easily be pressed into reaching job burnout due to the actions, pressures, and, even, inaction of those in higher level authority, can bring about extreme physical and mental response in an individual's inability in just doing their job, as they understand its rules, regulations, laws, etc.
We have already seen what the second term has brought about. More terrible than any of us could even have imagined... Mainly because, we saw only one man as the instigator... After Project 2025 was published and immediately implemented through those "yes-men" who followed a mandate written by a "foundation" not even associated with government itself... No wonder we now have the mess that we have...
GABixler
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