Kirstjen Nielsen’s Lies About Separating Families at the Border Tell Us Everything
Of all the rationales trotted out by members of the Trump administration for its ongoing practice of imprisoning small children in cages, perhaps the strangest one comes courtesy of Department of Homeland Security secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, whose galaxy-brain position on this barbaric policy—one on which many media outlets have reported extensively, and about which the president and multiple White House officials have spoken at length—is that this barbaric policy does not exist.
At first, this lie seemed to be less a product of Sessions-esque antique racism than it is an uneasy compromise she has struck with herself while grappling with the atrocities occurring on her watch. On Saturday, The New York Times reported that Nielsen was “uncomfortable” with the practice and had “clashed” with Trump in private about its efficacy and morality. Her courageous stance, it wrote, had led to “furious lectures from the president” and even prompted her to consider leaving the White House.
At some point between publication of that article and Sunday morning, Nielsen found a way to get comfortable again.
On Monday, her strategy for sleeping at night shifted once more, as she began parroting the absurd contention that federal law compels immigration authorities to separate immigrant children from their parents as a matter of course. “We will not apologize for doing our job,” she said about a job that, she concluded, exists after all. On Twitter, Nielsen went on to call on Congress to “change the laws,” hoping that no one would notice (1) that her Republican counterparts on Capitol Hill control both chambers and yet have refused to act, and (2) how carefully she avoided enumerating any problematic laws that, if amended, would stop the executive branch from pursuing its chosen course of action.
By the time she arrived to take questions at yesterday afternoon's White House press briefing, whatever qualms she may have had with the thing she was charged with pushing had disappeared altogether. When asked whether Trump was using the imprisoned children as a bargaining chip to get his wall—something to which Trump himself has unsubtly alluded, and that Sarah Sanders reiterated during the same press conference—Nielsen retorted by calling the very suggestion "offensive." When asked if the border separations are an intended or unintended consequence of the administration's zero-tolerance immigration policy—her mentor, John Kelly, has made clear that it is the former—Nielsen launched headlong into the cryptofascist talking points that made Stephen Miller famous.
I think that they reflect the focus of those who post such pictures and narratives. The narratives we don't see are the narratives of the crime, the opioids, the smugglers, of people who are killed by gang members, of American children who are recruited, and then when they lose the drugs they are tased and beaten. We don't have a balanced view of what's happening.
In roughly 48 hours, the secretary went from staunchly opposing the policy to offering full-throated defenses of it.
For the first few months of Nielsen's tenure, many observers saw her—a former Bush administration official and national-security lifer—as disciple of the Gary Cohn school of White House service, which calls on Principled Republican Intellectuals to hold their noses and take jobs in the administration in the name of advancing the conservative agenda. Whenever the president and his true believers wade a little too far into white supremacy for their liking, these erudite wonks distance themselves from it by telling reporters on background how “disturbed” they are by such an unseemly mess. It is enough to allow them to show their faces in Washington without feeling shame, but never enough to interfere with their implementation of a dusty Heritage Foundation white paper.
The family-separation debacle illustrates the limits of this cynical calculation’s utility. For Nielsen, when she was offered a seat at the table, whatever differences she may have had with the president who wanted to hire her were minor inconveniences to be worked out later. The power and prestige associated with being a real live cabinet official in the real-life West Wing, she thought, would make those troubles worthwhile.
Now, as acts of astonishing cruelty are committed in her name, she has learned that in politics, you eventually become the thing for which you’ll fight in public, no matter what you believe (or claimed to believe, or once believed, or wish you believed) in private. At this point, Nielsen could undo some of the damage she's caused by quitting, but doing so appears well beyond her capacity for courage. Besides, her actions demonstrate that she is beyond caring what people think about her anymore. The implications of her true choices became too awful for her to think about, and so believing the lies she tells about them to everyone—to the press, to the American people, to herself—is the only coping mechanism she has left. It’s hard to be “troubled” by anything when you’ve decided that being the villain suits you just fine after all.
