Then Trump’s views began to change. He witnessed Iran’s hostile behavior and recognized appeasement wasn’t the best course of action. His internal pendulum swung hard in the other direction. After Iran shot down an American surveillance drone in June 2019, the president wanted a super-muscular response. Pentagon officials warned against escalation with Tehran, but Trump reportedly called for a military strike anyway. When warplanes were in the air ten minutes out from the target, he apparently decided to call it off, caving to the advice of skeptics including Fox News host Tucker Carlson. Only a few weeks later, the pendulum swung again. He was back to suggesting to aides that he might sit down with Iran’s leaders in a face-to-face meeting, which many of us believed would be a colossal mistake. Trump teased the possibility of a G7 meeting in France.
When Trump’s flip-flopping is about something like new army uniforms (“very expensive,” he once lamented, but on the other hand, “beautiful”), it is exhausting. When it’s about air strikes, it’s terrifying. The president’s impetuousness poses a danger to our military, the full extent of which will not be known for years. He is more than a minor headache for the Pentagon. He is a blinding migraine. Those who have served at the highest levels of the Pentagon, who have sat with Trump in moments of decision, know all too well. On a weekly basis, they shield men and women in uniform from the knowledge, as best they can, of just how undisciplined the commander in chief is above them and how he treats the US military like it’s part of a big game of Battleship. Our warriors risk everything to venture into the darkest corners of the world to hunt those who would do us harm. They deserve better for their inviolable code of duty than a man lacking a basic moral compass.
It’s scary how we, his appointees, have become accustomed to this. I once walked out of a meeting with the president, and a visibly shaken briefer, who was new to the Trump circus, pulled me aside.
“Are you kidding me?” he remarked. Moments earlier Trump expressed a spur-of-the-moment reversal about a military mission. He wanted to go another direction, and his change of heart was followed by a presidential order to act, straightaway.
“What should we do?” the briefer asked nervously. “He wants us to scrap everything the agency was planning.”
“Relax,” I assured him. “We aren’t going to do anything. I swear he’ll change his mind tomorrow.”
I was wrong. The president changed his mind later that afternoon.
Then there is homeland security. For conservatives, this is a subset of “defense” and the government’s overall obligation to protect its citizens. For President Trump, it is a centerpiece of his agenda. He ran on the promise to bring the border under control and to support agents on the frontlines. Of all the random issues he brings up unprompted in meetings and events, the award for biggest Trump non sequitur goes to “The Wall.”
It’s a running joke in the White House that one of the worst jobs in the administration belongs to the poor souls charged with designing the president’s border wall. Trump, of course, talks about the wall all the time with a gleam in his eye. Running for president, he vowed that he would build “a great wall, and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me, and I’ll build them very inexpensively… And I will have Mexico pay for that wall. Mark my words.” He admonished rival candidate Jeb Bush for talking about border fencing: “It’s not a fence, Jeb. It’s a WALL, and there’s a BIG difference.”
I have to admit, it’s knee-slappingly hilarious to watch Trump tackle this issue. In late 2015, he said his wall would “be made of hardened concrete… rebar and steel.” At one point in 2017, he proposed that the wall be solar powered to generate clean electricity. A month later, he said that “you have to be able to see through it.” The wall was no longer a concrete slab, but “a steel wall with openings.” Then the wall became “artistically designed steel slats.” Then, in 2018, the president claimed he could have “a steel wall—or it could be a steel fence—but it will be more powerful than any of the concrete walls that we’re talking about.” At the end of 2018 he said “an all concrete Wall was NEVER ABANDONED, as has been reported by the media,” only to tweet less than a week later that “We are now planning a Steel Barrier rather than concrete.” Midway through 2019, he flipped again, touting the “brand-new” “high steel and concrete Wall” that he’d already built and previewed that there was much more to come.
Officials would come out of meetings on the subject looking like they’d stepped off the Gravitron at the county fair. The president was constantly changing the design. Ten feet high or fifty feet high? Electric fence or not electric fence? He couldn’t make up his mind, officials complained. They were pulling their hair out in frustration. Trump’s shifting preference in aesthetics seemed to be matched only by his shifting explanations for the construction timeline. At various times, Trump told us construction was under way, then he said Democrats were stopping the wall from being built altogether, then that Congress needed to act, then that his critics were wrong and so much wall was being built, then that the courts were standing in the way, and then—never mind all of that about Congress and the courts—he could build it alone and “we’ll have the whole [border] sealed up” by the end of 2020.
Here’s the truth. Trump has barely built any wall, and his policies have been a thorough failure when it comes to border security. By all accounts, most of what the president has built is replacement of old fences at the border. If there are really hundreds of miles of new wall on the way, as he nervously promises voters, experts say it still won’t solve the problem. Even with a giant concrete wall (or steel fence, or concrete-steel wall-fence) across the entire border, migrants can still come to our border and file for protected status. Then they are let into the United States for years while their cases are reviewed. That is what Republicans begged Trump to address, but instead of using his political capital to fix the broken laws, he fixated on one of his favorite pastimes—a construction project. The result is that the system will remain broken well past his presidency.
In the process of bungling border security, Donald Trump has obliterated America’s reputation as a nation of immigrants. This is a deeply Republican, conservative, classical liberal conception—that the United States is a refuge for those seeking a better life. Such was the condition of the republic at the moment of its founding and ever since. The United States was molded by people who left home in faraway places, by idealistic risk takers and hard workers who fought the odds to reach a literal new world. Our republic was not rooted in “blood and soil.” It was rooted in a shared aspiration for a fresh start. However, not being a man of history, Trump never adopted this view.
A shocked aide walked out of a meeting in the Oval Office one day, came to my office, and recounted an anecdote about a conversation with the president. They’d been meeting on another topic, when Trump off-roaded onto a tangent about immigration, complaining about the number of people crossing the border.
“We get these women coming in with like seven children,” he told his listeners, briefly attempting a Hispanic accent. “They are saying, ‘Oh, please help! My husband left me!’ 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.”
The handful of attendees in the room shifted uncomfortably in their chairs but said nothing, the aide reported. They didn’t even know what to say. This is how the president of the United States thinks and speaks about people who would give their lives (and sometimes do) to reach America. Whenever these quotes find their way to the press, a mid-level communications staffer is dispatched to say Trump was joking. I assure you he isn’t.