When a whirlwind of shocking news comes out about scandalous business practices or government corruption, it’s easy to forget that the most unbelievably bizarre parts of it are often not known to the public.
Usually, we only find out decades after the fact about the strange habits of presidents or the baffling reasons behind the decisions of other powerful leaders.
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However, it becomes much easier to gain access to that information when the people present for a strange period in history no longer see the benefit in keeping what they know to themselves. And it seems that day has come for several White House officials.
A book entitled “Border Wars: Inside Trump’s Assault on Immigration,” is expected to see release on October 8.
As The New York Times reported , the book has a section detailing a particularly tense week in March of this year when President Donald Trump pressed his staff for immediate action at the U.S.-Mexico border.
The book was based on interviews conducted with over a dozen White House and Trump administration officials who were present when the turmoil went down.
This chapter largely concerns the struggles of Department of Homeland Security and State officials to convince Trump not to close the border.
However, the book revealed that this big concern was also accompanied by other “extreme” solutions Trump suggested for border control.
One such idea was to support the wall with a water-filled trench that he would then populate with either snakes or alligators. Although this obviously didn’t happen, his aides apparently looked into a cost estimate for the idea before it was shelved.
Trump also made the public suggestion that American soldiers should shoot migrants in the event that they threw rocks.
His staff reportedly told him that this was illegal, so he suggested shooting them in the legs to slow them down.
He eventually walked back from this idea after being told that it was also not legal.
Trump also seemed to follow various whims about the wall itself only to be told that they weren’t effective.
One of these ideas was to electrify the wall and to put spikes at the top that would pierce human flesh, while another concerned the sudden decision that he needed a cement wall.
To this, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen replied, “Sir, I literally don’t think that’s even possible.”
This was because the current wall’s steel design and the contracts for building it had already been finalized.
Trump’s staff had to work their hardest, however, to convince him not to close the border entirely.
When he pushed for this, he wanted the entire 2,000 mile border closed by noon of the following day. But whether this was a realistic timeline or not wasn’t the issue.
Instead, the aides understood that doing so would trap American tourists in Mexico, leave school children on both sides of the border stranded, and prevent $200 billion in American exports from moving across the border for year.
Mitch McConnell identified this as having “a potentially catastrophic economic impact on our country.”
Although they did convince the president to reverse course on this plan, many did so at the cost of their jobs.
Nielsen was the most notable of these purged officials, and Trump had repeatedly considered her ineffective and “not tough-looking enough.”
As he was quoted as telling her, “Lou Dobbs hates you, Ann Coulter hates you, you’re making me look bad.”
h/t: The New York Times
