PATRIOTS & TYRANTS - WORK IN PROGRESS

MURDER IN THE WHITE HOUSE

“Any Hispanics in the room?” 

DONALD TRUMP

IN EARLY FEBRUARY OF 2017, PRESIDENT Donald Trump, the 45th President of the United States, trudged around the Oval Office a little over a month after his inauguration while preparing his first address to a joint
session of Congress. Son-in-law Jared Kushner and adviser Stephen Miller were with the president as he practiced some scathing, campaign-style rhetoric on immigration that he said would cause his audience to go wild. He read aloud the names of criminals and their crimes — rapes, murders, drug dealers — felons he said he was planning to toss about in his speech. They were all Hispanic names, and the president seemed to relish saying each with an anglicized pronunciation. Trump told the two men that the tough talk on illegal immigrants was irresistible red meat for his Make America Great Again base, and predicted the audience would go wild when he talked about tossing them out of the country. Kushner and Miller reportedly laughed aloud at the president’s performance, but then that would have been expected. Trump was accustomed to such immediate support from Kushner, his senior adviser and daughter Ivanka’s husband of almost a decade. Miller was an anti-immigration hardliner and a chief champion of the Trump administration's decision to separate migrant children from their parents who entered the country illegally, as a policy that would deter migrants from coming to the United States. It was only when other White House aides heard of Trump’s plans to double-down on his anti-immigrant stance that the president reluctantly agreed with their suggestions that he tone down the blistering rhetoric on Latino immigrants that he would deliver to America in the nation’s Capitol.