Blowback A Warning to Save Democracy from the Next Trump

by Miles Taylor

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...