The FRONTLINE Interviews

Anna Palmer

Co-Author, The Hill to Die On: The Battle for Congress and the Future of Trump's America

Anna Palmer is a senior Washington correspondent for Politico and the co-author of The Hill to Die On: The Battle for Congress and the Future of Trump's America.

This is a transcript of an interview with FRONTLINE’s Michael Kirk conducted on June 5, 2019. It has been edited for clarity and length.

This interview appears in:

Zero Tolerance

TOP

Anna Palmer

Chapters

Text Interview:

Highlight text to share it

The Republican “Autopsy”

OK, so it’s 2013-14.The Republican establishment has created an “autopsy” in the aftermath of the Mitt Romney loss.And there’s another group over on the side at the “Breitbart Embassy” sort of licking their chops and looking at what’s been happening.Explain to me, will you, what was the environment like right before [Steve] Bannon, Breitbart, [Stephen] Miller, [Jeff] Sessions, all jumped on the scene the way you can remember?

You know, I covered Mitt Romney’s 2012 race, and I think after that, Republicans couldn’t believe how much they got blown out, particularly on this issue.And so they did the autopsy and tried to dive into where the Republican Party needed to be. And they thought it needed to be a bigger tent, right?They were going to try to attract more women or minorities.They were going to be friendlier on immigration.

And clearly, as we’ve seen now, that didn’t happen.And so the Republican Party was looking to try to make a bigger tent, try to find a way forward on immigration, try to be the responsible party when it came to that issue and that topic.

But all of a sudden, you had this force that a lot of people didn’t see in Breitbart, in Steve Bannon, in Stephen Miller, that was kind of fomenting on the ground.And a lot of people in the establishment Republicans, they weren’t taking that seriously.They thought they could just kind of brush them aside and let the real adults do the work and the business of Congress.

How would you describe Bannon at that time?

I mean, he was trying to foment a revolution, right?He was trying to be this figure in politics that most of the Republicans at that time—you have to think Paul Ryan, right?He is the statesman, and you looked at—he was going to be the policy guy who’s going to be the heart and soul and the brain of the Republican Party.And Steve Bannon was this guy who’s saying, “No, I’m going to be the bomb thrower; I’m going to foment the masses,” and really kind of understand how to get the grassroots really fired up about issues like this.

But I really think nobody could really understand how much he was going to play a big part in the next chapter of Republican politics.

One of the things he does, of course, early, is form an alliance with this young guy working, a staffer, talk about a back bencher, working with Jeff Sessions.Who is Stephen Miller at that time?

Jeff Sessions and his philosophy of immigration was really one of keeping people out, limiting the number of immigrants that were allowed in.And he had a lot of young staff, Stephen Miller being one of them, who were carrying the torch for him day in and day out and was probably a very lonely mission, because that really wasn’t where a lot of the Republican Party was, certainly not in the Senate where Sen. Sessions was at that point.

And so people like Stephen Miller would send emails to me being upset about how we were covering immigration and how we weren’t being fair to his side and to what was happening.We didn’t really take it all that seriously because he really wasn’t where the majority of the leadership, in particular in the Republican Party, was and the people that were determining what was going to hit the Senate floor.

And Sessions?Who was Sessions at this time?

I mean, Sen. Sessions is somebody who is very well liked on Capitol Hill.He’s got a lot of colleagues still who really enjoy him as a person.But his beliefs on immigration were far outside of where most Senate Republicans were at that time.He’s a gentle guy, and he talks to the press.He likes the press a lot; he has a good relationship with them.But in this area in particular, very hard-line, and had always been that way.He didn’t have to go through some kind of revolution.This is what he’s believed for a long time.

Bannon, Sessions and Miller, at that time, with the momentum behind the autopsy and the new Republican kind of openness, what chances did they actually have to change the entire Republican Party and stop the immigration, bipartisan immigration bills?

It’s pretty stunning.I think you have to realize bipartisan immigration deals are very difficult, and putting them together piece by piece, it’s a lot of concessions, and all sides, for the most part, end up unhappy.But Congress has been trying to do immigration reform for a long time.So yes, was it, of course, Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, Sen. Sessions trying to stop this bill in 2013-2014 and the efforts that were going on?Sure.There were also a lot of other interests who were also trying to stop it.You had interests of business; you had interests of the labor unions.And so there was a lot of fighting and nitpicking at this effort.

Defeating Eric Cantor

So one of the things they do, with great audacity, is aim for Eric Cantor, the number two Republican in the House and presumptive future speaker of the House.They aim for him to knock him off in a primary.Tell me what you know about that story.

It was stunning.The loss of Eric Cantor was really the first time Republicans had to take a serious look at the fact that there was a movement out there that they didn’t recognize and they didn’t understand.You also have to realize Eric Cantor was, as an establishment Republican, kind of Harvard Business School-esque figure that you could get, and who was running against him was Dave Brat, who was a professor, but was also a real bomb thrower.He didn’t have any money.

The real knock on Cantor, looking back, if you look back at it, is that he didn’t go back to the district.He was really focused on Washington.He was very focused on what was happening under the dome, his leadership race, right?He wanted to be the next speaker of the House, and he was putting all of the bricks together to make that happen, but he wasn’t taking care of things back home.

… They figure out, they tell us, that there’s a base of Republican voters who are not the people that the autopsy is counting on.These are—whoever they are.Who was the base they identified?

I mean, I think they saw a lot of disgruntled Americans who felt like the economy, while it was doing well, was not doing well for them.I do think immigration was an issue.I don’t know.I mean, everybody in hindsight there’s a lot of people that try to take credit for everything.So I’m not sure that he only lost on immigration.He also lost because of the kind of deficit spending, cutting, spending, and that was a lot of the message that Dave Brat also brought to the table.

Now, one of the things that helps Brat is the alliance between Bannon, Breitbart, Miller, Sessions, talk radio, Laura Ingraham, Mark Levin, just banging away there.How much do you think that effort contributed to the loss of Eric Cantor?

I think talk radio oftentimes hurts leaders.Whoever is in the leadership, if you’re a Republican, those people are throwing arrows and slings at you every single day, no matter what, because you’re not going far enough, right?You’re not pure enough, and they had this purity test that they were magnifying through the radio and through Fox News and through some of these other channels.And so it was certainly something that hurt Eric Cantor particularly in his rural, more kind of exurb districts.

How surprised were you on election night?

I was surprised.I will say I was very surprised.You know, one of the things that was really true is there were very few people that were out at Eric Cantor’s district as reporters.I was not there either, because people just thought of course he would win.

I would assume this, then, sends a thunderclap or a lightning bolt through the establishment Republican leadership and others when Cantor gets knocked off and immigration may be part of the reason?

Yes and no, right?It’s one House race; there’s 435 House seats.So yes, was this something that shook people, saying, “Oh, what’s happening here?”But there’s also a lot of ways that you can explain it.Oh, Cantor just forgot who he was; he didn’t like to go back to the district; he’d been in Washington too long.And so yes, was immigration one of the issues that was all of a sudden, “Hmm, maybe we’re not on the right side of this, but we’re—some of the more rural district folks are?,” sure.But I don’t know that it was all of a sudden, “We’re going to change like that.”

Can you imagine how Sessions, Miller and Bannon felt about Cantor going down?

I’m sure victorious.I mean, they’re taking out one of the top-seeded Republicans and saying, “This is the issue that’s going to matter.”

The Trump Campaign

…. They go looking for a presidential candidate, and Bannon tells us that he stops at Lou Dobbs’ office and says, “Lou, why don’t you—?”I mean, he starts with Sessions; Sessions says no.He goes to Dobbs; Dobbs says no.He’s shopping around, and who does he find?

I mean, I believe he found Donald Trump.

Yeah.Trump is right for them for what reasons, do you think?

Well, Trump was a little bit of an ideological hole.He wasn’t a 20-year veteran of the Republican Party.He was a Democrat and had been for a long time.But I think he was a winner for them because the one thing he cared about and the one thing he talked about a lot was really the border, was immigration.And they could mold him on that, and he was very effective. Just as Steve Bannon had found people in talk radio to be very effective for amplifying his message, all of a sudden you have Donald Trump, who’s very effective at amplifying whatever message he wants to get across.

And lo and behold, Stephen Miller is giving the warmup act for Donald Trump in arenas all over America.Surprising?

The whole race was surprising.I was covering [Sen.] Marco Rubio at that time, and that—because everyone thought he was going to potentially be the candidate.It was [Gov.] Scott Walker.It was a lot of these more Republicans that you would have expected to be the next generation of the party.Donald Trump was kind of seen as a joke.

… They’re talking about the wall, the anthem of the wall actually happening one place or another.What did you think of that?

You’d go to Donald Trump rallies, and it was like he was a rock star.It’s unlike any political rally I’ve ever been a part of.You go to the line, and people are waiting.And partly it’s cult TV personality; partly it’s people who have never been involved, they just kind of want to see what the spectacle is.And then there was a lot of people who had never been—didn’t think politics was for them.This was the first time, and they were excited, and he was talking to them, and he wasn’t talking down to them.He shared their feelings of rage or disgruntlement on a lot of different issues.

What do you figure the immigration, the wall speeches, was tapping in the base?

I think it was frustration.I think there’s this real sense that whenever I go across the country that people in Washington just talk down to everybody else.They think they’re smarter than everybody else.And Donald Trump didn’t do that.I think he also really has an ability to get a crowd moving.He understands how to get into the psyche and the emotional ability of people to really kind of become fervent followers.And those followers have stuck with him through a lot of ups and downs since then.

Tell me what you think the impact of Jeff Sessions joining the campaign was?

Well, it gave him credibility in Washington.First, he was the first senator, somebody who Washington knew very well, and knew his immigration policy and what he thought—knew of him.But he gave a lot of credibility that this was something for real.

What were the stakes for Jeff Sessions if Donald Trump flamed out?

Huge.I mean, this is his moment, the guy who’s going to carry his creed of immigration reform and what it should look like, and a wall and the border.And if he lost, of course, the Republican Party was going to stick with where it had already been, and it was not—it wasn’t going to go towards where Jeff Sessions wanted it to.

Oh, that’s interesting.So that’s the stakes for Bannon, Sessions and Miller, really, once they hitch themselves to Trump, is their whole immigration quest is in play.

I mean, I think Donald Trump was the manifestation of all that Jeff Sessions wanted on immigration for decades and had gotten nowhere on.He was kind of the laughingstock when it came to policy for where the mainstream Republican Party was.All of a sudden, you had the ability to get it to the White House, to really force change, and as you’ve seen, Stephen Miller is not shy about trying to force things through in what he’s looking to try to accomplish.

The Trump Transition

Tell me what you thought of the announcement that Sessions would be the attorney general, Miller and Bannon would be the chief strategists for the president of the United States with offices in the West Wing?

It was pretty shocking.I mean, I think it shouldn’t have been, because they were all very close to the president.I think everybody thought that they would be advisers, but I don’t know five years before anybody would have put money on the fact that those three people would be in the positions that they were at the beginning of the Trump administration.

What does it mean that they were there?

Well, they certainly guided him in his policy, although at that time, you have to remember, there were a lot of other people that were coming in.There was Gary Cohn; there were different folks who were trying to augment or push away some of these issues, right?A lot of people thought when Donald Trump came into the presidency, oh, he just campaigned on those things, right?He wasn’t really serious about them.Now we’re going to have to get back to reality.And what we’ve seen is clearly, he campaigned on the wall as one of the only things he talked about all the time, and he meant it.

Yeah, the assumption everybody had was he will pivot.They always do.They get in the Oval Office and suddenly they realize the weight of the office.But not true in this case.

It’s easy for any politician to promise a lot of things when it comes to campaigning.It’s another thing to deliver on them and also to have the weight of the whole country on you instead of just kind of talking in big, broad brushstrokes.

The Travel Ban

Within five days, on the Friday, they go over to the Pentagon.He signs the Muslim travel ban.Washington explodes.What do you think was up with that?

I think he was delivering on what he promised, and I think Washington went crazy.I think the country, around the country, there was—I mean, the tenets of what this country was built on was immigration.And all of a sudden, you had a president who’s saying based on your religion, you’re not welcome here.

When you heard it, when you saw it, when you saw those crowds gathering out at the airports and everything else, what did you make of it?

I was interested to see how Congress would react.You have a push/pull; Donald Trump, for a lot of people on the coasts, can be an offensive figure, right?But for a lot of these members who had just gotten elected, they were Trumpsters.If you are a member of the House who got elected, it’s not about you going home and having somebody say, “How can you be defending this guy?”They’re saying, “Why aren’t you bear-hugging him more?”And so how did they deal with the responsibilities that they have and then at the same time—because once you’re a politician, you’re always looking for your next race.And they’re always worried about being primaried to the further right, being more conservative than they are about to the left.

It’s so interesting to watch the personalities of Sessions, Miller and Bannon at that moment.Tell me what Bannon does.Remember, he flies too close to the sun.He’s on the cover of Time magazine, at CPAC [Conservative Political Action Conference]; he’s threatening the deep state.Tell me about Bannon in the White House at that time.

He made a mistake that sometimes people do, which is when the staff—you’re not the principal, and so don’t get out in front of him.And clearly the president didn’t like that he was getting all kinds of headlines and kind of swatted him down.

Jeff Sessions as Attorney General

… Sessions, meanwhile recuses himself.The impact of that, do you think, on Jeff Sessions’ career?

Clearly the president didn’t get, in Jeff Sessions, the attorney general he thought he was going to.And I think Jeff Sessions did what he thought was the appropriate thing, and it ended up being a very tense relationship after having what seemed to be a pretty collegial relationship on the campaign trail.

The Dreamers and DACA

Sessions decides to continue the immigration fight anyway quietly and under the surface, sending U.S. attorneys and others out into the border areas.Miller’s helping him.By the fall of ’17, the DACA [Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals] moment happens around the “Dreamers.”Trump has a part of him that’s sort of sensitive and worried about the Dreamers, but Sessions has sort of boxed him in to having to do what he has to do.The press blows up.Do you remember this?What were your thoughts about what was happening then?

It’s the first time we saw the internal debate that Trump was having with himself really in the external, right?So he chooses to go forward saying, “We’re going to repeal DACA; you have six months, Congress, to figure it out,” and at the same time is tweeting, “Well, we don’t want to kick the kids out, and these are tax-paying—and they’re taxpayers, and they’re good.”And you really saw that kind of internal dialogue that maybe a leader would have with his close aides, but for public consumption.

And the kind of going back and forth on it was pretty stunning.And at that same time, you have to realize he’s trying to get Congress to give him money for the border wall, and they’re fighting over government funding, and it’s this kind of very tense moment in the fall of 2017 about what is going to be the future of our immigration policy, of what’s going to happen at the border.Can he get Democrats to cave and give him money for his wall?And then he kind of puts TNT on it all, and it explodes around his decision to move forward on that.

Exactly.There’s a meeting right before he locks himself in place … where he invites the TV cameras in and says, “Watch this as we try to hammer out a policy.”[Sen.] Dianne Feinstein is in the room, lots of others are there, and he’s bargaining right before the camera.Do you remember this?

Yeah.But what was stunning about that is, again, I mean, I think you see how oftentimes Trump’s first instinct is to—he just wants to make a deal.He doesn’t have policy positions that he’s held for a very, very long time.And so in that conversation, he actually starts off talking, and it’s [Sen.] Dick Durbin speaks, and then Dianne Feinstein and [Sen.] Chuck Grassley, and it’s this kind of push/pull of both sides.The Democrats can’t believe their ears, because what they’re hearing is a president who says: “Hey, you know what?Let’s do DACA first, and then we’ll deal with border security.”

And Kevin McCarthy, then the number two in the House Republicans, who’s close to the president, he keeps trying to pull him back and say, “Well, Mr.President, we really want to do a total border security package.”And so everybody leaves that meeting saying, one, “What does he really want?,” which is very rare, and two, Democrats think that they’ve really made some headway, that potentially it sounds as though he’s willing to split this up, which is anathema to what the Republicans, particularly in the House, want to do.

And in that 48 hours, until Durbin and Lindsey Graham come back and he utters the profanity, Fox is kicking his ass, the talk radio people are going basically berserk.Stephen Miller, who was standing in the back of the room is hitting the phones and calling for help from his conservative right supporters in the Senate and other places…So there is all that pressure; the TV, the noise, the whatever, here we go again like the first part of the dreamers, right?

I think what you really see is this president consumes more news than anybody else, and he is always taking the temperature of what’s happening on Fox News, what is talk radio saying.And he wants people to like him.I mean, he’s in constant search of approval, largely from the elite media, even though he loves to hammer us publicly.And so yes, I think this push/pull was really on display, and all of a sudden he goes from saying, “Hey, maybe we could split up DACA and the border security and the border funding,” to saying: “No, I’m now—we’re going to repeal that.Congress, you’re going to have to deal with it.”

Durbin and [Sen. Lindsey] Graham are just shocked.They talk to him at 11:15 in the morning, and he says: “Come on over.That sounds good to me.You guys have worked this out. Fabulous.”But by the time they get there, the room has [Sen. Tom] Cotton, [Sen. David] Perdue and many others who are loaded for bear.And Miller has fed him statistics, scary things from the border, murder from whatever, and it’s a different Donald Trump waiting for Durbin and Graham than they saw on television a couple of days before.

He clearly had been swayed and was upset and didn’t want to be seen as soft on immigration and the border and felt like that was what was happening.

It’s then that he says “shithole countries.”How does that play when it gets released?

It was like a bomb.All of a sudden—there’s no way Democrats could make a deal with a president who says things like that about countries.

Why?

Because it’s anathema to what they think and their whole beliefs to say El Salvador and countries in Africa, that those people aren’t welcome in America, when at the same time they’re trying to save Dreamers, and they’re trying to do all these other things.He just doesn’t also seem like he’s an honest broker to them, right?How could you have a meeting however many hours before where you’re ready to make a deal, and you’re talking pretty openly about it, and all of a sudden you change your position so quickly?I think it’s one of the things that inform Democrats and Democratic leaders in their negotiations for the next two years.

Zero Tolerance and Family Separation

So now it’s there it is, stuck, and by I guess the spring or January, it’s Sessions announces the separation, the “zero tolerance” policy.…What does that tell us about Sessions, about Miller, about Trump and about where the debate is going from their point of view?

I think they were trying to force the hand of Democrats.And they wanted—Trump wanted—border funding, and it’s a singular mission for him, and it backfired, clearly.I think the images and what happened—you had Republicans coming out; you had evangelicals, which was a very strong part of Trump’s base.Seeing family separation, seeing that, it just isn’t something that they could get their arms around.

Yeah.And Trump, when that kind of pressure comes, he wavers, and then he’s back.And he wavers.It’s like a battle between the talk radio Fox people and the MSNBC Rachel Maddow people saying, “Rrr, you talk about push/pull.”That’s a lot of what was happening through that.

Yeah, I mean, I think he was trying to find a way out, right?The president always wants to find a win, and I think he was having a very hard time finding a win here.

The 2018 Midterm Elections

So we’re headed into the 2018 midterms, and now there’s caravans; there’s [murdered student] Mollie Tibbetts; there’s troops on the border.What’s going on?

I think there’s a lot of concern among Republicans, particularly Republicans in leadership who are trying to defend the House, that the saber rattling that Trump was engaging in was very unhelpful, and it’s not what they wanted to do.They knew that they were going to have an issue in the suburbs in terms of getting Republican women in particular to vote for their candidates; that people were scared about Trump; that the economy and the tax bill that they had banked on wasn’t working; and that Trump’s kind of doubling down on a lot of his issues on the border on bringing the troops down there, that people were seeing through it, that they were saying: “There isn’t really this crisis.The president’s just kind of making it up as a way to find something to talk about politically that engages his base.”

… They lose in the House.

Dramatically.Three dozen seats.

What does it tell?

So what was very interesting—I sat down with the president very shortly after the election in November, and he took no credit for massive losses in the House, unlike anything we’ve seen — historic.I mean, Republicans should historically have lost the House, but not by the kind of numbers that they ended up losing it by. But unlike George W. Bush, unlike Barack Obama after—they also faced midterm losses—he took no personal credit of it at all.In fact, he goes publicly and does a press conference that says, “Mia Love didn’t give me any love,” you know, goes through all the different people who didn’t want to be close to him and how they lost.

But what was interesting to me in this interview with the president, he said he actually felt like he could do more deals with Democrats because Republicans were too ideologically restricted, and Democrats, they could do whatever they wanted to do—sign bills, bring them to him, and he could decide whether he was going to sign them into law or not.That clearly hasn’t happened, but that was his real philosophy after the election, that maybe Democrats in power in the House would be good for him.

It didn’t turn out that way.

No.

The Government Shutdown

Take me into what leads us up to the showdown, or the shutdown.What does he want, what does he need, and what do they refuse to give him?

So I think what happens, really, is you have House Republicans in the Freedom Caucus who are really ginning the president up, who say this is our last gasp to get you the $5 billion you want for the border wall.Paul Ryan and Republicans in leadership have been promising you to just wait, to just delay, we’re going to get it for you, and they haven’t delivered, and now you’ve lost the House, and so this is the last moment with which you were going to have the opportunity to get your border wall, the singular issue that you care about.

The problem was, I think Donald Trump and Republicans in general thought Nancy Pelosi was going to blink, and she didn’t.She firmly became speaker, and the first thing she said is no money for the border wall.And so there’s a lot of different meetings that happen and iterations of what happened.But she didn’t blink; Trump shuts down the government because Mitch McConnell says, “All right, well, I’m going to fund the government”; and House Republicans kind of have this whole fomenting of anger around the fact that they, too, want to have the border wall.

But there’s no game plan.Nobody has any plan for how they’re going to move forward.Paul Ryan’s looking at the end of his career.He wanted to try to close it out with a bow, and they don’t.He walks out of his career into the longest shutdown in history.

You think Trump miscalculated in some way?You said strategy or lack of strategy.It almost feels like he’s playing a different kind of game than the Democrats are, and it’s a brinksmanship game, and as you say, maybe he wanted somebody to blink.But I don’t know.What was the plan from what you can tell, from what you guys think?

I think the House Freedom Caucus, Mark Meadows, Jim Jordan, were talking to the president, really ginning him up.You had Fox News going crazy about this, saying we’ve got to get the border wall; we need the money.And so the problem is you have the Freedom Caucus, which was created in the House to stop things; it was to stop its own Republican leadership from getting things done.They weren’t there to enact legislation.So it’s a very different position.So instead of stopping things in the House, it’s much easier than actually getting something accomplished.

And so you really start to have this long shutdown where everybody leaves town.I mean, it’s pretty stunning.I’ve been covering this stuff for a long time, and usually when there’s a shutdown, everybody stays, and people start negotiating.But there really wasn’t much to negotiate about, because the president wasn’t budging on his $5 billion; Nancy Pelosi wasn’t budging on no money.

And so everybody leaves town.Trump stays, kind of sequesters himself in the White House, but doesn’t use the opportunity of being the only person in Washington to try to build the case for why this was so important that Congress should pass his bill that has this money in it.They come back, and all of a sudden there was no way to end it, right?It was kind of this long stalemate.

But what started to happen is some of the public services really started to have issues, right?You had museums shutting down; you had trash issues.And there was some security issues, right?TSA [Transportation Security Administration] checkpoints are getting closed.And so the president is feeling an immense amount of pressure in terms of when the basic functioning of government stops.Then all of a sudden you had Mitch McConnell saying: “We need to get a deal.We need to find a way, a pathway forward.”

He’s always got one ear, as you say, to the base and what the base is thinking.What is the base, from what you can tell, what was the base telling him, thinking about, during that shutdown?

I think Jim Jordan had told the president, “We want to go for this fight, but just remember, once you go for it, you can’t cave.”And so I think they were trying to say, “Hold strong; we’re going to come to a deal.”It’s always the darkest before the dawn.But clearly, that didn’t end up working out for him.What ended up happening is Nancy Pelosi saying, “I’m not going to allow you to be able to have the State of the Union in the House, on the floor of the House,” which she controls as speaker, “because of security issues.You’re talking about hundreds of Secret Service agents who haven’t been paid in days,” and, you know, “Are we really going to be able to protect you and keep you safe?I don’t think we are.Let’s move it back.”

And there was no end in sight for him, and he ended up reopening the government, and they ended up having the deal that gave him nothing.

Is this a big loss for him?

Yes, I think it’s the first of what has become a series of losses where he hasn’t really understood Nancy Pelosi and her ability to control and keep control of her caucus.You know, in our book there’s a quote where he says: “Democrats are lousy politicians.They have lousy policy.”But then he goes on to say—he’s almost kind of reverent and jealous, because he said: “But they stick together.And I say that to Republicans all the time: They stick together.”

Crisis at the Border

It’s a real crisis now, a supercrisis at the border.I mean, if it was not a real crisis two years ago, it’s a real crisis now.What kind of a fix was the White House in in March as Miller and others actually knew, started to see the real numbers from DHS [Department of Homeland Security]?

I mean, I think there’s a lot of concern around it.I think the issue is there’s not a great solution for it, and clearly we’re still seeing that play out, right?The president now is saying he’s going to enact 5 percent tariffs on Mexico unless he can see some change at the border, but he hasn’t made it clear to anybody in the public, anyway, what that change needs to be in order for him to not enact them.

And the crisis—I don’t know what the next step is in the crisis, but it’s pretty bad, and we’re heading for a presidential election in 2020.You figure this, the immigration issue, is going to be the centerpiece of his reelection campaign?

It’s certainly going to be one of the big centerpieces.I think a lot of people would tell him, his advisers would tell him that he should be talking about the economy; he should be talking about a lot of other things.When you look at some of the states that are in play, immigration is a big deal, certainly, and I think it’s been the constant theme throughout his presidency.So that’s not going away.The question is really going to be, does that move the needle for some of the people who voted for him the first time, right?

I think Donald Trump was elected, in a lot of ways, upon the argument that he and he alone was the dealmaker who could change the way Washington worked.And the question is, are those voters going to come back and say yes, he did change the way Washington worked?

Just to go back to right before the shutdown when there’s talk that Trump’s going to go along with the McConnell deal.Can you give us a little more on what Jordan is doing and the role of Fox News and—?

Sure.So Mitch McConnell had decided that they were going to move forward with the funding package, and they had gotten all of their ducks in a row in the Senate, and they’re looking to pass it.And the night that they are going to pass it, Paul Ryan was on board, and he had set up the Rules Committee, which is basically the arcane process with which bills move through the House, and that’s kind of the first step to get the clock started, if you will.

Mark Meadows is at the Capitol Hill Club, along with Mick Mulvaney, then OMB [Office of Management and Budget] director.And they’re having dinner, and they’re talking about this bill.And Mark Meadows was really frustrated about the fact that again, the House—everybody’s going to cave; they’re not going to fight on the wall, and he thinks that this is the time, because if not now, when?

And they start kind of going around to different tables, and there’s agitation, and then all of a sudden kind of a growing, almost, you know, fervor among Republicans at this private club just steps away from the Capitol that they should fight.And so Paul Ryan and others—the committee starts to hear this, and so they end up canceling the meeting.They aren’t going to have the Rules Committee hearing.

And so the next day, they all go to the House basement where they have their meetings, and Paul Ryan and the other leaders of the House Republicans have heard that there’s some dissent, but they’re expecting dissent.But they get into the meeting, and it is much worse than they expected.There’s a majority of members who are agitating to not pass what the Senate has passed; that they should go for the wall.

And so the president actually calls Paul Ryan, and he steps out, and he says—the president asks him, “I hear there’s going to be problems with this.”And Paul Ryan says, “No, no,” like, “We’ve got this.”And so they hang up.And then later, the president called Mark Meadows, and Mark Meadows says, “No, this isn’t just a couple of us; this is a big number.”

And so Paul Ryan really had a choice there, because what he could have done—this is days before he’s about to be done with his entire congressional career, and he could have put that bill on the floor, and it would have passed.But it would have passed with a majority of Democrats helping it across the finish line, and he chose not to.

So they leave because they can’t come to an agreement.But it’s really because Paul Ryan had that moment where he could have bucked the president and forced him to either sign the bill or veto it.

The president was willing to compromise in lots of ways, but Meadows and Jordan didn’t want that to happen.

I mean, they had set this up previously, because they had gone to the House floor; they had gone to Fox News.They had really started their campaign that this was the time to fight, and if not now, when?

Latest Interviews

Get our Newsletter

Stay Connected

Jon and Jo Ann Hagler on behalf of the Jon L. Hagler Foundation

Koo and Patricia Yuen

Funding for FRONTLINE is provided through the support of PBS viewers and by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Additional funding is provided by the Abrams Foundation; Park Foundation; the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation; and the FRONTLINE Journalism Fund with major support from Jon and Jo Ann Hagler on behalf of the Jon L. Hagler Foundation, and additional support from Koo and Patricia Yuen. FRONTLINE is a registered trademark of WGBH Educational Foundation. Web Site Copyright ©1995-2025 WGBH Educational Foundation. PBS is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization.