Donald Trump has been itching to fire his Secretary of Homeland Security, Kirstjen Nielsen, for a long time. She implemented Trump’s infamous family separation policy at the border, but that wasn’t good enough for Trump.
Yesterday, she went to see Trump, planning to discuss with him her plans to increase restrictions on migrants fleeing gang violence in Central America, in order to please her boss.
Nothing doing there: yesterday afternoon, our Twitterer-in-Chief announced that Nielsen has resigned. Aides familiar with the situation said that it was clearly a forced resignation (https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/07/politics/kirstjen-nielsen-homeland-security/index.html?no-st=1554724593; https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/07/us/politics/kirstjen-nielsen-dhs-resigns.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share), and Trump named, as Acting Secretry of DHS, a placeholder.
It’s more than likely that Trump’s 33-year old chief anti-immigration hardliner, Stephen Miller, was pushing for Nielsen’s ouster (https://www.politico.com/story/2019/04/07/stephen-miller-trump-immigration-1260431).
As soon as Nielsen left the White House, associate solitary reporter Johanna Jones asked Trump to tell her whom he plans to name as Nielsen’s permanent replacement.
“That’s easy, Johanna,” Trump said. Who else but Stephen Miller?”
Associate solitary reporter Melissa Smith, who covers Congress for us, asked Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell about the likelihood of Miller being confirmed by the Senate.
McConnell did not hesitate. “Melissa, to tell you the truth, I’ve been having a lot of trouble with Trump recently. There’s absolutely no chance that we would even think about confirming Stephen Miller, because he’s even more of a flame-thrower than Trump is.” Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin), the Chairman of the Senate’s Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, nodded vigorously in agreement with McConnell.