Border Wars: Inside Trump's Assault on Immigration

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The question is about your legacy. Will you be remembered as Donald Trump, the xenophobic president?

I hope not. Because I’m not that way. I hope not—I think you’re right—I think the perception might be more that way than the other. I hope not. I would like to have a great immigration policy, I’d like it to be fair. I do not want criminals coming into our country. I don’t think you do either.

Donald J. Trump

The Oval Office

June 25, 2019

PROLOGUE

PRESIDENT TRUMP WAS OBSESSING again.

It was the afternoon of December 4, 2018, just two days after his return to Washington, D.C., from a quick, three-day trip to Buenos Aires. The world was mourning the death of George H. W. Bush over the weekend, and the screens of the many televisions Trump had installed in the White House were filled with glowing tributes to the ninety-four-year-old icon. Trump was in the Oval Office, where he had just finished signing a bill to fund the Coast Guard. But as his guests were ushered out, Trump asked Kirstjen Nielsen, his secretary of homeland security, to stay behind. He wanted to talk about the wall.

That was no surprise to Nielsen. In almost every conversation she had with the president, no matter the topic, Trump eventually found his way to the wall. He raised it in the middle of meetings that had nothing to do with immigration or border security. He buttonholed her at social occasions, like after a movie screening in the White House family theater, to ask, Kirstjen, what about the wall? He called her at home, usually before 7 a.m., to complain or muse about it, often flinging f-bombs about how ugly the existing wall looked and demanding that she do something about it. Sometimes, his outburst was prompted by a fleeting image of a section of the wall during a segment on Fox News or a snarky tweet from a critic about his demands for a barrier on the southern border. Other times, it seemed to come out of nowhere. But in Trump’s mind, those close to him could see, the building of the wall and its physical appearance were directly correlated to his own success as president—they were an extension of himself. And if there was one thing Trump loved to talk about, it was himself.

It’s got to be steel bollards, Trump told Nielsen that afternoon, describing his vision for what seemed like the millionth time. This was his latest infatuation. During his campaign, Trump had said he wanted a wall built of precast cement slabs, and as president he had proudly posed for the cameras in front of massive, concrete prototypes that towered over him. But he had since shifted his focus. Border officials didn’t like concrete walls because they made it impossible to know who or what was on the other side. Besides, his homeland security advisers had explained to him, concrete was exceedingly easy to break apart. All you had to do was drill a small hole and inject expanding grout—available cheap from any Home Depot—and within twenty-four hours, the cement would begin to collapse. After many months of painstaking conversations, Trump had been convinced that heavy-duty steel posts were the way to go instead, and that was what his Department of Homeland Security had signed contracts to have built.

Love that design. Gotta be steel bollards, Trump told Nielsen. But it’s got to be the bollards right next to each other. Just the bollards. He showed with his hands what he meant—kind of like toothpicks standing straight up, right next to each other.

That might work, Nielsen said, as she explained, once again, that such a design would require some kind of stabilizing bar at the top. Otherwise, the engineers said it would be too easy for someone to pull down individual poles or spread them apart and slip through the barrier into the United States.

No. No. No, Trump said. If you have a bar at the top, people can throw a rope over it and climb over the fence. Plus, it’s ugly. This has to be beautiful. Think of it like flagpoles, he told Nielsen, using his hands again to demonstrate a series of lines placed close together. A flagpole next to a flagpole next to another flagpole. I have the best flagpole guy in the country, Trump assured her. I’ll put you in touch with him. And also, he continued, the tops of the poles have to be sharp and pointy, so that no one will dare try to climb over it. And the pointy parts should be painted black, so that they get hot in the bright sun. That will help to deter anyone trying to climb up.

By now, everyone around Trump had become accustomed to the president’s extraordinarily detailed lectures about the wall. He saw it as the embodiment of his presidency, a hulking physical reflection of his giant political brand, and he was obsessed with every aspect of it, down to the kind of black paint that should be used. Flat black! he would insist, both because it would draw in the most heat and make the structure too hot to touch, and because it would be beautiful, he said. He was reluctant to let go of the idea even after Nielsen informed him that his preferred matte black paint would cost an additional $1 million per mile of wall. Nor was Trump discouraged by the practical challenges associated with building the structure, which involved a painstaking, often impossible process of poring over property records—some so outdated they were still on microfiche—to identify who owned the land where it would be erected. Just take the land and let them sue us, Trump would say. In one meeting with a group of Republican senators at the White House, Trump had veered off topic and offered another reason the border wall had to be sharp and hot on top. It was so that birds would be less likely to land on it and take a shit, sullying his beautiful edifice.

But the president’s overarching goal was to make the experience of crossing the border into the United States as terrifying and perilous as possible. At one point, Trump became enamored of the idea of digging a trench along the border, so much so that Nielsen asked the Army Corps of Engineers to calculate the cost. (Twice to three times as expensive, they reported back.) Discussions with his advisers ensued about what would be inside the ditch: Water? Alligators? Snakes? Some of the president’s proposals were so outlandish that aides could not even tell whether he was serious. Trump was crystal clear on one point, though: the wall should be dangerous enough to dissuade immigrants from even attempting to scale it. More than once, he had instructed officials at the Department of Homeland Security to look into whether the wall could be electrified so that anyone touching it would receive a shock. He wanted the spikes on top to be sharp enough to pierce human flesh in an instant. He wanted concertina wire everywhere. Trump had vivid descriptions of what he wanted immigrants to experience if they tried to scale the wall: They would be burned, maimed, cut to pieces by the wire. I want these people to be in horrible shape if they climb up, the president would say.

It was stunning. The president was openly advocating for illegal border crossers to be maimed and burned at the border, the kind of treatment usually associated with brutal dictators or military strongmen. In fact, Trump was envious of Kim Jong-un, the ruthless leader of North Korea, for the security of his border, fortified with land mines and policed by armed guards who shot to kill. When you talk about a wall, when you talk about a border, he said in 2019 before a visit to the Demilitarized Zone, that’s what they call a border. Nobody goes through that border. Trump expressed no sympathy for people clamoring to enter the United States. To the president, they were all criminals, the kinds of dangerous people he so frequently warned about during his rallies. He was determined to keep them out, and his aides were alarmed at what he was willing to do to get his way.

On that particular day in early December, Nielsen left the meeting with yet another detailed presidential vision for his wall. This time, though, she had an idea. She would take Trump’s musings and make them into something tangible that she could use to mollify him the next time he spun into one of his regular rages about immigration. When she got back to DHS headquarters, Nielsen gave the staff at Customs and Border Protection the specs and asked them to develop a mock-up of what the president had described. She didn’t mention that it was Trump who had dictated the requirements to her in meticulous detail in the Oval Office. She had no intention of actually instructing her department to scrap its plans and build what Trump had described instead, nor was she planning to present the design to the president proactively. But Nielsen figured that having a printout of the president’s dream vision for the wall might be useful the next time Trump got angry at her for failing to be tough enough at the border and she needed a way to calm him down. A diversion of sorts. Just as Trump had used it on the campaign trail.

Donald John Trump never meant for a giant wall across the entire southwestern border to be the totem of his presidential campaign or the icon of his presidency. And he certainly never thought it would be the omnipresent reminder of his biggest frustrations in the White House. But it became all of those things, and the story of how it did is the story of Trump’s assault on immigration.

Conceived of almost by accident, out of political expediency and sheer marketing power, the wall perfectly captured the us-versus-them spirit that animated Trump’s candidacy, becoming a symbol of the same working-class disaffection and sense of alienation that he had first tapped into by questioning Barack Obama’s birthplace. For a politically inexperienced president who was untethered from any particular ideology, the wall was a centering force, an organizing principle for his promises. He would fix what was broken in the country, and what better symbol of America’s problems than a deeply dysfunctional immigration system that had become a third rail of politics, too charged for either party to touch? Trump vowed to cut through all of that—a Manhattan developer who would take a figurative hammer and nails to the task. In doing so, he would gleefully raise a middle finger to political correctness and to a Republican establishment that was looking for ways to appeal to Hispanic voters. And while he was at it, Trump would fan the flames of fear and insecurity by promising to wall off the United States from the threats he imagined were just across the threshold, the them who looked and sounded different than us.

Was it racism? Nativism? Xenophobia? Trump and those who knew him best swore that it was not. But Trump’s instincts clearly tended toward bigotry—the belief that foreigners were a threat, and that native-born Americans were inherently more deserving. And his agenda held deep appeal to white supremacists and others who had felt shut out of politics in America for years, chastised for their views and obsessed with an agenda of racial purity. The appeal for Trump was much simpler and more basic. He was a marketing genius, a branding maven. And fear of the other, he discovered at his campaign rallies, sells like gangbusters. It worked as well on audiences in places like Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania whose once thriving industrial manufacturing workers felt displaced and distraught as it did in states on the border with Mexico that had been profoundly changed by immigration and immigrants.

But as potent a campaign message as the wall became for Trump, and as strong as its gravitational pull grew after he took office, it also stood as a symbol of everything that plagued his immigration policy. It reflected Trump’s fixation with ideas that had political power but were often impossible to implement. His ever-changing dictates about its dimensions and materials were the most concrete examples of the whims of a fickle and deeply insecure president who always grasped for the solution that looked toughest. He pursued the wall over the objections of the career public servants who always knew that a wall was not the solution, just as he would disregard their advice and legal counsel on so many other immigration matters. It was a one-dimensional approach to a complex problem, in large part based on his own ignorance. His determination to build the wall over the objections of Congress reflected his cavalier approach to the law, which invited court challenges at almost every turn. The years-long war he waged over the wall revealed the bundle of contradictions that was Trump himself: a resident of one of the most diverse cities on the planet who married two immigrants, but was hostile to outsiders; a businessman enamored of cheap and readily available labor who pressed for cuts to legal immigration; a self-styled master negotiator who could not cut a deal with Congress on immigration to save his life.

Build that wall! was the incessant soundtrack of Trump’s frenzied campaign rallies, but once in office he discovered that doing so was an operational, legislative, and legal quagmire that would swallow up his political capital and leave him deeply frustrated. It was a pattern that played out on every level of Trump’s immigration agenda. His Muslim ban was an early indication of how the rush to fulfill his campaign promises could sow chaos and spark court challenges. Plotted in secret because Trump’s advisers were certain deep state bureaucrats would kill it in the cradle, the travel order embodied the president’s approach: Propose something outrageous, divisive, and potentially illegal. Watch your political opponents lose their minds criticizing it. Ask questions and provide policy rationales later. Trump’s decision to end protections for Dreamers—the undocumented young immigrants who had been brought into the United States as children—set the stage for months of fighting with Congress and revealed his conflicting instincts: a desire to be seen as compassionate even as he disparaged shithole countries in Africa and unleashed bare-knuckled tactics on immigrants. His decision to separate migrant children—some just a few months old—from their parents at the border pointed up profound conflicts inside his administration. Some had warned of the dire consequences of a plainly cruel tactic while others argued that it was the only effective way to deter a horde of migrants from rushing the border. It was one of the only times that Trump retreated under pressure, unwilling to endure a backlash that included members of his own family.

And a curious thing—perhaps predictable, in retrospect—happened as Trump’s immigration crackdown unfolded throughout the country: an actual crisis, different but no less urgent than the one he was constantly warning Americans about, began to develop and worsen at the border. Desperate groups of migrants, fleeing for their lives and looking for better opportunities from Central America, surged across the border, pleading for asylum and further clogging a system that was already under intense strain. Trump’s harsh rhetoric fueled a sense of urgency for these migrants, many of whom hastened their journey north because they believed the new American president was about to seal off the border. His deterrence tactics acted as a perverse incentive; as the administration clamped down at legal ports of entry, migrants went around them, crossing illegally. They formed caravans that were a constant irritant for Trump, a living, breathing personification of his inability to get control of the border. It was a vicious cycle perpetrated by the sitting president of the United States: Clamp down on the flow of migrants being processed at the border, prompting them to look for other ways to get across. Watch as border apprehension numbers rise. Become enraged at the uptick. Crack down still harder. Rinse and repeat.

Through it all, Trump chafed under the strictures of the law and the institutions of government itself, raging profanely about the lawmakers who rejected his demands, the judges who blocked his directives, and the bureaucrats who were unable or unwilling to execute on his wishes. Refusing to be constrained by any of them, he tried to make immigration policy on his own, through declarations on Twitter or out-of-the-blue utterances shouted over the sound of helicopter rotors on his way to Marine One. Trump grasped for ever-more extreme ways to get his hands around the border crisis, ordering the National Guard, and then the active-duty military, to the border over the wishes of his defense secretary. He defied a recalcitrant Congress and declared a national emergency to fund his border wall, drawing a legal challenge that could take years to resolve. He overruled his own homeland security secretary when she refused to turn away migrants at the border and instructed the top Border Patrol official to do just that, promising a presidential pardon if there were consequences. None of it worked. The big, beautiful wall does not exist, and at this writing in the summer of 2019, as Trump looks toward his reelection, border crossings are at their highest levels since he took office, outpacing what they were under Obama.

But for all its frustrations and failures, Trump’s attempt to upend the nation’s immigration system has had its share of successes, with vast impact on the nation. Through little-noticed rules and regulations, his administration made it more dangerous and costly to be undocumented in the United States. They targeted undocumented immigrants who had lived in the United States for decades, tagging them for immediate removal. It now takes much longer to get a visa to come to America, and the wait to become a naturalized citizen has doubled. The number of refugees admitted to the United States has plummeted to its lowest level in more than three decades.

Through demagoguery and sheer force of messaging, Trump has upended many decades of bipartisan consensus in favor of immigrants and immigration, swinging the pendulum on an issue that is fundamental to America’s vision of itself. Since the country’s founding, immigration has been at the heart of the American ideals of freedom and democracy, diversity and inclusion, opportunity and upward mobility. But it has also been at the core of the nation’s struggles with its own identity, at times yielding darker moments in which leaders have turned inward in hopes of preserving a bygone era.

Trump is one of them.

In the end, Trump always came back to the big, beautiful wall. His obsession with building it infuriated world leaders and eroded alliances, egged him on to force a damaging government shutdown, frustrated his attempts to cut deals with Democrats, and tortured his own immigration officials every day.

No one was more tortured than Nielsen. But on December 21, just four days before Christmas in 2018, she got her chance to use the mock-up of the wall that Trump had described in such detail several weeks earlier. Trump was fuming about the government shutdown that was looming and Nielsen needed a way to distract him. Sorry to interrupt, she said, pulling out a copy of the artist rendering. Instantly, his mood brightened. This was exactly what he wanted! That is beautiful, he exclaimed as he yelled out for Dan Scavino, his social media guru and the keeper of the Trump Twitter feed. I gotta tweet this out! Nielsen had a moment of heartburn. This wasn’t a serious design. Her department wasn’t really examining how, or if, it could be built. There might be environmental concerns or operational restrictions. And if the president of the United States tweeted new specs, it could affect the contracts that were already in the works for rebuilding parts of the aging fences along the border. They could probably alter the existing contracts, but the change orders to do so could be costly. It’s not really ready to be tweeted, she protested. But Scavino wasn’t about to tell Trump no, and it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. This was a president who did what he wanted.

At 5:14 that evening, Trump posted the sketch that Nielsen had handed him on Twitter. A design of our Steel Slat Barrier which is totally effective while at the same time beautiful! The picture showed what looked like tall, black flagpoles with pointy tops, one after another, towering over a Customs and Border Protection Jeep. It quickly became an internet meme, Trump’s proudest achievement instantly transformed into the object of relentless ridicule. The president’s tweet drew thousands of replies, including some that showed dogs, cats, and even people squeezing through the flagpole-like slats and into the interior of the United States.

Trump’s moment of triumph that day in the Oval Office would be just that: a moment. It quickly gave way to frustration with his inability to get funding for the wall and the broader predicament of a border crisis that seemed impossible to solve. His wall—like his immigration agenda itself—remains a work in progress, as divisive as it is ambitious, as politically powerful as it is practically limited, as much a private disappointment as it is a public source of pride. Trump’s assault on immigration became the beating heart of his administration, reflecting deep truths about the most unconventional of presidents, about whom he trusts and how he governs, and about the ways in which he has impacted the country he leads.

This is how it happened.

— 1 —

THE VESSEL

SOARING HIGH ABOVE IOWA in his private jet, Donald J. Trump permitted himself to imagine a successful campaign for the White House.

The year was 2013, and Trump had just finished a short trip to Ames, where he had spoken to the Family Leadership Summit, a gathering of evangelical Christian conservatives that had become a mandatory Midwest stop for aspiring presidential candidates. During his speech, Trump lamented the decline of the country, which he said was on the brink of collapse. He mercilessly ridiculed Mitt Romney’s losing presidential campaign and what he said was the failed strategy of Republican operatives like Karl Rove. He warned that Hillary Clinton would be tough to beat in 2016 and cautioned Republicans against cutting any immigration deal that would allow undocumented immigrants to gain citizenship. That would be a death wish for the party, he said, given that all 11 million illegal immigrants would certainly vote for Democrats. He threw in some signature Trumpian flourishes, too, drawing chuckles from the audience when he said he’d much rather talk about himself than Romney. It’s very hard for me to build up somebody else, he told the crowd of devout, churchgoing Christians. But what the hell.

In fact, Trump was preoccupied with building himself up on that trip. He was already sixty-seven years old and thinking about seizing what his advisers were telling him would be his final chance at mounting a winning presidential campaign. As a Manhattan real estate magnate and political neophyte, he had donated to liberal Democrats but done little more than flirt on the fringes of Republican politics. He had no obvious policy platform on which to run and no core set of beliefs with which the public identified him. He was known for his boastful air as a businessman, his glitzy buildings and golden hair, his brash You’re fired! television persona—and not much else. But Trump had a gut feeling that he could build a movement that would capture the imagination of a group of disaffected Americans who disdained conventional politics and felt that they were being talked down to by politically correct elites. He imagined harnessing their anger and sense of exclusion to create a powerful groundswell. Trump knew they existed, and he knew how to speak to them because he had been cultivating them for years. These were the same people who had bought into a pet cause that had recently gained purchase as he traveled around the country: Trump’s quest to prove that Barack Obama was an African born in Kenya, making him an illegitimate—indeed an illegal—president.

Trump had been stoking the birther lie for two years, bringing it up in television interviews, embracing fringe conspiracy theorists who offered detailed purported evidence, and tweeting false claims about Obama’s birth certificate. Trump repeatedly taunted the sitting president to prove that he belonged in the Oval Office. Sam Nunberg, the foul-mouthed political operative from New York City who worked for Trump, had seen the result: Trump’s popularity among hard-core Republican primary voters had skyrocketed. Nunberg thought that people who believed in the birther conspiracy could represent at least 5 to 7 percent of Trump’s base if he ran for president. But running openly as a birther was a nonstarter. The trick, Nunberg told Trump that summer, was to weave the birther theme into a legitimate campaign platform, without losing those voters.

It’s going to be immigration, Nunberg told Trump that day as they flew back from Iowa to New York on his private 757, emblazoned with TRUMP in giant white letters. Birtherism was an attempt to stoke fear about installing in the Oval Office a dark-skinned foreigner whose loyalties and patriotism were in question. The voters who appreciated the theory were also moved by Trump’s blunt talk about the evils of immigration, and they harbored deep anxiety about people who looked and sounded different from themselves. It’s interconnected, Nunberg said later. We would be able to keep those people.

Trump was captivated throughout the flight, peppering Nunberg with questions. A communications operative who relished the same kind of in-your-face politics that animated Trump, Nunberg first drew attention for his fierce opposition to construction of a mosque two blocks from Ground Zero in New York. He was a volunteer for Mitt Romney’s first presidential campaign in 2007 and signed on with Trump in 2011, long before the real estate mogul was taken seriously as a potential candidate. That day on the plane, they discussed the Republican Party’s autopsy, in which the party leaders had called for renewed outreach to Hispanics after Romney’s loss in 2012. In a campaign, Trump would take the opposite approach, seizing on the threats posed by immigrants as a way of doubling down on the fears of American citizens who were struggling economically. Immigration dovetailed perfectly with Trump’s protectionist impulses and his long-standing antipathy for multilateral trade agreements, which riled up voters who felt exploited by globalization. And it had the advantage of setting Trump apart from some of the Republican Party’s leading lights, like Jeb Bush, the former governor of Florida, and Marco Rubio, the Florida senator—two possible rivals whose positions on immigration were squishy at best. Nunberg ranted during the flight about John McCain, the Arizona senator who had tried, and failed, to pass a liberal immigration compromise with Democrats. Nobody kissed the Spanish people’s asses more than Juan McCain, okay? Nunberg told Trump. And he got less votes from the Spanish than even Mitt Romney did in 2012, Nunberg told him (though the opposite was true). This shit is not how you get their votes. Immigration was an issue Trump could take on without any real financial risk to his business, Nunberg promised. I don’t think those people are getting married at Trump Tower or Mar-a-Lago, Nunberg said with a laugh. It’s not going to cost you business.

If there was any doubt in Nunberg’s mind that immigration would be Trump’s issue, the flight dispelled it. It was, he said later, like pushing on an open door.

Trump did not know it at the time, but seven months earlier, three men had gathered in Washington, D.C., and sketched out what would become the contours of Trump’s immigration-centered campaign. They met in the shabbily chic, ornate dining room of a townhouse on Capitol Hill known as the Breitbart Embassy, which served both as Steve Bannon’s home and the headquarters of Breitbart News, the right-wing media empire he oversaw. Bannon had invited Jeff Sessions, the Republican senator from Alabama, and Stephen Miller, one of the senator’s top aides, for a dinner that would last for five hours and serve as the spark for a political alliance that would change history.

A onetime Navy officer and Goldman Sachs investment banker, Bannon in 2013 looked like neither, with his unkempt, ragged mane of salt-and-pepper hair, chinos and multiple layers of shirts, open at the collar and usually stacked under a khaki barn jacket. He was not yet a universally recognizable figure on the national stage, assailed by the left as an anti-Semite or lampooned by Saturday Night Live as a Grim Reaper–like figure behind a childlike president. But as the chairman of Breitbart, the hard-right internet outlet backed by the conservative Mercer family, he was well known in media circles and within the Republican Party as a political anarchist. Bannon had spent $1 million of his own money making The Undefeated, a hagiographic documentary about Sarah Palin, McCain’s ill-fated 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee, which had been panned by critics. Bannon used his clout at Breitbart and the megaphone of a satellite radio show popular with the far-right conservatives and white supremacists who make up the alt-right to torment establishment Republicans. He prodded the party toward a darker view of American society and culture—one in which whites felt threatened by immigrants, radically left-leaning Democrats, and, most importantly, by mainstream Republicans who he argued had forsaken the people who sent them to Washington. There was, Bannon argued, a collective unconsciousness among working-class voters, who believed that immigrants were to blame for the social and economic problems they were suffering. But politicians had to find a way to tap into those concerns, and he needed to find the perfect vessel to carry the message. Bannon railed against elites even as he eagerly rubbed shoulders with Washington reporters while pitching them on the dangers of a corrupt ruling class. A fan of apocalyptic imagery and the 1973 French novel The Camp of the Saints, in which mass migration to the West from the Third World leads to the destruction of Western civilization, Bannon argued that the Judeo-Christian West was engaged in a war against Islamic fascism.

Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III had strong views on immigration shaped by his experience as a young politician in rural Alabama. He had watched as an influx of immigrants had moved into his state’s white working-class communities, taking the grueling, low-wage jobs in poultry plants that had once been the exclusive domain of poor, unskilled Americans. During more than a decade as a federal prosecutor and state attorney general, and twenty years in the Senate, Sessions came to believe that legal and illegal immigrants posed a direct threat to the country by depressing wages, committing crimes, and competing for welfare benefits. At sixty-six years old, he was deeply influenced by the work of George Borjas, a Harvard economist who has said that immigrants have an adverse impact on the economy. An apple-cheeked, almost elfin white-haired man with a glint in his eye, Sessions was as courtly as his deep southern accent suggested. He was no fire-breather, and he did not set out to become the leading anti-immigrant voice in the United States Senate. He had never worked much on the issue before 2006, when George W. Bush had set out to forge a bipartisan comprehensive immigration reform bill that would give the undocumented immigrants living in the United States—then estimated at around 12 million—a pathway to citizenship. But during a meeting in his Senate office that year with Roy Beck, the executive director of NumbersUSA, a group that pressed for less immigration, it dawned on Sessions that he might be the only person willing to take up the cause and try to block Bush’s amnesty. Sessions turned to look out his window, clasping his hands behind his back as he pondered a future as the leading anti-immigration voice in Congress. I guess if I don’t do it, Sessions finally said, nobody’s going to do it.

Miller, then in his mid-twenties, had found a home on Capitol Hill as a spokesman and strategist for Sessions. By day, he drafted the senator’s strongly worded speeches lamenting how Congress was too complacent in the face of Obama’s overly permissive immigration policies. By night, he would pelt journalists with barrages of emails arguing that immigrants were taking advantage of native-born Americans, depressing wages, living off welfare, and posing threats to their communities. He forged an informal alliance with Breitbart, pumping out a steady stream of tips and critiques that the news site would dutifully publish, making life exceedingly uncomfortable and politically dangerous for those seeking a consensus for a comprehensive immigration overhaul.

Together, the trio couldn’t have been further out on the fringes of the Republican Party establishment in 2013. But they were convinced that their views represented those of the majority of voters. And they were determined not to give up on their vision of a very different future for America, one where secure borders meant that immigrants were no longer threats to the economic and physical safety of the native-born.

The dinner unfolded at Bannon’s home at a dark time for Republicans. Obama’s reelection victory over Romney two months earlier had sent dejected party leaders searching for answers for how they could have suffered defeat in two consecutive presidential elections. Some argued that Romney’s harsh approach on immigration—he had proposed making life so untenable for undocumented immigrants that they would self-deport—had cost Republicans the election, driving away Hispanic voters who helped Obama win key states like Colorado, Nevada, and Virginia. Miller thought that analysis was disastrously stupid. What was needed, the trio agreed, was not a more inclusive party but a raw, populist appeal to the grievances and concerns of white working-class voters. Those men and women felt betrayed by liberal politicians like Obama, who constantly cried foul about inequality but did nothing to confront the trade agreements and immigration policies that created job loss, low wages, and disappearing economic opportunity. Over steak and fish from Dean & DeLuca, the three men discussed an article entitled The Case of the Missing White Voters by Sean Trende, a right-wing writer. More than six and a half million white voters did not show up in 2012, Trende wrote, because they could not stomach Romney, who had allowed himself to be caricatured as a wealthy elitist and failed to articulate an agenda that spoke to their fears and insecurities.

As the clock ticked close to midnight, talk shifted to 2016, and Bannon turned to Sessions with an out-of-the-blue idea: We have to run you for president. Bannon told Sessions the same thing that he had told both Sarah Palin and Lou Dobbs, the Fox anchor, during similar conversations years before. He wouldn’t win the presidency. But a Sessions campaign could catapult trade and immigration to the top of the Republican agenda and reshape the party in the process. The argument was simple. Mass illegal immigration was just a scam perpetrated by the Chamber of Commerce and corporate-backed Republicans to suppress wages for unskilled black and Hispanic workers, Bannon said, and legal immigration was doing the same to skilled workers. Trade agreements were nothing more than a permission slip for unfair foreign competition, hurting working people while fattening the wallets of the elites who ran the companies that benefited. It was the same set of arguments Sessions had been making in the Senate for many years, Bannon argued. If he took it national in a presidential campaign, the populist right could seize control of the Republican machinery in Washington.

The Alabama senator demurred. I’m not the guy, he said. Even if he thought the strategy could elevate the issues that he had been toiling quietly for years to highlight, a presidential campaign would dredge up the nasty accusations of racism that his enemies raised during his failed bid to be a federal judge in 1986. In his Senate confirmation hearings that year, an African American prosecutor testified that Sessions had called him boy. Sessions had always denied the story, but if he ran for president, that would all come up again, he told Bannon and Miller. Still, the three men were captivated by the idea of finding a candidate who could seize on the deep resentments of white, working-class Americans toward the large influx of immigrants entering the country.

Sessions believed there was a cleavage between where the American people were and where the political establishment was. Bannon saw it, Stephen Miller saw it, and Sessions saw it, along with a few others. Why not give the American people what they want? What’s wrong with a lawful system of immigration that serves the national interest? The energy generated from the clash between elites and everybody else was what generates populism, Sessions liked to say. And if a politician was serving the people, instead of the elites, there was nothing wrong with honest populism.

Even if they didn’t know it that night in early 2013, the three men were setting in motion an absurdly unrealistic takeover of the Republican Party and an improbable presidency, which would usher in an equally audacious effort to upend decades of law and policy that had opened the United States to generations of immigrants. By the time their project had come to fruition, they would erode a public consensus in favor of immigration that was more fragile than most in Washington had thought it to be.

The notion of finding a candidate who could catapult those ideas to the forefront of the Republican Party was still on Bannon’s mind two months after their dinner when he heard Trump speak at the Conservative Political Action Conference, CPAC, in Washington. Trump was not a candidate for anything at the time. But his speech touched on all of the themes that Bannon, Sessions, and Miller had talked about at dinner: China’s rise, the danger of 11 million illegals gaining the right to vote, the decline of the manufacturing sector in the United States. You’re on a suicide mission, Trump told Republicans. Our country is a total mess—a total and complete mess, and what we need is leadership. Bannon’s ears perked up. Suddenly, the conversation that had started two months earlier was no longer in the realm of the hypothetical. Trump was the living, breathing embodiment of what Bannon, Sessions, and Miller had agreed was needed to bring their party back from the dead. Miller was impressed, too. Within months, Miller would tell friends that he hoped that Trump would run for president.

Raised in Queens and a longtime resident of Manhattan, Trump spent most of his life in places defined by diversity, where differences of language and national origin are a reality and multiculturalism is a fact of life. But even in his childhood, Mr. Trump and his family sought the homogeneity afforded by wealth and privilege that set him apart. Jamaica Estates, the neighborhood where he grew up, was a cloistered and mostly white enclave in a sea of more pluralistic communities, where he attended a private school before being sent to a military academy. As an adult, Trump was equally removed from the clash of cultures on the streets of New York City, overlooking them from the windows of his glitzy triplex apartment in Trump Tower. He once observed that from the top floor of his building we looked down on the sidewalk and there were thousands and thousands of people, they looked like ants, little people going all over—boom boom boom—so little, because when you’re sixty-eight floors, they look really small, but there were a lot of them.

The president himself is a grandson of immigrants, as Michael D’Antonio notes in the biography of Trump that he wrote a year before the 2016 election. Friedrich Drumpf, Trump’s grandfather, immigrated in the 1890s from Bremen, a German city on the banks of the Weser River in the northwest part of the country. He arrived in New York at Castle Garden, an entry point at the southern tip of Manhattan, where immigration officers conducted many inspections before stamping their approval, and the name Trumpf, on his papers. A barber in Germany, Friedrich Trumpf followed the mining boom of that decade to the Pacific Northwest, and later renounced his allegiance to his home country and became an American citizen. He eventually returned to New York like many immigrants, wealthier and more prosperous than he was when he arrived. After traveling back to Germany to marry, D’Antonio writes, Friedrich Trump (by then he had dropped the f) returned to New York with a pregnant wife.

If Trump took anything profound from his grandfather’s experience as an immigrant to America, there is little evidence of it. Despite having been the subject of attention and scrutiny for much of his adult life, Trump rarely built his grandfather’s immigrant story into the narrative of his own life. (In fact, one of Trump’s most curious fabrications involves claiming that his father, not his grandfather, had been born and raised in Germany, a false assertion that he has repeated at least three times as president.) His early upbringing was not without exposure to some other kinds of people; his family occasionally vacationed at the Concord in the Catskills, where they ate dinner together at tables piled with platters of kosher food, writes Gwenda Blair in her book The Trumps: Three Generations of Builders and a President. But there are few stories about Trump’s exposure to people from other cultures during his time at the New York Military Academy, where he attended high school, and later at Fordham University and the Wharton School of Business. Those early years offered few clues to explain his later embrace of xenophobia and anti-immigrant sentiment as a path to political power.

In the early 1970s, the Justice Department sued Trump and his father, alleging that the pair refused to rent apartments to African Americans, a charge that Trump vigorously denied. As Blair observed, the future president learned a lesson from the episode about surviving accusations about racism: He had also seen that being charged with discrimination did not seem to deter anyone in the public or private realm from doing business with him, she wrote. Indeed, practically speaking, the entire matter appeared to add up to little more than ‘a spit in the ocean.’

In the 1980s and 1990s, Trump’s instincts about race and immigration became public fodder when he called for the death penalty in the case of the Central Park Five, four African Americans and a Hispanic man who were convicted of brutally beating and raping Trisha Meili, a white woman who was out for a nighttime jog in Central Park. In full-page ads that he took out in the city’s four major newspapers, Trump assailed what he called roving bands of wild criminals, and later, in an interview with Larry King, he said that, maybe hate is what we need if we’re gonna get something done. Twelve years later, the convictions of the five men were thrown out after a serial rapist linked by DNA confessed to the crimes, but Trump never apologized. Then in 2011, Trump revived the birther conspiracy about Obama, instinctively tapping into a fear of the other that he felt strongly himself.

Bannon had no elegant theory about where Trump’s views on immigration came from. We needed a vessel for the anti-immigration presidential campaign, Bannon would say later, and this guy was it; it was as simple as that. He saw Trump as a modern-day Archie Bunker the lovable bigot, as the television producer Norman Lear once called his fictional character, sitting in his armchair ranting about the threat to the common folk. Trump, who lived in a gilded tower bearing his name in the heart of Manhattan, was about as far as he could be from the blue-collar Archie in his working-class home in Queens, but when he opened his mouth, it was sometimes hard to tell the difference. Some who knew Trump said the prejudice ran deep and had been building for years. He’s always been fearful where other cultures are concerned and always had anxiety about food and safety when he travels outside the United States, said D’Antonio, who spent hours talking with Trump before he became president. His objectification and demonization of people who are different has festered for decades, and he has sought out the safety of the same. Over time, those views hardened and became part of a more insidious story Trump told himself about people from outside the United States.

By the time he entered politics, Trump had grown to see immigration as a zero-sum issue: what is good for immigrants is bad for America. But even as Trump embraced those hard-line views, he remained conflicted, often describing himself to friends as benevolent and wanting to be liked by the many immigrants he employed. As a budding politician, he harbored ambitions of appealing to Hispanic voters who he believed would share his anger at illegal immigrants because they were competing unfairly for jobs. Two weeks after returning from Iowa with Nunberg in 2013, Trump met with Antonio Tijerino, the president of the Hispanic Heritage Foundation, to discuss whether the group might honor him at their annual gala. Tijerino arrived at Trump Tower with three guests, young undocumented immigrants. Sitting in Trump’s office, they shared their stories one by one, describing how they had been brought to the United States as children and raised as Americans, but each lacked the legal status to attend college, serve in the military, or work.

I came to this country when I was five and a half years old, José Machado told Trump. Machado had awoken one morning years earlier at the age of fifteen to find his mother had vanished—deported, he later learned, back to Nicaragua. Trump was shocked. Honestly, he had no idea, Machado would say later.

Trump was preoccupied with the politics of the Hispanic community. He quizzed his young guests about what they thought of the potential Republican presidential candidates—Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, Rick Perry, Chris Christie—and asked who they thought would win their community’s support in the next election. He mused about his own personal experiences with immigrants, at one point saying that some of the employees keeping the lawns beautiful and green at his hotel and golf properties were probably illegals. But the future president displayed no understanding of how the immigration system worked. Well, why don’t you just hire an attorney and get legal? Trump asked them, appearing perplexed when they insisted that it was not that simple. What do you mean that’s not possible, to just pay someone to make sure you can stay?

Trump was friendly and charming, and seemed touched by the Dreamers’ personal stories. But he also displayed flashes of what would later become his America First philosophy, at one point asking the young immigrants so who deserves to go to college? A young man who’s in a wheelchair, or one of you? The question hung in the air awkwardly. As the meeting wound down, Trump insisted that his guests accompany him downstairs to his gift shop for souvenirs for them and their families. In the elevator on the way to the lobby, Trump became quiet, looking at his visitors and seemed