Elaine C. Duke, then President Trump’s acting secretary of homeland security, arrived at the Roosevelt Room, down the hall from the Oval Office, on a steamy August afternoon in 2017 expecting a discussion about President Trump’s pledge to terminate DACA, the Obama-era protections for young immigrants. Instead, she said, it was “an ambush.”
“The room was stacked,” she recalled. Stephen Miller, the architect of the president’s assault on immigration, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and other White House officials demanded that she sign a memo ending the program, which they had already concluded was illegal. She did not disagree, but she chafed at being cut out of the real decision-making.
“President Trump believes that he can’t trust,” Ms. Duke, now a consultant, said in a wide-ranging interview about the 14 months she spent working for him and the consequences of the president’s suspicion of what he calls the “deep state” in government. “That has affected his ability to get counsel from diverse groups of people.”
A veteran of nearly 30 years at the Departments of Homeland Security and Defense, Ms. Duke was the deputy secretary of homeland security in the summer of 2017 when John F. Kelly, Mr. Trump’s first secretary, left to become White House chief of staff. Ms. Duke served in the top job at the department until late 2017, when Kirstjen Nielsen was confirmed as Mr. Kelly’s permanent successor.
A lifelong Republican who describes herself as “a kid from the Cleveland, Ohio, area,” Ms. Duke said she supported tougher enforcement of immigration laws, as long as it was tempered by a sense of humanity that she tried to exhibit when she volunteered to teach naturalization classes. But she described an administration that is often driven by ideology instead of deliberation, values politics over policy and is dominated by a president who embraces “hate-filled, angry and divisive” language.
“We get distracted by slogans, by maybe words we heard like the president allegedly saying ‘Haiti is a shithole,’” Ms. Duke said from her home overlooking the Occoquan River about 25 minutes south of Washington. “So we get only spun up in that, and then we never get to the issue.”
Ms. Duke is the latest in a series of senior officials who have gone public to describe — often in vivid, behind-the-scenes detail — their discomfort and sometimes shock at the inner workings of the Trump presidency.
She said she was especially taken aback, during the response to Hurricane Maria’s devastation of Puerto Rico, when she heard Mr. Trump raise the possibility of “divesting” or “selling” the island as it struggled to recover.
“The president’s initial ideas were more of as a businessman, you know,” she recalled. “Can we outsource the electricity? Can we can we sell the island? You know, or divest of that asset?” (She said the idea of selling Puerto Rico was never seriously considered or discussed after Mr. Trump raised it.)
Like former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, she chooses her words carefully. And like John R. Bolton, the former national security adviser who published a book titled “The Room Where It Happened,” Ms. Duke says she is not ready to commit to voting for Mr. Trump again.
“That’s a really hard question,” she said. “But given the choices, I don’t know yet.”
Sorry, f**k her. Another "good" Republican who couldn't bring herself to do or say anything when it really mattered, and who now wants to rehabilitate herself for the post-Trump era.
Posts: 12758 | Location: Williamsburg, VA | Registered: 19 July 2005
I rarely respond to your rather mindless trolling, but ...
It will be even more fun to watch the GOP rip itself apart over the next few years and, hopefully, sink into its own well-deserved irrelevance over time.
Posts: 12758 | Location: Williamsburg, VA | Registered: 19 July 2005
Originally posted by Horace: It will be fun to watch the petty vindictiveness wallowed in by the virtuous folk, who think they've earned the right by their uncompromising virtue.
Thank you and you can congratulate me further when I become the Deputy Secretary for Revenge.
-------------------------------- Several people have eaten my cooking and survived.
Posts: 25850 | Location: Still living at 9000 feet in the High Rockies of Colorado | Registered: 20 April 2005
