Kirstjen Nielsen Wasn't Cruel and Lawless Enough for Trump. That Doesn't Exonerate Her.

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https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/04/kirstjen-nielsen-legacy-family-separation-trump-mcaleenan.html

Kirstjen Nielsen Wasn’t Cruel and Lawless Enough for Trump. That Doesn’t Exonerate Her.
By Dahlia Lithwick
April 08, 20191:48 PM


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That she will likely be followed by someone far worse hardly makes Nielsen—who signed off on McAleenan’s policy, lied about it repeatedly, but wouldn’t reinstate it after it had been enjoined in court—the darling of the law and order set. Like Rex Tillerson, Jeff Sessions, Kelly, and multiple others, Nielsen seems less to have had an ethical red line of lawlessness that she wouldn’t cross than to have been finally fired for declining to cross one of those lines. There is a difference. And whether lying about monstrous acts is better than owning them outright is an ethical calculation for future historians to sort out.

There are now a couple of ways that Nielsen’s career and public life will play out. One way was suggested on Monday by CNN’s Jeffrey Toobin, who hazarded that Nielsen will forever be tarnished by her complicity with the cruelest public action taken by the Trump administration. “Here is this woman who was a reasonably admired bureaucrat,” Toobin observed. “For the rest of her life people will look at her and think, ‘Oh, that’s the woman who put children in cages.’ ” Maybe. Or perhaps she will be scooped up as a Fox News pundit or given a sweet academic post from which to “explain” the Trump age to future historians. She will leak about the president’s infirmities and sit on a vaunted stage at Davos someday to slyly complain about him. Because whoever comes next will surely be “tougher”—which is to say even more vicious—she will seek to be remembered as the temperate one.

We should not forget, though, the monstrousness of the policy Nielsen implemented when it was her turn. Reports this weekend suggest that the government may take up to two years to even identify the thousands of traumatized children who were taken from their families as a result of that horrific policy and its mangled planning and execution. Nielsen will forever be the face of that policy because she found it useful, precisely until it was not. To borrow from Bouie’s construction, Nielsen was Trump but with more obfuscation. If she wants to clear her name, it shouldn’t come by way of press leaks and corporate boards and winking asides about Trump’s volatility. It should come with a full and honest reckoning about what she was willing to oversee and why she lied about it. Being fired by Trump isn’t an act of Resistance. It’s the inevitable outcome of a job in this White House. And being infinitesimally less compromised than whoever follows you isn’t a redemption story. It’s the thing of nightmares.