Dear Commons Community,

Jeffrey Toobin, CNN chief legal analyst and New Yorker staff writer, said Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen’s abrupt resignation is a cautionary tale of “what happens when you go to work for Donald Trump.”

“He is the great reputation killer,…” Toobin said.

“Here’s this woman who  was a reasonably admired bureaucrat, and for the rest of her life, people will look at her and think, ‘Oh, that’s the woman who put children in cages, that’s the woman who broke up families across the border.’ And you know what? They’ll be right. Because she implemented that policy. … She’s going to get what she deserves.”

Trump announced Nielsen’s ouster on Sunday and said she’d be replaced by Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin McAleenan. She had repeatedly clashed with Trump privately over his anti-immigration demands, but publicly defended the administration’s zero-tolerance policy of separating children from their parents at the border.

Nielsen infamously claimed in testimony before Congress that the policy was “not a policy.” She also quibbled over the definition of a cage, arguing during a House Homeland Security Committee hearing last month that the chain-link pens in which minors were being held were simply “detention space[s].”

Pennsylvania Avenue is lined with the career corpses of the dozens of people who have worked for Donald Trump.  He is a user and could not care less about human decency or loyalty when it comes to the people who have worked for him in government.

Tony

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