by Jim Acosta
“It was just chaotic and messy,” a senior White House official told me, looking back at the rollout of the travel ban.
The official pointed the finger at the new chief strategist at the White House, Steve Bannon, for pushing the travel ban and other nationalist policies to the top of Trump’s agenda in the early days of the administration. Before jumping aboard the Trump campaign, and prior to his arrival at the White House, Bannon was the conservative firebrand who led the Breitbart website, a haven for nationalist fearmongering.
“We had way too many people not paying attention to what was being done, and some people doing two counterproductive things. One, fomenting fear and foisting their own agenda items. Two, pretending they had been elected to rule,” the official said.
This chaos, of course, found its way back to the White House, where some officials, such as White House press secretary Sean Spicer, were also unprepared for the fallout. But there was another top aide to the president who appeared to be much more in control of the fast-moving events than the public really understood at the time.
That mysterious individual was none other than senior domestic policy adviser Stephen Miller, who would quickly become a household name in the Trump White House. Miller was well known in Washington. Before Trump, he had served as a little-known but loyal aide to Jeff Sessions when the Alabama Republican was in the Senate before becoming Trump’s attorney general. While working for Sessions, Miller was the guy who would email reporters every day with the latest anti-immigration talking points coming from the senator’s office. And when Sessions jumped on the Trump train, Miller hopped aboard, too, as a speechwriter. Trump loved Miller’s bomb-throwing linguistic flourishes so much during the campaign that he had him serve as an occasional warm-up speaker at the rallies, allowing the once low-level staffer to make something of a name for himself out on the trail. It was a puzzling sight. There Miller was, at numerous Trump rallies, warming up the crowd mainly with his over-the-top immigration rhetoric. I remember thinking, How in the hell is this former Senate aide warming up campaign rallies for Trump? Other reporters who covered Washington and observed this had the exact same reaction. That’s Stephen Miller? On the stage? For a presidential candidate? Behind the scenes, Stephen was the enforcer on the immigration issue. When another outlet reported that Trump was going wobbly on his promise to build a border wall, Miller vowed to me that an impenetrable barrier would be built across the U.S.-Mexico border. He was emphatic, as in I could take it to the bank.
Miller was one of the main architects of the travel ban, crafting the policy but also responsible for its haphazard rollout. A senior GOP congressional source told me that Miller was impossible to work with on immigration. He did much of his dirty work behind the scenes, on calls with congressional staffers and Trump surrogates who thought the former Senate staffer was essentially chasing an anti-immigration “pipe dream,” as one White House adviser put it. Miller knew exactly what he was doing from a policy standpoint—indeed, in those early days, he may have been one of the few people in the Trump administration who did. It appeared he’d come to the White House to weaponize his biases, and the travel ban was his first order of business. If there was confusion in the White House about the severity of the travel ban and the motivations behind it, it was only because people weren’t asking Stephen Miller about it. Miller wasn’t drinking the immigration Kool-Aid. He was making it.
Miller would go on to be a key player inside the West Wing on nearly all the administration’s plans on immigration, from the travel ban to a proposal to dramatically reduce the number of legal immigrants coming into the United States to the national emergency Trump declared in early 2019 in order to build his wall on the southern border with Mexico. If a policy had anything to do with immigration, Miller’s fingerprints were on it, always with Trump’s blessing.
As Miller operated in the shadows, Spicer seemed out of the loop, becoming the face of the administration’s struggle to explain an inhumane policy. Sean was trying to sugarcoat what was clearly a draconian, hard-right turn for the nation’s immigration system, one that immediately sent a message to the world that a new, less welcoming America had arrived on the scene. The press secretary, spiraling farther down his rabbit hole of deception, insisted that the new policy was nothing more than an enhanced vetting system for travelers and migrants coming into the United States.
“It’s not a Muslim ban. It’s not a travel ban,” Spicer cried at a January 31 briefing, less than two weeks into the new administration. There was only one problem: Trump kept calling it a ban, over and over.
If the ban were announced with a one week notice, the “bad” would rush into our country during that week. A lot of bad “dudes” out there! Trump had tweeted the previous day, using the word ban.
“He’s using the words that the media is using,” Spicer maintained, to eye rolls in the Briefing Room.
But Trump would go on to undercut his press secretary, a constant source of frustration in the West Wing. Of course, Trump didn’t care. Sean could try to dance around the truth or flat-out bullshit the public, but there was no hiding what Trump was trying to do. The issues that had animated his campaign would do the same for his administration. He was demonizing immigrants to keep “the base” happy. There is just no getting around that. Immigrants would become a scapegoat for Trump in ways we had not seen from an American president in decades.
As with Trump’s attacks on the press, immigration was an issue that touched my sense of self as a journalist and an American. I’m a reporter, of course, but I’m an American first, and it was impossible to see these events unfolding without feeling tremendous sadness and concern. Watching the chaos at the airports and in the West Wing in real time, seeing the faces on some of the kids caught up in it, I found it hard not to think once more of my father and his experience coming from Cuba. He was only eleven at the time. Surely, he was scared, arriving with his mother (my grandmother), uncertain how they would assimilate in this new world. Taking in the scenes from the airports, I found it impossible not to think about his journey here.
My father’s arrival was not met with hostile crowds or a president spewing hateful rhetoric. As my dad tells the story, he and my grandmother found warmth (both the wardrobe and human kind) at a Presbyterian church in Vienna, Virginia. Rather than settle in South Florida, as so many Cuban refugees during that time did, my dad and abuela migrated again after their arrival, from Miami to Northern Virginia, right outside Washington. The people at the church in Virginia gave them coats and sweaters to keep them warm during their first DC winter. Dad went to elementary school and started to understand life as an American, experiencing kindness and a welcoming spirit. One of his teachers would pull him aside to tutor him in English until he became proficient and then fluent.
Now, I don’t want to paint a rosy picture of life for my dad and grandmother in the 1960s. Virginia, even Northern Virginia, was . . . well, Virginia in the early 1960s—probably not the best time or place to be a Cuban immigrant. I remember, as a child of the 1970s, seeing people act rudely to my grandmother—whom I called Waya, because I couldn’t say abuela when I was younger—in reaction to her broken English. To this day, I still recall one woman at a supermarket flashing a look of hatred at my Waya. The look on my grandmother’s face broke my heart. She was clearly embarrassed. So was I.
My dad graduated from high school and went on to work in grocery stores for the rest of his life. Remember that person working the checkout line in the supermarket? That was my dad. He did that (as well as other tasks, stocking groceries and so on) for forty years. Most Americans struggled to say my dad’s name, so he asked people to call him A.J., the initials for “Abilio Jesus.” Anytime I visited him at the supermarket, the customers would tell me how much they loved A.J., and my dad loved serving them. The Safeway, in the affluent suburb of Great Falls, Virginia, gave him the opportunity to meet members of Congress, famous journalists, and star players for the Washington Redskins. M
y dad would tell me all their stories. He took photos with the Redskins players and shared them with me and my sister at home.
Listening to the rhetoric in the aftermath of Trump’s travel ban, thinking about the scenes of hatred toward immigrants I’d seen on the campaign trail, I couldn’t shake the sense that this was not a country I recognized. As the anti-immigration activists lied to people and implied that newcomers to the United States were lazy parasites, I simply pictured those millions of immigrants as being like my dad, working in that checkout line at Safeway until he literally could not stand anymore and retiring only when his legs were too weak to get him through an eight-hour shift. My dad paid his taxes. He paid into Social Security and Medicare. He earned his retirement. Fortunately, he also benefited from a union at Safeway that guaranteed him a pension along with the Social Security payment he receives every month. A.J. wasn’t in the United States to game the system. My dad, like many of the young, undocumented so-called Dreamers, was brought to this country as a child. He played by the rules, worked hard, and, along with my mother, helped his two kids grow into successful adults, and is now enjoying his retirement—just what so many others deserve.
In the end, my dad flourished in part because, from the start, he had been welcomed much the way Americans had always welcomed immigrants. His success story, like those of millions of others, was made possible by the values America embodied and practiced—or at least it did up until Trump’s executive order. Stories and experiences like those of my dad and the millions of others who’ve come to the United States seeking a better life were discounted in Trump’s rush to institute his travel ban. If you came from a particular country, he and his top officials argued, you were automatically considered a danger to the public.
Trump’s Muslim ban was troubling not only for how it played out but for what it foretold about things to come. On a personal level, the rollout of the ban and the tone of the Trump administration’s position on immigration hit home. Prior to this, I’d always brought a passion for the truth to my job covering the White House, for finding the story, but it was difficult in those early weeks not to feel the weight of these attacks.
Like Trump’s war on the media, his fraught immigration policies were still in their infancy, and it would take time to understand how far his administration was willing to go to dehumanize people seeking hope within America’s borders. While I didn’t alter my coverage on air or off, in the years ahead, I would often think about the initial chaos of the travel ban. Trump’s attacks on this critical part of American life were personal for me long before he turned them into policy.
* * *
IN THIS INITIAL PUSH FOR THE MUSLIM BAN, THE ADMINISTRATION made it clear it had no problem erasing the boundaries between its immigration ideas and its fight with the media to suit its ends. This foreshadowed much of what was to come as the Trump team battled with the press, in large part, to clear the way for his policy designs for the nation.
During the first week of February, less than one month after moving into the White House, Trump, along with his counselor Kellyanne Conway, began to mischaracterize the media’s coverage of terrorist attacks, pathetically insisting that somehow the press downplayed this threat out of some kind of political correctness run amok. Speaking to the U.S. Central Command on February 6, Trump made the absurd statement that news outlets didn’t report on terrorist attacks. Anybody who has watched CNN’s rolling coverage of such incidents is obviously fully aware that this is an outlandish lie, but Trump let loose that whopper anyway as he attempted to defend his travel ban to the public.
“It’s gotten to a point where it’s not even being reported,” he told the Central Command. “And in many cases the very, very dishonest press doesn’t want to report it.”
This assault on the press followed an outright falsehood that came just a few days earlier, when Conway complained to MSNBC’s Chris Matthews that the media had not covered something she referred to as the “Bowling Green massacre.”
“I bet it’s brand-new information to people that President Obama had a six-month ban on the Iraqi refugee program after two Iraqis came here to this country, were radicalized, and were the masterminds behind the Bowling Green massacre,” Conway said.
It was “brand-new information” because there never was a Bowling Green massacre. Conway, who later said she made a misstatement, had her facts wrong in an astounding way. There was a case in Bowling Green, Kentucky, in which two Iraqi men were arrested for providing weapons to al Qaeda. But the men never carried out an attack of any sort in Bowling Green.
Despite that embarrassing episode for Conway, the White House continued to push the false narrative that members of the press were under-reporting terrorist attacks and that this served as justification for the travel ban. One day after Trump’s comments to the Central Command, the White House released a list of seventy-eight terrorist attacks the West Wing claimed the media had not covered sufficiently. It was a laughable mess. Covering a time period stretching from September 2014 to December 2016, the White House list included, incredibly, the 2015 massacre in Paris and two mass shootings in San Bernardino, California, and Orlando, Florida. All three of these attacks were covered extensively by nearly every major news outlet in the United States for days on end. As I went through some of this on the air for CNN, I relayed the fact that the document was pure amateur hour, not to mention filled with misspellings. Just as Spicer had alleged from the lectern on the day after the inaugural, the White House was once again accusing the press of misreporting something when we hadn’t.
“A head-scratcher” is how I described it on the air to CNN’s Erin Burnett as we reported on the list that night. What an understatement!
Michael Short, an aide in the White House press shop, later emailed me to complain about my report, calling it “shoddy.” But it was the administration’s work that was shoddy. To include major terrorist attacks in such a list and claim they weren’t being reported on was simply another example of the White House presenting “alternative facts” to the American people. And as in the case of the inauguration crowd size, the main thrust behind the terrorist attack list offered up by the White House was easily disproven with a simple Google search.
Shortly after that ridiculous White House list was released, on February 10, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals dealt a major blow to Trump’s initial travel ban, ruling 3–0 against the executive order, stating that the public has “an interest in free flow of travel, in avoiding separation of families, and in freedom from discrimination.”
Trump had lost, and he didn’t take it well, tweeting in all caps, SEE YOU IN COURT, THE SECURITY OF OUR NATION IS AT STAKE!
The battle over Trump’s travel ban would continue. The White House modified the ban twice more and ran into more roadblocks in the U.S. legal system, before ultimately receiving a favorable decision at the Supreme Court, which ruled that the third version of a ban could be rolled into action.
But all that was months ahead. In early February 2017, Trump was angry. He was being thwarted, not only by a news media that refused to roll over, but also by a U.S. justice system that was flexing its muscles as a coequal branch of the government. In the early days of the Trump administration, it was a sign of life from American democracy. The system, while under stress, was working.
Still, the cause for concern was everywhere you looked. For the moment, the issue of the Muslim ban had come to a halt, but in the aftermath, I began to understand, perhaps more clearly than ever before, just how difficult the coming months and years would be. What had been more academic in the weeks before Trump’s inauguration had hardened into reality. As my colleagues and I were reporting on the latest twists and turns of the new administration, trying to keep up with a nonstop news cycle that had not relented since the days of the campaign, it felt as though we were stepping carefully across a minefield. One small screwup, and Trump would call us “fake news.” We were constantly aware of that danger. But keep in mind that
when he’d use the term fake news, he wasn’t really talking about bogus reporting. Negative stories were what he cared about. He was just trying to bully the press into giving him more favorable coverage.
“He’s trolling you guys,” a Trump source of mine would tell me time and again. In other words, what was coming out of the White House was designed to drive us nuts and ratchet down what Trump perceived as negative coverage. He wanted us to pull our punches, use kid gloves, and soften the impact of our reporting. The heart of this strategy was, to put it crudely, shoot the messenger. Again and again, Trump was trying to shape the news by denouncing those covering it.
Now, every administration takes issue with its coverage by the press. Every administration complains about how stories are aired and characterized. Republicans in particular have been waging a war on the “liberal” media since the Nixon administration. Yet, this was something else entirely. Never had an administration been so combative with the media, or used open hostility as a way to push its policy agenda. Never had an administration been so willing to distort the truth publicly, or to rely on fabrications to justify its behavior. What had begun during the campaign as a way to get applause and cheers from raucous crowds at Trump rallies was now a bludgeon to elicit the positive coverage Trump craved. And this would become the new normal for the White House press corps.
What wasn’t lost on me in all this was a simple reality of Washington power following Trump’s election: Republicans controlled all three branches of the federal government. And though Trump would spend the next two years silencing one-off GOP dissenters, he was excellent at strong-arming Republicans on the issues that mattered to him. As it soon became clear, Republicans, despite their private frustrations with Trump, were not about to stop him, they were not going to use their powers in Congress to check his worst instincts.