The Enemy of the People

by Jim Acosta

  Then I heard her call my name again. “Acosta!” Apparently, somebody had told her I wasn’t in the pool that day, and so I was moved to a different area, where the print reporters were allowed to stand—not as close to where I thought the president would be, so I was disappointed.

  But then I was moved again. A separate wrangler, Annie, was now in charge. “Jim, you’re not supposed to be in here,” she said to me and dispatched me to an even less desirable press area, where, truth be told, I should have been sent in the first place.

  All this was starting to crack me up. What on earth is with these people? I thought. But I knew the reason. I had become such a pain in the ass that I warranted individual attention.

  Then the moment arrived. Trump had delivered his remarks at the Easter Egg Roll and was starting to move into the crowd. This was my moment. As it turns out, despite the wranglers’ best efforts, I had ended up in the perfect spot. It was a pretty clear example of an inexperienced press shop working in my favor, and putting Trump in a less-than-ideal situation.

  Near where I was now standing, several children were seated at a table coloring away, the tabletop covered with adorable Easter Bunny drawings. And Trump walked right over to them and took a seat at the table . . . about ten feet away from me.

  Fixated on blocking me from trying to shout a question to Trump, the wranglers had moved me three times, but the third time was the charm, at least for me.

  Then another stroke of luck came. While the children sitting among the president were working with their boxes of crayons, the music piped into the festivities suddenly stopped. It was fairly quiet.

  “Mr. President,” I called out, “what about the DACA kids? Should they be worried about what’s going to happen to them?”

  “The Democrats have really let them down,” he said. “They really let them down. They had this great opportunity. The Democrats have really let them down. It’s a shame. And now people are taking advantage of DACA and that’s a shame.”

  Trump, of course, was rewriting history. He had ended the DACA program. He had dashed the hopes of hundreds of thousands of Dreamers. It was just like the Oval Office encounter on the “shithole” countries: once again, he was lying. A follow-up question was required.

  “Didn’t you kill DACA, sir? Didn’t you kill DACA?”

  Trump did not respond. Pursing his lips in disgust, he went back to chatting with the children, who probably wondered what these adults were talking about. But his silence was clear. He didn’t have a response.

  Why did I ask that second question about Trump killing DACA? Well, to be blunt, it would have been journalistic malpractice simply to let the president get away with the blatant lie that the Democrats were to blame for ending DACA. Trump had terminated the DACA program back in September 2017 with a statement that spoke volumes:

  “We must also have heart and compassion for unemployed, struggling and forgotten Americans,” Trump had said, referring to the country’s nonimmigrants. It was another example of him pitting one group of people against another. In Trump’s worldview, it’s the immigrant community versus native-born American citizens.

  The fact that Trump responded to my question at the Easter Egg Roll at all should surprise no one. He often can’t help himself—which is great if you’re a White House reporter. And for some reason he particularly can’t seem to help himself around me. I’m not bragging, but for all the times I’ve been advised not to take Trump’s bait, it should be noted that he himself finds my questions, my bait, hard to resist, too. I suppose this is part of the reason some reporters just can’t get enough of covering this guy. Sure, Trump has endangered reporters with his “enemy of the people” rhetoric, but his impulsiveness around the cameras also makes him extremely accessible. Some reporters like the idea of the access and ignore Trump’s taunts and threats. After all, it’s a byline-rich environment.

  As for the Easter Egg incident, Trumpworld was not pleased. His 2020 campaign manager, Brad Parscale, demanded that my press credentials be pulled, a foreshadowing of events yet to come.

  Maybe it is time for Jim Acosta to get a suspension for breaking protocol. He continues to embarrass himself and @CNN. Pull his credentials for each incident, Parscale said in a tweet, with a link to a story in the Daily Caller.

  Just doing my job, which is protected by the First Amendment of the Constitution. You might want to give it a read, I replied on Twitter.

  I understand why Parscale posted his tweet. He was channeling the frustrations inside the White House, and from Trump specifically, that reporters were asking questions that interfered with the president’s message of the day. I totally get that. But asking questions of the president at photo opportunities is a long-standing practice inside the White House.

  Needless to say, this was not how Trump’s apologists and propagandists in conservative media saw things. Sebastian Gorka, a former White House official turned Republican analyst on Fox News, tweeted, Despicable. @Acosta is a self-aggrandizing activist hack. That’s rich. He’s as cartoonish as Washington hacks come.

  The conservative blog Power Line referred to me as “Resistance man Jim Acosta” and as the “grandstanding clown who covers the White House of CNN.”

  Another right-wing blog, RedState, wrote, “Acosta has no regard for time and place because, to him, every time and place is one for self-aggrandizement. . . . Either way, CNN continues to send Acosta to the White House despite his obvious flaws and agenda, which means that CNN is continuously endorsing his behavior.”

  The Gateway Pundit, another conservative site devoted to criticizing the mainstream media, offered up the headline “CNN’s Jim Acosta Gets SAVAGED for Yelling at Trump While He Was Coloring with Children at White House Easter Egg Roll.” The article’s contents, however, don’t live up to the hype, merely referring back to Parscale, Gorka, and the Daily Caller article. These sites are all part of the same ultraconservative echo chamber that, for all intents and purposes, serves as Trump’s propaganda machine. These were the same guys who were giddy with fanboy excitement when I pressed Obama on ISIS, asking him, “Why can’t we take out these bastards?” They may not remember, but I do.

  In a sign of things to come, all that hostility from the conservative movement over my work at the Easter Egg Roll appeared to inspire an outbreak of violent and threatening language on my social media and email accounts. Ever since the 2016 presidential campaign, I’d been subjected to threats and disgusting comments on social media, a fact of life for just about every reporter covering Trump these days. After the Easter Egg Roll, though, the death threats and other suggestions of violence started pouring into my Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter accounts in numbers I had never seen before.

  One disturbed person sent an email to me that was so appalling that it cannot be published in its entirety here. The message was forwarded to CNN security. To explain how the stakes had changed for reporters covering the Trump White House, I talked about this email during a private meeting at a CNN management retreat in April 2018. Former ABC News White House correspondent Sam Donaldson came to speak to the crowd and explain that my shouted questions were part of a long tradition of covering American presidents. CNN president Jeff Zucker put the threatening email up on a giant screen so other managers could see some of the hazards of the White House beat.

  Date: April 3, 2018 at 9:26:17 AM EDT

  To: Jim Acosta

  Subject: You

  You truly a scumbag . . . maybe some of us will find out where . . . you have the couth of a cockroach. You are not a journalist, you’re a carnival barker.

  The violent part of that email has been removed from the message, but you get the point. Think of the worst possible death threat you can imagine. It was that bad.

  For years, I’d been getting threats through social media. In that time, I’d seen a lot of disturbing things, the vast majority of which I was able to push aside. But the longer Trump was in office, the harder it became to ignore the reality that th
e threats were getting more disturbed. By this point, Trump had been attacking and threatening the media from the White House for over a year, and the effects of those attacks were clear, not in how our coverage had changed, but in the ever-increasing amount of hateful comments we received. The violent messages flowing into my social media accounts were becoming more intense. While my hope was that these threats would remain in the relatively harmless world of Twitter and Instagram, a part of me began to fear that they would soon become a real-world problem as well.

  Arguably worse than Trump’s fearmongering over DACA or his support for people such as Roy Moore and Rob Porter was the cruelty embedded in his administration’s “zero-tolerance” policy at the border, which officially launched in spring 2018. Time and time again with this administration, everything kept coming back to immigration and the White House’s continued demonization and punishment of people entering this country out of desperation. With people such as Stephen Miller pulling the strings behind the scenes, each month seemed to reveal an increased willingness on the part of the Trump administration to formulate policy on a foundation of ultra-nationalist ideas, with fear used to build a case for actions. The travel ban had been about Muslims of course, but “zero tolerance” was about people from Latin America. As I said before, remember the three M’s: the Mexicans, the Muslims, and the media. Like so much under Trump, with each month, things grew more concerning. Still, in many ways “zero tolerance” felt like the culmination of many of the racist ideas that had shaped both the Trump campaign and his first year in office.

  Homeland security secretary Kirstjen Nielsen was one of several top administration officials who tried to dance around this reality. She lied to the American people when she said the Trump administration did not have a family-separation policy. But as has been noted countless times, Attorney General Jeff Sessions confirmed the existence of such a policy when he issued a verbal warning to migrants in May 2018, saying that immigrant children could be separated from their parents at the border.

  “If you are smuggling a child then we will prosecute you, and that child will be separated from you as required by law,” Sessions told law enforcement officials at an event in Arizona.

  Incredibly, Nielsen continued to deny on multiple occasions that the administration had a family-separation policy. We do not have a policy of separating families at the border. Period, she tweeted in June 2018, after Sessions made his comments. Nielsen was contradicted by memos sent to officials in her own department, including her, detailing just how the separations would be handled. The memos, obtained by two government watchdog groups, revealed that the department indeed had a family-separation policy.

  Trump himself reversed course on the policy in June 2018, when he issued an executive order purportedly to put a stop to the separations. But that was only after the horrors of the policy were brought to the attention of the American people. Later, in August 2018, Ivanka Trump described the awful sight of families being broken up as a “low point” for the administration, but it was worse than that.

  There were other top officials inside the West Wing who were also horrified by the “zero tolerance” policy.

  Kellyanne Conway is one of the few officials who admitted to me on the record that the family separations were simply contrary to her religious beliefs.

  “As a mother, as a Catholic, as a person of conscience, I don’t want children ripped from their parents,” she said with some regret.

  “I also don’t want those parents lied to by smugglers and embarking on the perilous, treacherous journey to the border where the smugglers and coyotes take your money and promise you lies,” she added, returning to the West Wing talking points.

  But the zero-tolerance policy should not have come as a surprise to Ivanka or to the rest of the country. Consider the variety of ways in which the president has characterized immigrants with his nativist rhetoric. He has referred to sanctuary cities that shield undocumented immigrants from deportation as a “breeding concept.” Trump has repeatedly characterized the undocumented as being teeming with members of the violent gang MS-13, once tweeting in 2018 that Democrats “don’t care about crime and want illegal immigrants, no matter how bad they may be, to pour into and infest our Country, like MS-13.”

  Now a shameful stain on U.S. history, Trump’s family-separation policy resulted in the splitting up of more than two thousand children and their migrant parents. Some of those children were likely orphaned by the Trump administration’s zeal to halt migration across the border. An inspector general’s report later found that the administration never really had a firm handle on the actual number of separated children. The total is likely much higher than the government has admitted.

  In April 2019, a court filing from the Trump administration estimated it could take one to two years to locate thousands of immigrants who were separated by U.S. authorities at the border.

  Thinking about my own father’s story of coming to America as a Cuban refugee, it was difficult to keep my emotions in check as I considered the human costs of such a grotesque policy. Can you imagine being a child in a family that has handed over its life savings to a smuggler only to reach the border and have the U.S. government tear them apart? Take it one step further. Picture yourself as a child locked in a jail-like setting, as many of these young migrants have been, caged up with other kids. Still, in the eyes of the U.S. government, you are as much a criminal as your mother who, yes, broke the law by taking you across the border. Now continue to see yourself through this child’s eyes. You are waiting in this facility for days, weeks, maybe months, all the while wondering if you will ever see your mother again. You’re just a kid, wondering when this government-imposed child abuse will end. Would we do this to these children if they were white?

  I had been told by sources both inside and outside the administration that the White House saw these harsh tactics as a “deterrent” to illegal immigration. The thinking was that once word of this horror show at the border made its way to Mexico and Central America, migrants would think twice about fleeing to the United States. Of course, what those officials didn’t understand was that they were criminalizing desperation. These families were often escaping far worse conditions in gang-infested communities. Given the choice between possible separation at the border or death at home, where is the deterrent?

  I’ve been to the border for several assignments on the immigration issue over the course of my career. Never in my life have I seen the “invasion” of migrants Trump so often talks about. Instead, what we face at the border is a massive humanitarian challenge worsened by a U.S. policy in Latin America that has been adrift for decades. Our drug war south of the border has made the violent illegal narcotics trade wildly profitable in Mexico and across Central America. Exactly what we should all do about that ineffective policy is a debate for another book. But I will pass along what law enforcement officials have relayed to me about their experiences on the border. In many cases, they are seeing women and children, once they set foot on U.S. soil, walking right up to border patrol agents for help. Many of them aren’t looking to evade the agents. They want to be arrested. They want to file for asylum because they’ve placed their hopes in the promise of America. That’s the background I brought into the White House Briefing Room in June 2018, when I pressed Sarah Sanders on the morality of the zero-tolerance policy.

  It was on this same day that former attorney general Jeff Sessions had defended the administration’s policy by citing the Bible, paraphrasing the scripture that reads, “[O]bey the laws of the government because God has ordained them for the purpose of order.” That, of course, is not how the law works in the United States. That would mean the government could devise any kind of policy and point to the Bible and order citizens to “obey.” That’s not much of a legal justification given the separation between church and state embedded in the Constitution.

  So, I asked Sarah Sanders, the daughter of a Baptist preacher turned governor, to weigh in
on what Sessions had said.

  “Where does it say in the Bible that it’s moral to take children away from their mothers?” I asked.

  Sanders replied that it is “very biblical to enforce the law. That is actually repeated a number of times throughout the Bible.” I pressed her further on this line of thinking, wondering where in the Bible it justified the separation of children from their parents. Clearly frustrated, Sanders fired back: “I know it’s hard for you to understand even short sentences.”

  Rather than answer the question, she went on the attack, a clear sign she had lost the argument. It was all but an admission that she couldn’t defend the policy in her own wheelhouse. If the daughter of a minister can’t explain how it’s morally defensible to rip kids away from their parents, then probably nobody can.

  The next day, I got a call from Sanders. It was a bad connection, and I was in a sketchy area for cell reception, but I could make out that she was apologizing for her comment at the briefing.

  “It was the heat of the moment,” I replied.

  Listen, I don’t regret posing the question. I’d do it again and again. Truth be told, I was badgering other officials in the administration about the policy. (These guys never wanted to be quoted on the record.) One of them told me the administration would prefer to detain the families together, but that the detention facilities for adults were not suitable for children. Therein lay the problem: if you detained the parents, you had to separate the kids, the official said. The problem for the government, in some cases, was that once the families were separated, the government occasionally had trouble keeping track of it all. Kids went one way; parents went another. Most times they would be reunited. But there were incidents when it didn’t happen.

  Keep in mind that the entire family-separation policy was driven by Trump who had said he wanted to end “catch and release,” the practice of allowing border crossers to be released before a hearing. Trump insisted that only a small percentage of those released would subsequently appear in court for their hearing. Yet the Justice Department’s own data say otherwise, noting that the vast majority of migrants actually do show up for their court date. In short, Trump was exploiting a negative, and false, stereotype that migrants come into the United States only to melt into American society before mooching on the nanny state or committing crimes against law-abiding citizens. He was also willfully ignoring a number of studies clearly showing that immigrants, legal and undocumented, commit crimes at lower rates than native-born Americans.