Disorder at the border and a blundering European tour

In the 12th instalment of our series recapping an unprecedented presidency, Joe Sommerlad looks at a maligned homeland security secretary and the president’s return to Europe for D-Day commemorations

Homeland security Kirstjen Nielsen watches a Trump address on the border (AFP/Getty)

While the fallout from the Mueller report dominated the national news agenda, Donald Trump was laughed at for referring to Apple CEO Tim Cook as “Tim Apple” during a tech summit but otherwise busied himself by returning to the idea of a “crisis” in illegal immigration threatening to overwhelm the southern border.

Not content with raking in the funds for his wall over Democratic objections, the president threatened to close the border entirely on 4 April 2019 if Mexico did not act to stop the flow of illegal narcotics northwards, visiting the under-construction barrier in Calexico, California, a day later to inspect progress.

He was accompanied on that trip by his homeland security secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, who had been in the job since December 2017 and found herself the reluctant face of the administration’s heartless policies, not least the separation of families.

Trump announced her dismissal just three days later, prompting The New York Times to report that he had “regularly berated her” in early morning phone calls for not implementing even harsher measures as he became increasingly fixated on illegal entry statistics.

“For the rest of her life people will look at her and think, ‘Oh, that’s the woman who put children in cages'”, one New Yorker pundit commented of the hapless Nielsen, while late night host Stephen Colbert wondered who would be next in line for her job.

“Get ready for secretary of homeland security Pennywise!” he joked, alluding to the cannibal clown demon from the horror blockbuster It (2017).

Incredibly, that made Nielsen the second member of the administration to be likened to Stephen King’s evil sewer-dweller, following Saturday Night Live imagining Kellyanne Conway in the role, pursuing CNN’s Jake Tapper.

The Washington Post reported on Trump’s ongoing attempts to micromanage the border in May, saying he considered early work on his wall “ugly” and had demanded it be topped with spikes and every square inch of it painted black, on the theory that the colour would better absorb the heat from the blistering sun, making it tougher to climb.

A military engineer quoted by the newspaper identified an obvious problem with this: “Once you paint it, you always have to paint it.”

The story was just the latest embarrassment over the wall – with more to come.

Trump’s jaunt to Calexico had seen a shiny commemorative plaque affixed to the steel fencing (it was no longer being built with concrete, as voters had been promised), only for it to be pointed out that the section in question had actually been erected under Barack Obama in 2009, an error the president had fallen into more than once already on Twitter when posting pictures of “progress” that actually just documented pre-existing sections being replaced.

Known for his combative – not to say bullying – approach to statecraft, Trump managed to cause a good deal of offence in this period, beginning with his deeply undignified decision to tweet a meme from supporter Carpe Donktum on 4 April depicting Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden “molesting himself” during an apology video in which he addressed allegations over his conduct towards women.

Aside from being an unthinkably crude and unstatesmanlike act of trolling, the tweet merely served to betray Trump’s fear of Biden as a challenger, a concern that would be borne out when he trounced him at the ballot box 19 months later.

The other side of a trip to Japan when the president managed, from nowhere, to resuscitate his feud with the long-dead John McCain, he returned to London for a three-day state visit that began with him insulting the city’s Muslim mayor before Air Force One had even landed at Stansted.

“Sadiq Khan, who by all accounts has done a terrible job as Mayor of London, has been foolishly ‘nasty’ to the visiting President of the United States, by far the most important ally of the United Kingdom,” he tweeted. “He is a stone cold loser who should focus on crime in London, not me.”

Khan had opposed the president’s visit and responded by dismissing his “childish insults” but the two had previous.

The mayor had denounced Trump’s ignorance of Islam in 2016 and been challenged to an IQ test for his pains before subsequently lashing out at his “shameful and cruel” travel ban, the president in turn accusing Khan of doing a “terrible job” in responding to the London Bridge terror attack of June 2017.

The visit got more ill-tempered when Trump found he couldn’t pick up Fox News at Winfield House, the US ambassador’s residence by Regent’s Park, but the mood did improve when he met Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall at Buckingham Palace and clearly relished the two 41-gun salutes, guard of honour and white-tie-and-tiara Welsh lamb banquet he felt he and his family deserved.

A mere 250,000 protesters disagreed, and Trump would only slightly undermine the goodwill by subsequently referring to Charles as “the Prince of Whales” on Twitter by mistake.

Following trade talks with Theresa May at Downing Street, the Trump entourage visited Portsmouth to observe celebrations marking the 75th anniversary of D-Day, surely the only time in his life he would be serenaded by Sheridan Smith hammering out “We’ll Meet Again”.

For all the fine poetry and spectacular RAF fly-pasts, the highlight of the day was surely the glorious moment when the Trumps met a group of elderly war veterans and 93-year-old Thomas Cuthbert of Essex shook Melania’s hand, gave her the once-over and said to her husband wistfully: “If only I was 20 years younger…”

“You can’t take him anywhere,” Cuthbert’s daughter tutted.

D-Day ‘worked out OK’, Trump told Fox’s Laura Ingraham

The delegation made a brief stopover in Ireland next, where Don Jr and Eric Trump went on what they optimistically called a pub crawl in the village of Doonbeg, County Clare, and the latter was photographed pulling a disastrous pint of Guinness (all head) and making an “absolute abomination” of a glass of Smithwick’s Red Ale.

Observing further commemorations in Normandy on 7 June, their father caused more offence by giving an interview to Fox’s Laura Ingraham directly in front of a soldiers’ cemetery, which he spent disparaging Nancy Pelosi rather than paying his respects.

D-Day “worked out OK”, he told Ingraham.

No history buff, Trump had reportedly once asked John Kelly what Pearl Harbour was “all about” while visiting the USS Arizona Memorial in Hawaii.

His return home was immediately marred by a new rape allegation when Elle magazine agony aunt E Jean Carroll accused him of attacking her in the changing rooms of New York’s Bergdorf Goodman department store in the mid-1990s.

The president denied the story and claimed to have never met her – a lie Carroll easily disproved with a photo of them together – and said that, anyway, “she’s not my type”.

The writer subsequently sued him for defamation. The case is ongoing.

Read the full The Trump Review series here