I fully expect Kirstjen Nielsen, who was deposed Sunday as Secretary of Homeland Security, to find some reasonably lucrative spot to land within this country's amnesia-industrial complex—a nice think-tank gig, perhaps, or a fat book contract followed by a redemption tour in which she will explain that, yes, mistakes were made in regards to treating toddlers like lifers in stir.

At the level of politics and government from which Nielsen has just been tossed, very little is permanent. Just to name one example, the Never Trump movement among conservatives always has room for one more. Torturers and their enablers have found comfortable couches in offices and Green Rooms across the land. Nielsen, after all, just ordered that children merely be tormented and their families destroyed. So, I'm not exactly concerned that Nielsen may one day sell me an apple from a steam grate on D Street.

Deep in the New York Times account of her firing, we see the seeds of this recovery. Nielsen was just another bureaucratic victim of an incompetent, insecure president*.

Her entire time in the job was spent batting back suspicion from the president, even as he told people he liked how she performed on television and enjoyed dealing with her personally. He initially was skeptical because of Ms. Nielsen’s previous service in the George W. Bush administration, and then because she was close to John F. Kelly, Mr. Trump’s former chief of staff.

The president called Ms. Nielsen at home early in the mornings to demand that she take action to stop migrants from entering the country, including doing things that were clearly illegal, such as blocking all migrants from seeking asylum. She repeatedly noted the limitations imposed on her department by federal laws, court settlements and international obligations.

Those responses only infuriated Mr. Trump further. The president’s fury erupted in the spring of 2018 as Ms. Nielsen hesitated for weeks about whether to sign a memo ordering the routine separation of migrant children from their families so that the parents could be detained.

Please.

Nielsen looks on as Trump answers questions after signing an executive order that ended the practice of family separation. Win McNamee Getty Images

It's far too late for Nielsen to plead this particular case—that she was trying to moderate in some little way an indefensible policy composed of dozens of crimes against humanity. And that she found out that she'd be leaving the administration via the president*'s account on the electric Twitter machine does not make my heartstrings ring, either. That's the way things are done in this administration*—where, God help us, an out and out bigot like Stephen Miller now seems to be running all things related to immigration.

Mr. Trump and Stephen Miller, the president’s top immigration adviser, have privately but regularly complained about Ms. Nielsen. Lou Dobbs, a Fox News host who is one of the president’s favorite sounding boards, has also encouraged Mr. Trump’s negative views of her handling of the migrant crisis. Ms. Nielsen lost a powerful protector when Mr. Kelly, her mentor, left his job as White House chief of staff at the beginning of the year. Mr. Kelly was the Trump administration’s first homeland security secretary and lobbied for Ms. Nielsen to replace him.

Multiple White House officials said she had grown deeply paranoid in recent months, after numerous stories about her job being on the line. She also had supported the Immigration and Customs Enforcement nominee Mr. Trump withdrew, Ronald D. Vitiello, and her support for him was described as problematic for her with the president. Mr. Trump felt Mr. Vitiello did not favor closing the border, as the president threatened again to do in a tweet on Sunday night.

"Deeply paranoid"? Somebody—Miller? Kushner?—really has the knives out. Take a job with the childish Gambinos and this is what you can expect. Nielsen is not a devoted public servant who fell in with dolts and mountebanks. In March, she appeared before congressional committee and fudged herself right up to the thin borders of perjury. (Representative Kathleen Rice, Democrat of New York, actually did accuse her of lying to Congress, as had Senator Jeff Merkley back in January.) And when she wasn't hiding behind a thick cloud of bureaucratic squid ink, she was parsing the definition of what a cage is. From Vox:

"Sir, they are not cages, they are areas of the border facility that are carved out for the safety and protection of those who remain there while they’re being processed," Nielsen said during an exchange with House Homeland Security Committee Chair Bennie Thompson (D-MS).

Thompson, unimpressed with Nielsen’s euphemistic description, responded by telling her, "Don’t mislead the committee."

Nielsen briefs the press on the family separation policy in the White House briefing room. Alex Wong Getty Images

Thompson wasn’t the only Democrat who didn’t buy Nielsen’s semantic games. Under questioning from Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-NJ) a short time later, Nielsen had a hard time differentiating between CBP’s facilities for detained kids and dog kennels. "Does it differ from the cages you put your dogs in when you let them stay outside?" Watson Coleman asked.

"Yes ... it’s larger, it has facilities, it provides room to sit, to stand, to lay down —"

"So does my dog’s cage," Watson Coleman interjected.

Moreover, Nielsen defended one of the president*'s more ridiculous lies about the border.

Nielsen’s comments about cages weren’t the only ones that didn’t go over well with Democrats on Wednesday. At another point, she bizarrely refused to admit that a demonstrable falsehood Trump pushed during a recent trip to the US-Mexico border about how there have “never [been] so many apprehensions ever in our history” at the border is, in fact, false.

“I don’t have the full context of that,” Nielsen said, after Rep. James Langevin (D-RI) pressed her to simply admit Trump was wrong.

“I’m just trying to get a ‘yes’ or a ‘no,’ it seems self-evident,” Langevin replied. “Is the president misleading the American people?”

And, yes, it is something of a national crisis that even as loyal an apparatchik as Nielsen wasn't cruel enough to suit this administration*, which, in a tragic misallocation of resources, cages children and not Stephen Miller. But this is the administration* she had chosen, and nothing more becomes her public service than her leaving of it. The worst is yet to come.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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