Party Of One

President Trump has remade Republicans in his own image. Will it cost the GOP votes in the November elections? A Senate race in Arizona is ground zero.

- Nina Burleigh

A BLOW-DRYER HOT WIND DISTORTED THE MICROPHONES as Arizona Representative Martha McSally and Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen took their places at an outdoor podium in the Sonoran Desert. It was late May, and the two stood under the baking sun on sandy soil near a section of steel border wall in Nogales. “If you crossed the border illegally with your family, we take the parents, and we prosecute them,” Nielsen said, as U.S. agents were separating parents from children from Tijuana, Mexico, to McAllen, Texas. “People seem to think there should be no critical consequences if they have children.” A cluster of TV cameras and a crew from the Spanish-language Univision recorded the scene.

As chair of the Homeland Security subcommittee on borders, McSally had invited Nielsen to meet with “border stakeholders.” With the wall and a few ranchers in 10-gallon hats as backdrop, and border patrol helicopters maneuvering above, Nielsen responded to a question about family separations, which were just beginning to penetrate the national news cycle. She said incoming families contribute to “lawlessness and insecurity at our borders” and classified the children as fake news. “In the last couple of weeks,” she said, “there has been a massive dishonest misinformation campaign by people who do not want to see our borders secure.”