Jim Vandehei: ‘Politically’ Trump’s ‘Calculating That Immigration Will Be a Winner Again’

EXCERPT:

VANDEHEI: "Politically he’s calculating that immigration will be a winner again. You’re not going to get a softer line. You’re going to get someone running Homeland Security who takes a much harder line than someone who already had a pretty hard line. The President wants somebody who will really stretch what legal authority they actually have and really push to ultimately shut down the border. He tries to portray this as a crisis of historic proportion. It’s definitely a problem. Even Obama Administration officials say that we have a problem at the border. The problem is that it's a complicated one to solve because so many of the people that are coming here are coming from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, they’re trying to seek asylum because they're fleeing instability, gangs, basically bad places to live. So just beefing up security at the border won’t necessarily fix that problem in the short term. The bigger problem, the thing we should pay attention to is you now have this pattern where almost everybody leaves this White House bitter, especially in these national security positions. And where that matters is it just makes it so much harder to find somebody who will then come in and be the secretary of defense, somebody who really wants to be a full-time chief of staff, someone who wants to come in and truly run the Department of Homeland Security, because in areas that the President cares about, he’s going to intervene and he'll want you to do things that are above and beyond what current law and certainly current precedent might allow you to do. And that's a jam because at some point, and we've been talking about this for a long time, something bad will happen and you really do want really good people in the right positions to make good decisions based on what’s doable and what’s not doable. And little by little that’s getting harder."