Two New York Times Washington correspondents provide an inside account of the defining issue of Donald Trump's presidency: his steadfast opposition to immigration to the U.S.
... exquisitely reported ... reveals the mercurial unreliability and instability of the president. Davis and Shear perform this contextual service time and again throughout their book, which is essential reading for those searching for the 'beating heart' of the Trump administration ... Davis and Shear are scrupulously fair reporters. They give Trump’s minions a respectful hearing ... Davis and Shear are at their best describing the chaotic inner processes of the administration. They are less successful when they attempt to describe the effects of the crackdown on actual human beings — or give insight into the perpetrators of the Trump policies. They wait 280 pages to offer a biographical sketch of Miller, which raises more questions than it answers ... Davis and Shear are right: Immigration demagogy is at the 'heart' of the Trump show — and the Trump show is at the heart of our tragic decline as a civil and humane society.
In the same way that Trump’s obsession with the wall is about more than his wanting to build a barrier to protect us from the 'invasion' of immigrants at our southern border, Border Wars is about more than his administration’s strategizing and ill-fated efforts to make this happen ... If you have kept up with the news, many details you’ll find in Border Wars may sound familiar, but what’s new here is how each initiative concerning the construction of the wall or attempting to stem the flow of immigrants, followed by a degree of shortsightedness, followed by disastrous results (see: family separation), followed by a high level of damage control, is part of a larger pattern ... As might be expected in a book by New York Times reporters, Border Wars avoids polemics in favor of a fact-based account of what precipitated some of this administration’s more brazen assaults on immigration ... Hirschfeld Davis and Shear had only to state the facts and allow readers to draw their own conclusions. Trump has already taken care of impaling himself.
... a vivid, revelatory account of President Trump’s attempts to overhaul the U.S. immigration system ... Davis and Shear’s fast-paced, richly detailed narrative underscores the chaos surrounding the White House without minimizing the fact that it’s now 'more dangerous and costly to be undocumented' in America than it has been in decades. The result is an essential inquiry into Trump’s bet that his 'take-no-prisoners' approach to immigration will win him the 2020 election.
