First Lady Melania Trump's private complaints reached the President and changed how he spoke about his own immigration crackdown. After she objected when people she knew were deported, President Donald Trump began telling aides that Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff who drove the aggressive deportation campaign, had pushed too far, according to an inside account of the administration's midterm year published on Wednesday, drawn from officials and people familiar with the conversations inside the White House.
The First Lady's objection was a rare warning that actually landed. On immigration, the President went back and forth through the year, at times telling aides he wanted the crackdown to go even harsher. Republicans in Texas and Florida privately raised their own concerns with the White House, and on Election Day, counties with overwhelmingly Hispanic populations broke heavily for Democrats.
Most other warnings never got through. When aides brought the President polling in the spring and summer showing voters worried about affordability, he dismissed the numbers as fake, a senior administration official said, pointing out in one meeting that he had not commissioned any polls in 2016 and won anyway. At times, the President told aides he did not care about the midterms at all; the official said he had wearied of domestic politics and cared more about foreign affairs and how history would remember him.
Allies including Newt Gingrich and Sean Hannity quietly pressed him to focus on costs, and Senate Majority Leader John Thune repeatedly tried to raise affordability during calls the President made about scrapping the filibuster. When the President wanted to veto a popular bipartisan housing bill, he told one adviser that nobody cared about it; aides eventually talked him into letting it become law without his signature, so the housing help voters were asking for became law all the same.
The President also pushed aside stronger Senate candidates in four states in favor of loyalists, and Democrats won all four races. "It really didn't have to be this way," said Rep. Ralph Norman, who lost South Carolina's Republican Senate primary after the President intervened.
A White House official responded that the President was not indecisive and always sought out feedback, and advisers credited him with holding 30 rallies for candidates. No change to immigration policy and no change in Miller's position has been announced: what the account documents is the President's own private judgment, after the First Lady's complaint, that the man running his deportation campaign had gone too far.
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