Bad News for Progressives: Donald Trump’s Most Vile Spokesperson Is Gone |
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The Department of Homeland Security announced on Tuesday that its top spokesperson, Tricia McLaughlin, would depart the agency after just over a year on the job. To most, McLaughlin is probably best known for slandering Americans wounded or killed by immigration agents—including Renee Good (whom she accused of “domestic terrorism”) and Alex Pretti (whom she claimed sought to “massacre law enforcement”). Inside the legal system, though, McLaughlin is known for something else: Actively sabotaging the Department of Homeland Security in court through her crass, often false public statements. Most notably, McLaughlin has gained notoriety for smearing judges who rule against the Trump administration, deriding them as “activist,” “craven,” “out of control” partisans engaged in “judicial sabotage,” “race-baiting,” and stoking “the embers of hatred.”
President Donald Trump has praised her tactics, but they have done her department no favors in front of these judges. It was perhaps inevitable that judges would bristle at a government spokeswoman deriding them as hacks. But McLaughlin did not merely alienate the judiciary; she consistently undermined the administration’s legal arguments, sabotaging lawyers’ efforts to cover up unlawful conduct by boasting about it on social media. Judges then cited these posts to refute the administration’s claims and rule against it. Few if any government spokespeople have done more to kneecap their own agency in court than McLaughlin.
The gap between this administration’s public statements and legal assertions has been a stubborn problem since Trump returned to office, but nowhere is it more chasmic than DHS. In their briefings, government lawyers finesse a sanitized version into a clean narrative of law-abiding responsibility. At hearings, they insist that the department adheres to high standards of professionalism and good-faith compliance. But McLaughlin’s confrontational declarations to the press routinely punctured this fiction. And lawyers suing DHS pointed judges toward her messaging as evidence of the agency’s real actions........