Recent Books
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immigration at his rallies, the ground-
work was laid for immigration policy to
become the “beating heart” o Trump’s
presidency. The Muslim travel ban, the
crackdown on undocumented immi-
grants, the cuts in the number o refu-
gees accepted, the much-invoked wall,
the inveighing against caravans o
migrants, and the calculated cruelty o
the family-separation policy have
dominated news cycles for almost three
years. Davis and Shear, New York Times
reporters who have long covered these
subjects, wisely saved much o their best
material for this book. They have
assembled here a view from within the
White House, including through ac-
counts o interactions with the president
that verge on the surreal. Trump’s
immigration policies stem from impulse,
ignorance about substance and legality,
deep bigotry, and—their saving grace—
bureaucratic chaos and incredible
ineptitude. The book reveals much about
how Trump thinks, why he instinctively
“grasped for the solution that looked
toughest,” and, in hair-raising insider
detail, how he governs from day to day.
I journalism is the ¥rst draft o history,
this volume is a solid second draft.How the South Won the Civil War:
Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing
Fight for the Soul of America
BY HEATHER COX RICHARDSON.
Oxford University Press, 2020, 264 pp.
Richardson draws a straight line from the
radical inequality o the pre–Civil War
South to its resurrection a century later
in the modern conservative movement in
the West. There, “Confederate ideology
took on a new life.” An oligarchic econ-
omy emerged in the region, centered on
mining, oil extraction, and railroads, which,
like the cotton economy o the South,
depended on lots o capital and masses o
unskilled workers. In the late nineteenth
century, the protections o the 14th
Amendment (adopted in 1868) did not
apply to Native Americans and were also
interpreted in the West to exclude
Chinese and other immigrants, leading to
what eectively amounted to what
Richardson terms “the shadow o legal
slavery.” Forgetting the federal govern-
ment’s role in giving land to homestead-
ers and investing in irrigation, so-called
movement conservatives in the West
embraced the myth that all a true Ameri-
can needed from the government was to
be left alone. As reected in Barry
Goldwater’s Stetson and Ronald Reagan’s
broad-brimmed hat, the free-roaming
cowboy became the movement’s emblem.
Border Wars: Inside Trump’s Assault on
Immigration
BY JULIE HIRSCHFELD DAVIS AND
MICHAEL D. SHEAR. Simon &
Schuster, 2019, 480 pp.
Ever since a staer hit on the idea o
“build a fence” as a mnemonic to remind
candidate Donald Trump to talk about