There’s a particular kind of horror that comes from watching a powerful man describe, in clinical detail, how he wants to hurt innocent people and realising that the only thing standing between his fantasy and its execution is a room full of aides, scrambling to remind him what is illegal and what is not. That’s the horror I experienced in late 2018 and early 2019, when I was helping to lead the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) under Donald Trump.

And that was in his first term, when that room full of aides still existed. Now they’ve all been replaced by ghouls just as monstrous as he is.