in recent months, after numerous stories about her job being on the line."

It was a bit sad watching Nielsen briefly talk to reporters staked out at her Alexandria home yesterday, thanking the president, offering no hint of their disagreements and taking no questions.

But the press had little sympathy for Nielsen. A Times editorial said she "enforced cruelty at the border."

CNN's Jeff Toobin said Nielsen will be remembered as "the woman who put children in cages."

The Daily Beast's Michael Tomasky: "Kirstjen Nielsen Was Heartless, But Not Heartless Enough for Trump."

But if she is forever defined by the 2018 breakup of families, Nielsen was not an ardent advocate. She "hesitated for weeks about whether to sign a memo ordering the routine separation of migrant children from their families so thatthe parents could be detained," the Times says. Yet it was she who got hammered at Hill hearings when she had to defend the policy.

Trump will name Customs and Border Protection chief Kevin McAleenan, said to be more of a hard-liner, as her acting successor.

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The stakes for the president are laid out in a Washington Post piece that also includes his on again, off again assault on ObamaCare:

"Trump's dark warnings pose a central conundrum for his reelection effort: Can he win the White House a second time by railing against the very problems he promised to fix?"

That hearkens back to Bannon's warning to Trump about the border and the wall as the key to 2020 — and explains why Kirstjen Nielsen