In August 2018, Darren Beattie, a White House speechwriter and policy aide, was fired after CNN revealed that he’d spoken at a 2016 conference alongside several white nationalists, including contributors to the website VDARE. Later that month, Ian M. Smith, a policy analyst working on immigration at the Department of Homeland Security, resigned after The Atlantic obtained leaked emails linking him to white nationalists.
We’re about to find out how far the already impossibly low standards to which we hold the Trump administration have fallen since then. Last week, the Southern Poverty Law Center published evidence of the white nationalism of Stephen Miller, President Donald Trump’s senior immigration adviser.