Most of us, even the best-intentioned, are to some degree undermined by a key logical fallacy of our times: that Donald Trump is the sole actor in our national nightmare, that he alone is subverting the constitution and betraying the national interest, that he alone is to blame for where we are. I count myself among the guilty; it’s hard not to think this way to at least some extent, given the president’s unique mixture of malice, bravado, sociopathy, and sheer improbability. And after all, he IS the president.
But I think at this late stage of his catastrophic term in office, this emphasis on the man over the larger movement he seems to have coalesced and accelerated is not at all helpful. It is blinding us to the full danger of the moment, allowing his weaknesses to hide the clear strength, both in numbers and in frenetic, hateful energy, of a white nationalist, authoritarian movement that is asserting power and gaining strength via his presidency.
The most obvious way to think of this is that the president is hardly coming up with the full range of his crackpot policy ideas and strategies of hate and division all by his lonesome. He’s surely got an instinct for demonizing the vulnerable and stoking the prejudices of his base, but he’s been aided by advisors who, using their own ideology and experience, have worked to bring into reality what the nation is experiencing as Trumpism.
White nationalism is at the center of Trump’s governing strategy and substance, and no one appears to have been more important to helping him articulate it than Stephen Miller, the former aide to Senator Jeff Sessions who became the architect of this president’s unforgivable immigration policy: a policy that looked back to the America’s darkest days of immigration restrictions for inspiration, and sees no act too cruel so long as it’s perpetrated on those lacking the virtue of white skin. There’s already been ample documentation of Miller’s white nationalist links; but as this Rolling Stone article makes clear, Miller in turn is acting in concert with fellow travelers of anti-immigrant, white nationalist sentiment within the U.S. government. These include an ICE employee who used to belong to an anti-immigration center considered to be a hate group, another former employee of a second anti-immigration group, and a former writer at the right-wing Breitbart site.
Every day that Stephen Miller, with his extensive ties and alignment with the vilest strains of white nationalism, continues to work in this administration is a deep offense against our nation and against our common humanity. But the fact that Miller has a network of like-minded individuals working with him to create a fundamentally racist and nativist immigration policy should light a fire under anyone who doesn’t already feel a sense of outrage at what we’re facing. We have far more than a Trump problem. Adherents of a revanchist movement that sees non-white immigrants not only as unworthy, but as less than human, criminal, and disposable are now literally helping make decisions on the very issues they should be kept a million miles away from. They seek to reconfigure the demographics of the United States for potentially decades upon decades into the future, based on a toxic stew of racism, lies, hate, cultural slander, and a love of cruelty.
Seldom have the white supremacists been so upfront about their sick visions for America, and so empowered to make them a reality. It’s not just Trump who needs rooting out; the whole white nationalist gang has to be rousted from the government jobs they never should have held to begin with.