The legacy of the Trump administration keeps getting revealed as an even more and more virulently racist mess. The Southern Poverty Law Center has now published an exposé of the material in emails that longtime and still-serving Trump adviser Stephen Miller sent to the far-right website Breitbart in 2015 and 2016 railing on and on in support of racist causes. The organization reports that those reviewing the emails were “unable to find any examples of Miller writing sympathetically or even in neutral tones about any person who is nonwhite or foreign-born.” And that’s what’s driving the Trump administration.
Miller even complained to Breitbart about the backlash against Confederate flags following the 2015 terror attack perpetrated on a predominantly black church in South Carolina. He whined about “stunning corporate hypocrisy that defines our modern culture” in reference to companies still selling merchandise with Communist imagery on it.
The material was revealed by former Breitbart editor Katie McHugh, who worked at the site until June 2017. Breitbart editors introduced McHugh to Miller “with an understanding he would influence the direction of her reporting,” the SPLC says, and the conversations that she revealed vary from her seeking his input on a topic to him suggesting story ideas. Although since joining the White House itself, Miller has reportedly dialed back committing anything to writing, these communications involved his email address from his time as an aide to now former Senator and (also former) Trump administration Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
As McHugh noted, the sentiments Miller shared have “become policy at the Trump administration.”
As one example, Miller complained to her about refugees from natural disasters getting granted Temporary Protected Status, a complaint that included him sending her a link to an article at a virulently white nationalist website. Besides previously attempting to curtail Temporary Protected Status protections for groups like immigrants from Haiti, Honduras, and El Salvador, this year, the Trump administration declined to grant the protections to Bahamians fleeing the utter devastation of Hurricane Dorian. Baselessly, Trump told reporters:
‘I don’t want to allow people that weren’t supposed to be in the Bahamas to come into the United States, including some very bad people and some very bad gang members and some very, very bad drug dealers.’
Besides Miller’s link to a white nationalist website, the vast majority — about 80 percent — of the emails overall focused on immigration and related issues. For example, he also pointed McHugh to a violently white nationalist novel called Camp of the Saints that depicts immigrants as violent, nearly inhuman monsters that nationalist characters must respond to with deadly force. At another point, Miller pointed McHugh to new data from the federal government that separated crimes committed by Hispanics from those committed by whites.
Miller has helped develop Trump administration policies like their Muslim ban, and he’s stuck by the president’s side after even the former head of Breitbart Steve Bannon got booted. This week, another one of their team’s moves is coming to a head and the U.S. Supreme Court is hearing arguments in the case of the Trump administration attempting to overturn the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program.
