Trump’s own statements and policies are the strongest argument that his vision aligns with that of white nationalists. One wonders how, precisely, someone like Charlie Kirk could have answered a question posed by Fuentes in his channel: “Why does the president prefer immigrants from Norway vs. Haiti?”

While the litany of Trump’s acts cozying up to and encouraging a once-fringe white nationalist element is long, it’s worth considering the architect of the immigration policies that establishment Republicans like Dan Crenshaw champion. An ongoing series of articles by the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Michael E. Hayden, drawing on some 900 e-mails sent by Trump's senior policy adviser Stephen Miller to former Breitbart editor Katie McHugh, have laid out precisely the ideological affiliations of the administration’s immigration czar. From championing the Confederate flag to repeatedly linking to openly white nationalist sites like VDARE and American Renaissance, Miller stridently embraced the tenets of white supremacy; and like the Fuentes faction, he also advocated a complete cessation of legal immigration of any kind. “There should be no immigration for several years. Not just cut the number down from the current 1 million green cards per year. For assimilation purposes,” he wrote to McHugh.

Miller’s e-mails show a familiarity with—and advocacy of—the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, which posits a plot by elites to replace the white population of America and Europe with nonwhite immigrants. Miller stops short of embracing a crucial tenet of “great replacement” theory embraced by most of the white nationalist right: that this replacement is being orchestrated by Jews. (That precise theorem is what motivated the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter to murder eleven Jews almost exactly a year ago.) Perhaps this is because Miller is Jewish, a fact that the White House has belabored in its increasingly mendacious defenses of the staffer, going so far as to accuse the Southern Poverty Law Center of an anti-Semitic campaign.

But it is impossible to advocate for white nationalism, as Miller has throughout his career in politics, without simultaneously elevating anti-Semitism. For most white nationalists, anti-Semitism is a non-negotiable raison d’être for the movement, the unified field theory that ties a bigoted worldview together. In their minds, nonwhite people are too ignorant and barbaric to organize the kind of demographic coup the “great replacement” theory lays out; instead, they assert again and again, it has been orchestrated by cunning Jews, pulling the marionette strings of mass migration and advocating for interracial marriage. The sites, forums, and chats that advocate for an end to legal immigration—and that push the false theory that demographic change amounts to “white genocide”—are places that praise Hitler and traffic in the ugliest of anti-Semitic sentiments. This is why an administration awash in anti-immigrant sentiment, slashing rights for asylees and refugees, governed during the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, the deadliest pogrom in American history. It is not a coincidence. It never was.

None of the Republican figures so quick to disavow Fuentes did the same for Miller; indeed, there has been a profound, impenetrable closing of the ranks around him on the right. The chief difference at play is that Miller advocates from the White House for the end of legal immigration, while the insurgent faction does so on messaging apps, and while lined up in the audience section at events, like plebes. It’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that the differences are not primarily ideological; principally, they are about an aversion to heckling.

The sudden, awkward repudiation of white nationalism by conservative ideologues subjected to its unruly minions may be comical, but it is a small part of the story of a national plague. Begrimed in the filth of racist invective and nativist sentiment, which groups like TPUSA have eagerly whipped up in their own right with a constant stream of culture-war content, the Republican establishment finds itself unable to ward off the forces they have unleashed. It’s akin to someone who starves a dog intentionally; lets it terrorize a neighborhood, maiming and wounding all who come close to it; and then reacts in horror and surprise when at last the wretched cur turns on them.

There are tens of thousands of children who have been separated from their families by Stephen Miller’s policies; there are dozens of dead, murdered in an El Paso Walmart and a Pittsburgh synagogue and a Charlottesville street and by inadequate medical care in migration facilities. Through these years, as ethnic minorities and Jews and feminists and trans people and gay people have sounded out the alarm bells, the mainstream GOP laughed. They turned a profit on “triggering the libs”; they called opposition to the tide of rising white nationalism “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” Only when the hound turned on them, its jaws red and insatiable, did they at last begin to cry out in alarm about the danger the rest of us have known for years.

Talia Lavin is a writer based in Brooklyn. Her first book, Culture Warlords, is forthcoming in 2020 from Hachette Books.