Photo : Charlie Riedel/Steve Heibel ( AP )

Former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach may be an certified loser and shameless grifter whose last revolting stint in the Trump administration ended with a pathetic whimper, but that doesn’t mean the president is necessarily done with him yet.




According to an Associated Press report citing “three people familiar” with discussions taking place within the White House, Kobach is one of two far-right names being considered by the Trump administration to become the White House’s “immigration czar,” spearheading the president’s various anti-immigration initiatives. The other is former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, who once tried to amend the Constitution to get rid of birthright citizenship altogether. (Cuccinelli also lost his last bid for elected office, in the Virginia gubernatorial election of 2013.)

In addition to his groundbreaking work in making it obscenely hard for people to vote, Kobach earned anywhere from $150,000 to $800,000 over the past decade selling inflated anti-immigration hysteria to small towns all over the country—ones, it should be noted, which weren’t actually experiencing any significant immigration-related effects.


Cuccinelli, meanwhile, is no stranger to xenophobic hysteria himself. As a Virginia state senator in 2008, he introduced legislation which would have allowed businesses to fire employees and render them unable to receive unemployment benefits simply for not speaking English. At the time, Democratic state Senate leader Richard Saslaw called Cuccinelli’s proposal “the most mean-spirited piece of legislation I have seen in my 30 years down here.”

When reached by email, the White House declined to comment on the record. Just the possibility of Kobach slithering his way back into the administration, however, is a pretty solid indication that no matter how bad things look now, things could always be much, much worse.