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 Trump’s senior immigration adviser. The S.P.L.C. obtained more than 900 emails from 2015 and 2016 that Miller, who was then an aide to Senator Jeff Sessions, sent to editors at the far-right website Breitbart to shape its coverage of race and immigration. The group got the emails from Katie McHugh, a former Breitbart editor who, after being fired for anti-Muslim tweets, moved even further right before renouncing racism. The emails show that Miller was steeped in white nationalism before he joined the White House, where he’s had the opportunity to put his racist views into practice.

McHugh told the S.P.L.C. that her bosses introduced her to Miller so that he could help guide the site’s reporting. Miller forwarded her articles from sites like VDARE — named for Virginia Dare, the first English child born in North America — and Alex Jones’s Infowars. Miller sent McHugh information about “immigrant crime” and offered her talking points on defending Confederate iconography in the wake of the white nationalist Dylann Roof’s massacre of black churchgoers in Charleston, S.C.