As the saying goes, when people show you who they are, believe them; it’s likely to be even worse. And so we have the White House’s Stephen Miller, who leads the administration’s assault on entire cohorts of people it despises, making yet another coded statement that reveals the calculated racist anger at the core of current federal policy.
In a social media post on Saturday, Mr. Miller wrote, “Someone should write an alternative historical novel where Americans are the first to master the automobile, the first in flight, the first to harness the atom. . . .” The pushback from the left was swift, pointing out that the team that conducted the first controlled nuclear chain reaction was led by an Italian immigrant, Enrico Fermi. And many of the scientists whose work accelerated the Manhattan Project were refugees themselves from fascist regimes in Europe. These included, from Germany, the breakthrough physicists Albert Einstein and Hans Bethe, and from Hungary, John von Neumann and Edward Teller. That noted, these are not the kind of refugees Mr. Miller has in mind.
The end game for racist politics is power. When the president speaks with raw fury about immigrants, here legally or not, he is referring to people whose skin tone does not match his own, at least under all that orange makeup. Mr. Miller and others surrounding the president have cast their bet that stirring up race-based hatred among its voters is the only hope if the extreme right is to maintain its grip on Washington.
A long-term threat to Republican dominance began to emerge in the 1990s, as predictions about the changing ethnic makeup of voters suggested growing support for Democratic policies. Right-wing responses have included student voting restrictions, background checks, and tougher ID requirements. The current targeting of nonwhite people in Democratic cities should be seen in this context as a further attempt to intimidate voters.