Substacks
A poisonous campaign Judd Legum

Donald Trump’s term as president was chaotic, with an ever-changing cast of characters installed in top positions. But, amidst the mayhem, senior advisor Stephen Miller was a constant. Miller, an anti-immigrant hardliner, started out advising Trump on the 2016 campaign and remained in the White House for Trump’s entire tenure. He was the architect of many of Trump’s most controversial policies, including the initiative to separate migrant children from their parents.
Miller has also remained a close advisor to Trump. In November, when the New York Times sought comment about Trump’s immigration agenda in a potential second term, the campaign “referred questions… to Stephen Miller.” Should Trump prevail in 2024, Miller is expected to be installed in an even more powerful position, perhaps Attorney General. (Miller is not a lawyer, but that is not technically a requirement for the job.)
After Trump was defeated in 2020, Miller started a non-profit dedicated to advancing Trump’s priorities, America First Legal. Through America First Legal, Miller has initiated dozens of legal actions, accusing various entities of discriminating against white people. For example, Miller filed a complaint against NASCAR — a sport with just a handful of non-white competitors — for “ongoing, deliberate, and illegal discrimination against white, male Americans.”
Miller has a history of promoting explicitly white nationalist texts. In a 2015 email to an editor at Breitbart, a far-right website, Miller recommended promoting the racist French novel The Camp of the Saints. The book, published in 1973, depicts the destruction of Western civilization due to an influx of dark-skinned migrants. The migrants “are portrayed as diseased people who eat human feces.” The title is a Biblical reference “to the army gathered by Satan who overrun the earth, including the camp of the saints.” The Camp of the Saints helped popularize the racist “Great Replacement” theory, which posits that there is an intentional effort to “replace” white populations with non-white migrants. It has been “a must-read within white supremacist circles for decades.”
In recent weeks, Trump has featured these racist concepts into his campaign rallies, claiming immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” Trump featured this rhetoric during a December 16 rally in New Hampshire:
They’re poisoning the blood of our country. That’s what they’ve done… They’re coming into our country, from Africa, from Asia, all over the world. They’re pouring into our country. Nobody’s even looking at them. They just come in. The crime is going to be tremendous.
Hitler made very similar arguments to justify genocide in his autobiography, Mein Kampf. “All great cultures of the past perished only because the originally creative race died out from blood poisoning,” Hitler wrote. Hitler also argued that Germanic people were successful because they “racial stock pure and did not mix it with any other racial stock.” The dominance of Germanic people would continue, Hitler argued, “as long as that element does not fall a victim to the habit of adulterating its blood.” Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a professor at NYU and an expert in fascism, wrote noted that “Nazis made the fear of blood pollution of their master race and their civilization a foundation of their state.”
Trump has been speaking about the dangers of “blood poisoning” since September. People quickly noted the parallels to Hitler, but Trump has continued to use the phrase. In a December 22 radio interview with Hugh Hewitt, Trump maintained that he “never knew that Hitler said it” and “never read Mein Kampf.” Trump went on to say that he knows “nothing about Hitler” and is “not a student of Hilter.”
Despite his stated ignorance of Hitler, Trump maintained that Hitler “didn’t say [blood poisoning] the way I said it.” Trump says his use of the phrase “blood poisoning” is “very different” because Trump is talking about “people coming into our country [and]… destroying our country.” This is, of course, exactly how Hitler and other racists have used the phrase.
In November, Trump also promised to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.” Mein Kampf also describes Jews as “vermin.”
Trump has repeatedly claimed ignorance to excuse ties to racists. For example, when former KKK grand wizard David Duke endorsed his candidacy in 2016, Trump said he didn’t “know anything about David Duke” and didn’t “know anything” about “white supremacy or white supremacists.” In a 2020 debate with Joe Biden, Trump claimed to be unfamiliar with the Proud Boys, a violent hate group.
Why it matters
Ben-Ghiat warns that Trump’s rhetoric is not just idle chatter. Rather, Trump is “dehumanizing” immigrants and others now “to get Americans used to the idea that they should be persecuted.”
Miller, on behalf of Trump’s campaign, pledged that “Trump will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown.” Miller described plans to “deport people by the millions per year” with a “blitz” intended “to overwhelm immigrant-rights lawyers.”
New tactics will include “workplace raids and other sweeps in public places aimed at arresting scores of unauthorized immigrants at once.” The scope of these raids would exceed the current capacity of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, so the effort would enlist personnel from the National Guard and other law enforcement agencies. Arrested migrants would be shuttled to “vast holding facilities that would function as staging centers.” These tent cities would be built by the military “on open land in Texas near the border,” according to Miller.
The facilities would initially be “focused more on single adults because the government cannot indefinitely hold children under a longstanding court order known as the Flores settlement.” Miller said a second Trump administration would renew its efforts to overturn the Flores settlement. Reimplementing the child separation policy is also a possibility.
Mildly objecting to copying Hilter
Trump is in the middle of a campaign to secure the Republican presidential nomination. According to polls, Trump holds a wide lead and the Iowa caucus takes place in just two weeks.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R), once considered Trump’s chief competition, passed on an opportunity to criticize Trump.
“I don’t know what this means with the blood stuff,” DeSantis said on Fox News. “I know people are trying to draw historical allusions. I don’t know if that’s what he meant.” The best DeSantis could manage was saying that he did not think Trump’s rhetoric would “move the ball forward.”
Former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley (R), who has gained some momentum in recent weeks, offered only tepid criticism of Trump in an interview with the Des Moines Register. Haley called Trump’s comments “not constructive” and “not necessary.” She then listed a series of actions she would take to deport migrants.
Substacks
Stop Making Cents? Charles Lane

On Sunday, President Donald Trump announced that he has ordered his administration to cease production of the penny. The argument for the move seems straightforward enough. It costs more than a penny to make a penny (3.7 cents, according to the U.S. Mint). Given inflation and the move to digital payments, ditching the coin is just common cents, right?
Not necessarily. Life’s about more than just making the numbers add up, and amid all the government waste, doesn’t the humble penny deserve a carve out for sentimental reasons?
Today, we debate the penny’s fate. Good riddance or gone too soon? Deputy Editor Charles Lane supports Trump’s move. Consulting Editor Jonathan Rosen opposes it. Have at it, gentleman.
Charles Lane: President Trump’s decision to end production of the penny has my total support. This mite of a coin betrayed me, quite directly and personally, over the course of 13 years.
“Save your pennies, Chuck,” a supervisor at work told me in 2002, responding to some angst I expressed about future college tuition costs. This was her way of not getting the hint that I needed a raise.
Attitudinally positive as always, I took her advice. I told my 5-year-old son that we would henceforth be keeping every one-cent coin we received as change, found on the street, or won playing dreidel until the moment he left for college.
What a father-son project! So rich in lessons about thrift, consistency, and long-term thinking! And so we collected and collected, filling first one large glass jug and then another, until July 2015, when it was time for the big reveal: We had accumulated 10,142 pennies, about 2.19 per day.
They were worth $101.42, not even enough to cover a month’s fraternity dues.
Wrapping the little suckers in paper rolls to enable deposit at a bank took me several days. Valued at the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, the time wasted offset any wealth embodied in our hoard—with change left over.
So I did not need the DOGE to tell me the government lost over $179 million in fiscal year 2023 minting more than 4.5 billion one-cent pieces at a cost of three-plus cents each. I already knew that a penny is much more trouble than it’s worth.
Substacks
Nellie Bowles: The Triumph of the Plastic Straw Nellie Bowles

The biggest environmentalist craze of my generation started in 2011 with Vermont 9-year-old Milo Cress cooking up an arbitrary number for how many plastic straws Americans used daily. This 9-year-old figured it was so many. He says he called up straw manufacturers and calculated 500 million a day. Boom, big number, good number. The mainstream media was off to the races. That 500 million a day number was cited in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. Suddenly the most important thing we could do for the environment—for our children!—was ban plastic straws.
States and cities passed laws against them. California banned them from restaurants outright in 2018. New York, in 2021, changed the law so the only straws on display were paper (you were allowed to ask for plastic). Official fact sheets from Ron DeSantis’s state of Florida instruct Floridians to “Skip the Straw,” citing the 500 million figure. Did anyone question the basis of this?
Substacks
It Pays to Be a Friend of Donald Trump Joe Nocera

Two dodgy Democrats had a great day on Monday—thanks to our new Republican President Donald J. Trump.
The first, former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, was granted a full pardon. Back in 2009, after he’d been charged with corruption, Blagojevich got himself booked on Trump’s show, Celebrity Apprentice. (You can see his appearance in these YouTube clips. He was fired, of course.) I don’t know if Blagojevich had a premonition that Trump might someday be in a position to help him, but it sure has turned out that way. Transforming himself from a high-profile Democratic governor to a big-time Trump supporter was the single best move he could have made.
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