An immigration skeptic at the State Department: Meet Michael Anton
Michael Anton, Trump’s pick for policy director at the State Department, has criticized racial diversity, Muslims and immigration.
WASHINGTON − President-elect Donald Trump's pick for a top State Department post called immigration a source of weakness and division that has "overwhelmed, eroded, and de-Americanized formerly American communities."
Michael Anton's essays have made him prominent in the America First movement. As director of policy planning at Trump's State Department, he would have an influential role in shaping foreign policy for an administration that has promised mass deportations and tighter controls on immigration.
He will join a cadre of high-level aides focused on immigration, including incoming deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller and South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, Trump's pick to lead the Department of Homeland Security after a presidential campaign thick with hostile rhetoric and viral untruths linking illegal immigrants to rampant crime.
In March 2016, as Trump was mounting his first White House run, Anton used a Latin pseudonym to publish an essay titled "Toward a Sensible, Coherent Trumpism." Anton was revealed as the author of that and other essays by the conservative Weekly Standard magazine in 2017, while working at the National Security Council.
"'Diversity' is not 'our strength'; it’s a source of weakness, tension and disunion," he wrote. "America is not a 'nation of immigrants'; we are originally a nation of settlers, who later chose to admit immigrants.”
Anton was a National Security Council spokesman in the first Trump administration and had been a speechwriter for Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch and former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani.
Critics said the appointment of a right-wing ideologue to the State Department's policy office could hurt America's relationships with international partners.
"You put someone like that into a position to formulate policies and policy posture for the next several years and decades, that has the potential to do significant damage to both our credibility ... and to create a pretty darn dangerous precedent," Brett Bruen, the White House director of global engagement in the Obama administration, told Paste BN.
Transition spokesman Dan Holler touted Anton's credentials and cast him as an asset to Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., Trump's nominee for secretary of state, who is a child of Cuban immigrants.
"President Trump and Senator Rubio are building out an all-star team to deliver on the America First agenda the country demanded," Holler said in a statement. "As Director of Policy Planning, Michael Anton will play an important role in implementing an America First foreign policy."
Anton did not respond to a request for comment. The essay was brought to Paste BN by Accountable.us, a left-leaning government watchdog group.
'Mock the ridiculous lies'
Anton wrote in his 2016 essay that a source of Trump's appeal to voters was his willingness "to mock the ridiculous lies we’ve been incessantly force-fed for the past 15 years (at least) and tell the truth."
"The modern conservative believes the leftist lie that his natural affinity for people who look, think and speak like himself is shameful and illegitimate, to be internally repressed and publicly denied," Anton wrote.
The piece claimed "millions upon millions" of immigrants can't accept democracy.
"People from different nations with different circumstances, histories, beliefs and traditions will − by definition − hold very different conceptions of good government, some irreconcilably opposed to our own," he wrote. "Why then do we Americans continue to import millions upon millions who have never known republican life and do not care for it?"
He also wrote that "only an insane society" would have accepted an increase in Muslim immigrants after 9/11.
"Yes, of course, not all Muslims are terrorists, blah, blah, blah, etc. Even so, what good has Muslim immigration done for the United States and the American people?" Anton wrote.
"The burden is forced on Americans to prove that Muhammed is a terrorist or Jose is a criminal, and if we can’t, we must let them in," he wrote. "Trump alone among major political figures has stood up to say this is nonsense."
Early Trump defender
After earning his master's degree in political science from Claremont Graduate University, Anton was a speechwriter for Murdoch, Giuliani and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
Anton's essays positioned him as an early ideological defender of Trump at a time when many conservatives were wary of the real estate mogul and reality TV star. Anton wrote several pieces under the pseudonym Publius Decius Mus, the name of a fourth-century B.C. Roman consul who ritually sacrificed himself in battle.
Much of the attention focused on a September 2016 Anton essay arguing conservatives faced a stark choice in 2016: either support Trump or accept a catastrophic Hillary Clinton victory. He compared the choice to that faced by passengers on United Airlines Flight 93 during the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, who confronted the hijackers and crashed the plane, which was believed to be headed for Washington.
Since leaving the White House in 2018, Anton has worked for two institutions at the center of the intellectual pro-Trump right: the Claremont Institute, where he is a senior fellow, and the conservative Hillsdale College, where he is a lecturer.
Anton has continued to publish essays in the Claremont Review and several national publications, now under his own name, in which he criticized the Black Lives Matter movement and promoted conspiracy theories, including suggesting that billionaire George Soros and the Democratic Party were planning a coup in the 2020 election.
In his announcement of Anton's new role Dec. 8, Trump said that Anton "served me loyally and effectively" and that Anton had spent eight years "explaining what an America First foreign policy truly means."
150 feet from the secretary's suite
The director of policy planning is usually selected by the secretary of state after their confirmation. The position does not require Senate confirmation and has traditionally been occupied by a foreign policy expert.
The director leads the State Department’s influential internal think tank, which is charged with examining long-term global trends and emerging threats for the secretary of state.
"I don't think you want an ideologue in that position," University of Southern California international relations professor Jeffrey Fields told Paste BN. "I think a lot of people would say we certainly don't want somebody who has abhorrent, quasi-bigoted views."
The office is about 150 feet from the secretary's suite and is one of the few where the director and his ideas have direct, unfettered access to the secretary, said Fields, who worked at the State Department as a foreign service officer.
"It is personal," he said. "They can walk into the secretary's office at any time."
(This story has been updated to correct the spelling of Stephen Miller's name. A headline has been updated, and an extraneous sentence was removed.)