Donald Trump, Kirstjen Nielsen, John Kelly, Stephen Miller, and Jeff Sessions: Monsters Inc.

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Over the past few chaotic days, Donald Trump and his top advisers have offered so many rationales, excuses, denials and lies about their immigrant child concentration camps, I won’t even bother to recap all the nonsense they’ve spewed. The bottom line is that, with the exception of Trump himself, they all seem to want credit for the horror that’s playing out before our eyes. It’s also become clear why this nightmare is upon us.

Take a look at who’s running the show at this point. With most of Trump’s original White House senior advisers and officials having long ago resigned in controversy or been fired, the failing Trump administration only has a skeleton crew left. You’ve got Chief of Staff John Kelly, whose overall influence has clearly waned, but who still seems to have sway on these kinds of issues. You’ve got his former deputy, Kirstjen Nielsen, who now runs Homeland Security. You’ve got Jeff Sessions, who is openly despised by Trump, but who also still manages to get his way on the racist stuff. Then you’ve got Stephen Miller, and we all know what he stands for.

These folks have been some of the most openly and viciously racist people in the Trump administration all along. And, presumably because only the very worst manage to survive in Trump’s cesspool, they’re just about the only ones left. Remember when John Kelly was purging white supremacists like Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka? At the time it was believed that he was dumping them because their racism made them liabilities. In hindsight, maybe Kelly and his loyalists merely wanted control over the racist wing of the building.

These people are monsters. There’s just no other way to put it. Now that Donald Trump is essentially making his last stand by doubling down on locking children in cages, in the apparent hope that he can somehow spin this crisis to breathe new life into his dead presidency, it’s not surprising that the likes of Kirstjen Nielsen, John Kelly, Stephen Miller, and Jeff Sessions are the ones at his side. They’re the very worst that humanity has to offer, and so is Trump.

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