It's not been a good day in Trumpland

There's the undeniable damage of this:

A damning email dump from former Breitbart editor Katie McHugh points to Miller simply being a racist who hates immigrants. 

For years, Miller shared stories from white nationalist news sources. McHugh, who has since disavowed her alt-right sympathies, alleges that Miller cited with familiarity work from American Renaissance, the pseudoscientific white supremacist website run by racial segregationist Jared Taylor. Miller also reportedly shared a story from VDARE, yet another white nationalist site that published the likes of Taylor and Steven Sailer, as well as Infowars, the conspiracy-mongering website run by 9/11 and Sandy Hook truther Alex Jones. 

This information has been laundered through the Southern Poverty Law Center, so you can't take it seriously beyond the source material itself. For example, Miller's embrace of a bad immigration policy from the Coolidge era probably doesn't stem from the fact that Adolf Hitler liked the same policy, as the SPLC tries to put it. But the SPLC's contribution here is almost irrelevant, unless the emails are fabricated. The fact is that a Senate staffer who worked his way into the upper echelons of the White House was egging on McHugh to bring unabashedly racist online narratives about immigration into a more mainstream publication. 

Interns have been fired for less than this. We can't say with certainty what hate is or isn't in Miller's heart, but we know that he was happy enough to use the work of hatemongers and kill the GOP's last shot at immigration reform, apparently because it would help predominantly Mexican immigrants. It's long past time for Trump to dump Miller.

As Tiana Lowe of the Washington Examiner says in the excerpt above, the dump has SPLC's fingerprints on it, and that outfit long ago squandered its credibility as a watchdog with integrity, but there is the source material.

And John Bolton is inching ever closer to a definite break with Trumpist world-affairs perspectives:

Former national security adviser John Bolton derided President Donald Trump’s daughter and son-in-law during a private speech last week and suggested his former boss’ approach to U.S. policy on Turkey is motivated by personal or financial interests, several people who were present for the remarks told NBC News.

According to six people who were there, Bolton also questioned the merits of Trump applying his business acumen to foreign policy, saying such issues can’t be approached like the win-or-lose edict that drives real estate deals: When one deal doesn’t work, you move on to the next.

The description was part of a broader portrait Bolton outlined of a president who lacks an understanding of the interconnected nature of relationships in foreign policy and the need for consistency, these people said.

Condoleeza Rice is no longer in government, but she is considered pretty much of an elder states person in both foreign-policy circles and the Republican Party, someone not given to hot takes and reflexive conclusions. She has weighed in on the Ukraine mess:

Former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice said Monday that reports detailing the involvement of President Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani in the White House’s Ukraine policy were “deeply troubling.”

“What I see right now troubles me. I see a state of conflict between the foreign policy professionals and someone who says he’s acting on behalf of the president but frankly I don’t know if that is the case,” Rice said at a conference in Abu Dhabi. “This is just not a good thing. The world shouldn’t get confusing messages from the United States of America.”

Multiple witnesses have alleged in house testimony that Giuliani conducted his own investigative work without regard for the administration’s formal policy.

William Taylor, the former top American diplomat in Ukraine, whose testimony was released last week, asserted that Giuliani was actively undermining U.S. foreign policy.

“The irregular channel seemed to focus on specific issues, specific cases, rather than the regular channel’s focus on institution building,” Taylor said, according to the transcript. “So the irregular channel, I think under the influence of Mr. Giuliani, wanted to focus on one or two specific cases, irrespective of whether it helped solve the corruption problem, fight the corruption problem.”

Earlier Monday, news broke that Lev Parnas, an associate of Giuliani, will tell investigators that Giuliani attempted to leverage an official visit from Vice President Mike Pence to coax Ukraine into announcing an investigation into Joe Biden’s son Hunter’s business connections to Burisma.

Rice also said she thought Trump’s mention of former vice president Joe Biden and his son Hunter, who served on the board of Ukrainian gas company Burisma, during the call was “out of bounds.”

“The call is murky, it is really murky. I don’t like for the president of the United States to mention an American citizen for investigation to a foreign leader,” Rice said.

These items in their sum total just reinforce problems that were inherent in a Trump presidency from the time Trump made his bid for the job.

Without a core set of principles, you can't smell the hot-dog-ism that has followed a guy like Miller since Miller's college days. You also have no basis for seeing the conduct of foreign policy as anything beyond "cutting deals" and striking while the personal-loyalty iron is hot, rather than basing decisions on historic alliances and strategic interests.

None of this will give Trump pause. In fact, I'd bet that he has a barrage of defensive tweets lined up for release before the day is over.