Late on Thanksgiving Day, a holiday whose central fable is about the American value of welcoming strangers in need, President Donald Trump announced an intent to “permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries to allow the US system to fully recover.”

It is not clear exactly how exactly this sweeping policy is supposed to work in practice — or if, as is often the case, the president’s posts bear little resemblance to policy reality. But it does have a clear precedent: a speech given by Richard Spencer, the leader of the once-prominent “alt-right” movement, given just after Trump’s victory in 2016.

“One fundamental policy we’re going to put forward is a break on all immigration, particularly non-European immigration, for a 50-year period,” Spencer said at a November 2016 conference.

At the time, Spencer acknowledged his proposal was “certainly out in front of anything Donald Trump said.” Now, however, the president has adopted a version of Spencer’s policy as his own.

This is hardly the only example of the White House adopting language from the 2010s-vintage white nationalist movement.

Top White House adviser Stephen Miller referenced a prominent alt-right critique of immigration in a tweet last week. A call for “remigration,” a vision of mass deportations developed by Europe’s alt-right equivalent, has been embraced by Trump’s Homeland Security and State departments. And the concept of a “great replacement” of Americans by migrants, once the province of tiki-torch marchers at Charlottesville, is now widely proclaimed by the Republican Party’s leading figures — from Trump on down.

This isn’t entirely new: Miller, a college friend of Richard Spencer’s, sent emails privately citing white nationalist websites and advocating for a full immigration ban all the way back in 2015.

But in Trump’s first term, this kind of thing was not for public consumption — and when exposed, it caused a scandal. In 2018, for example, Trump fired speechwriter Darren Beattie after he got caught giving a speech at an alt-right event.

In the second term, the Trump administration........

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