In its first months in office, the second Trump administration has welcomed personnel who embrace conspiracy theories, bigotry and racism. These are people who have the power to shape the nation’s immigration policies, national security priorities, health care services, surveillance powers, civil rights enforcement, personnel decisions and much more.
This is the second installment in a series naming Trump personnel, from Cabinet members to staffers, who have expressed a variety of racist, misogynistic and bigoted ideas, or have ties to racist activists. (The first can be found here.)
Dan Bongino
In late February, President Donald Trump appointed the far-right podcaster and commentator Dan Bongino as deputy director of the FBI, making him second-in-command at the nation’s premier law enforcement agency.
Bongino worked for the New York Police Department and as a Secret Service agent before he became a full-time commentator, working for Fox News and eventually hosting his own podcast, “The Dan Bongino Show.” Bongino’s podcast is replete with conspiracy theories, including those about the agency he now serves. He has repeatedly called for dissolution of the FBI, arguing after agents searched Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in 2022 that it “is a fully now corrupt [sic] organization.” “What the FBI did to Donald Trump, it wasn’t law enforcement, it was tyranny,” he said afterward.
He also suggested that the FBI knows the identity of the person who left pipe bombs in Washington, D.C., the night before the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol. He called it the “biggest scandal in FBI history” and argued it was “an inside job” — either the work of someone inside the government, or “an anti-Trump lunatic” the FBI was attempting to protect.
He has consistently argued that the left represents an existential threat to the country, calling it a “clear and present danger to your public safety” and “evil.”
Though Bongino started his podcast in 2015, the misinformation and conspiracies he spread about the 2020 election and coronavirus pandemic helped him find a broad audience. “Dan Bongino leads the MAGA field in stolen-election messaging,” a November 2020 Politico headline declared. In January 2022, he was banned from YouTube for spreading COVID-19 misinformation after he said masks did not stop the spread of the virus.
Vance Day
Vance Day, a former Marion County Circuit Court judge in Oregon who in 2018 received a three-year suspension from the state’s ethics board, is now senior counsel to the deputy attorney general of the United States. In this role, he serves as an adviser to the second-in-command at the Department of Justice.
The state ethics board found that Day had committed repeated judicial misconduct. In one 2014 episode it cited, after the state legalized same-sex marriage, Day directed his staff to search court records to determine the genders of couples requesting to be married and not to schedule marriages for same-sex couples. “Those actions indisputably communicated to his staff his intention to treat same-sex couples who requested a marriage officiant differently from opposite-sex couples,” the Oregon Supreme Court found. While no same-sex couples sought out the judge for their marriages, the court concluded “that those actions manifested prejudice ‘against others,’ within the meaning of the rule.”
Paul Ingrassia
Paul Ingrassia is a far-right reactionary with a long history of embracing racist ideas and defending extremists including male supremacist Andrew Tate. He attended a speech by the racist Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes. He is currently working as the White House liaison for the Department of Homeland Security, which gives him power over staffing in the department. In late May, he was nominated by President Trump to head the Office of Special Counsel. The position requires Senate confirmation.
His social media posts and writing show that Ingrassia, who graduated from Cornell Law School in 2022 and has twice been a fellow at the increasingly authoritarian Claremont Institute, is preoccupied with the supposed decline of Western civilization and, specifically, how it is precipitated by immigration and a declining white population.
“God forbid we ever enact policies to protect the native population whites, whose birth rates are far below replacement levels,” he posted on X in July 2024. “Biden’s open borders are destroying our Great American Women!” he posted on the same platform in June 2024. “And that is by design: replace every last American with a terrorist infiltrator or gang member from the Third World.”
He has characterized both American immigration policies and diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives as “suicidal.”
Ingrassia has downplayed anti-Black racism and argued that it pales in comparison to the hardships white people — especially men — face today. “Exceptional white men are not only the builders of Western civilization but are the ones most capable of appreciating the fruits of our heritage — and are conversely hurt the most, at a spiritual level, by its destruction,” he posted on X in December 2023. “Arguably reverse racism against European and Christian culture is far, far more insidious than any other kind of ‘racism,’” he posted the same month.
In June 2024, he was spotted at a small rally held by Fuentes, one of the country’s most prominent antisemites, outside a Turning Point USA event in Detroit. Shortly after one of Fuentes’ supporters behind him yelled, “I freaking love Hitler,” Fuentes told the crowd, “The truth is, between people like Henry Ford or Kanye West or Donald Trump in 2015, there was nothing more patriotic than calling for the independence of the United States from the Jewish mafia and the state of Israel.” Ingrassia reportedly spent nearly 20 minutes listening to the speech.
Ingrassia also has ties to Andrew Tate, a male supremacist influencer whose TikTok videos once garnered tens of billions of views before he was removed from the platform in August 2022. Tate, who continues to be active on X and runs a membership-based platform called Hustlers University, argues that women are inherently inferior and should be made subservient to men — violently, if necessary. “The western mess is all women’s fault. All of it. There isn’t a single issue I can’t pin on women,” Tate posted on X in February. In one video, he described how he would beat a woman if she accused him of cheating: “It’s bang out the machete, boom in her face and grip her by the neck. Shut up bitch.”
Ingrassia was part of the legal team that represented Andrew and his brother Tristan Tate when the pair filed a defamation lawsuit in 2023 against a woman who accused them of luring her to Romania as part of a human trafficking scheme. The woman has since filed a countersuit, calling the defamation suit an attempt to “bully and harass” her. The brothers currently face a rash of criminal charges in Romania including human trafficking, trafficking of minors and rape.
Outside of his legal work, Ingrassia has been a staunch defender of the Tates, glorifying Andrew on X in July 2023 as the “embodiment of the ancient ideal of excellence.” In a Substack post coauthored with another one of the Tates’ lawyers, he managed to downplay the horrors of slavery while praising the male supremacist brothers. “The Tates are driven by a noble impetus to unshackle regular people, but young men especially, from the chains of propaganda, digital serfdom, and chemical and institutional castration that dulls the mind and enervates the body” — a kind of slavery, Ingrassia and Joseph D. McBride wrote, that “is arguably more insidious than anything found in the past.”
Matthew Lohmeier
Trump has nominated Matthew Lohmeier to serve as undersecretary of the Air Force, the second-highest civilian role in the department. From that position, he would help oversee both the Air Force and the Space Force.
Lohmeier was relieved of his command role in the U.S. Space Force’s 11th Space Warning Squadron in May 2021 after he appeared on a podcast promoting his conspiratorial self-published book, Irresistible Revolution: Marxism’s Goal of Conquest & the Unmaking of the American Military. A Defense Department official told CNN Lohmeier was removed “due to loss of trust and confidence in his ability to lead” based on the comments he made on the podcast.
Lohmeier’s book argues that Marxists are undertaking a “destructive conquest” of the military through initiatives like diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
After he left the Space Force, Lohmeier started his own podcast and expressed his views demonizing anti-racism on social media. In one X post from July 2024, Lohmeier said that he kept books about anti-racism “next to my copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf … because a similar spirit can be detected in their writings.” In another, from January 2024, he posted that the diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) “industry insists you adopt and express certain anti-western, anti-white, anti-conservative, and anti-merit views.” He concluded: “Diversity is not our strength; not as DEI teaches it.”
Ed Martin
After a key Republican opposed the president’s nomination of Ed Martin for U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., Trump said the conservative activist will head a “weaponization working group” that will, Trump wrote on Truth Social, “investigate the Weaponization of our Government under the Biden Regime.” Martin has a history of making racist comments, promoting extreme anti-abortion views, helping organize the movement to overturn the 2020 election, and arguing that Jan. 6, 2021, defendants should receive “reparations.”
Martin’s resume includes a stint as former Missouri Gov. Matt Blunt’s chief of staff from January 2006 to November 2007 and, beginning in 2013, as the chairman for the state’s Republican Party. He has long been an ally of anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly. In early 2015, he became president of Eagle Forum, an advocacy group Schlafly founded in 1973 that has a long history of promoting anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-immigrant ideas. After squabbles over the direction of the organization, Martin became president of Phyllis Schlafly Eagles — a splinter group that supported Trump.
Martin co-authored The Conservative Case for Trump with Schlafly and conservative writer Brett Decker, a book that was published in 2016 shortly after Schlafly’s death. The book fits squarely within the far-right “great replacement” conspiracy theory, arguing that the Democratic Party’s immigration policy is a “systematic effort to reshape the demographics of the American electorate for the benefit” of the party. The first chapter, titled “Immigration invasion,” lamented that the 1965 Immigration Act led to increased immigration from “Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East” and, in the process, shifted immigration away from majority-white European countries “that shared—actually created—America’s Western values.” The book cited VDARE, a white nationalist hate group.
Martin has, elsewhere, made racist remarks. In a 2016 speech at a Tea Party rally, he told the audience, “If you don’t think Muslims are vetted enough, because they blow things up, that’s not racist.” In a follow-up inquiry from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, he said, “My point is that it is not racist to make clear that some Muslims should not be coming to America.”
Martin has a history of taking extreme anti-abortion positions. As CNN reported after reviewing episodes of his podcast from 2022, Martin has argued that there should be a federal ban on abortion, said that there should be no exceptions made to abortion bans and floated the idea that doctors who perform abortions and the people who have them should face some kind of punishment. In reference to the case of a 10-year-old child who sought an abortion after being raped, Martin said: “This 10-year-old was brought up as an example of why abortion is necessary. I have said over and over again the examples that shouldn’t be the rule, right? You can’t let the exceptions be the rule. Especially when you get engaged in debate. I refuse to do it. I refuse.”
Martin also helped to organize and finance the “Stop the Steal” movement that sought to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. He has criticized the Department of Justice (DOJ) prosecution of people for the events of Jan. 6, 2021, at the Capitol and, during a keynote address he gave at a 2024 fundraiser, compared rioters to the Japanese Americans the government interned during World War II. At the event, Martin spoke after Timothy Hale-Cusanelli, who breached the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and was later pardoned. According to court documents, Hale-Cusanelli once wore a Hitler-style mustache and told coworkers that “Hitler should have finished the job.” Martin praised Hale-Cusanelli at a previous event as “extraordinary,” though he apologized when asked about the comment in late April.
Leo Terrell
In February, the DOJ announced that Leo Terrell would lead the multiagency Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism, which is focused on campus protests against the Israel-Hamas war. Terrell is a civil rights attorney and Fox News contributor.
As first reported by Raw Story, in March, Terrell shared a post on X by Patrick Casey, a white nationalist who once led Identity Evropa, later called American Identity Movement. Identity Evropa helped plan the deadly 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and, before it disbanded in 2020, was once one of the largest white nationalist groups in the country. In the post, Casey shared a video of Trump saying that U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer “is not Jewish anymore, he’s a Palestinian.” Casey commented, “Trump has the ability to revoke someone’s Jew card.”
According to Raw Story, Terrell has also shared posts from a watchdog group called Stop Antisemitism, “including doxes of pro-Palestinian activists that target students who are potentially subject to visa revocations, as well as professionals whom they seek to get fired from their jobs.”
Gavin Wax
Gavin Wax is the chief of staff and senior adviser to Commissioner Nathan Simington at the Federal Communications Commission, where, according to the FCC website, he “provides strategic counsel, manages the Commissioner’s office, and supports policy development and external engagement.”
Wax was previously the president of the New York Young Republican Club (NYYRC). After his takeover in 2019, the club moved increasingly to the right to become, as he put it in 2024, “a vanguard of the Trump movement.” At NYYRC events, Wax has repeatedly used combative language to describe his political project. At a 2022 gala, he told supporters: “We want to cross the Rubicon. We want total war. We must be prepared to do battle in every arena. In the media. In the courtroom. At the ballot box. And in the streets.” At the next year’s event, he told the audience, which included Trump: “Once President Trump is back in office, we won’t be playing nice anymore. It will be a time for retribution.”
Under Wax’s presidency, NYYRC helped to gather radical-right figures. As first reported by the Southern Poverty Law Center, at the NYYRC’s 2022 gala, white nationalists Peter and Lydia Brimelow and racist political operative Jack Posobiec mingled in a crowd that also included Steve Bannon and Donald Trump Jr.
Before his stint at NYYRC, Wax founded and ran the online libertarian publication Liberty Conservative. From 2014 to 2017, Wax oversaw a private Facebook chat for contributors to the publication, including James Allsup, a member of Identity Evropa. In the chat, as reported by Daily Dot, members frequently used racial slurs, made jokes about the Holocaust and discussed topics like “race realism” — the white supremacist belief in biological racial differences.
Kingsley Wilson
Kingsley Wilson is the deputy press secretary for the Department of Defense, a position that helps to communicate the department’s messages to the press and public. She has a history of bigoted and inflammatory posts on social media, including promoting the white supremacist “great replacement” theory, denigrating transgender people as mentally ill and “corrupted souls,” calling feminism a “literal disease” and a “cult of misery and meaninglessness,” calling for “zero immigration and mass deportations,” and repeatedly insisting that “the most prevalent form of racism in America today is anti-white racism.”
Wilson has, since 2021, repeatedly promoted the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, posting such variations of her argument as: “Replacement isn’t a ‘right-wing conspiracy[.]’ It’s a Regime-approved plan of action.”
Throughout her posts on X, Wilson has consistently denigrated racial justice activists while insisting that “white men are the most persecuted group in modern America BY FAR,” as she put it in a May 2023 post. She has characterized Black Lives Matter as “an anti-white terrorist organization” and, in one post, suggested that Black people have a higher propensity for committing crime — a core white nationalist conspiracy. Quoting a post about a series of assaults on women in New York City — which did not mention the race of the alleged assailants — she wrote, “How many of these women posted black squares on Instagram?” She was presumably referencing a 2020 social media campaign in which people posted a black square to their Instagram feed to express solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement.
Photos illustration at top: Clockwise from top left: Ed Martin, Paul Ingrassia, Vance Day, Kingsley Wilson, Matthew Lohmeier, Leo Terrell, Gavin Wax, Dan Bongino. (Credit: SPLC)