Trump pick for critical foreign policy role thinks Islam incompatible with the West

A staunch anti-immigrant conservative who was a spokesperson for the White House during Donald Trump's first year in office in 2017 is returning to government - this time, as director of policy planning at the US State Department, which is a role that effectively sets the agenda for the secretary of state. 

Michael Anton's appointment was announced earlier this month as Trump selects his team for his second term in office, beginning on 20 January. 

The 55-year-old Anton, who is of Lebanese descent, had previously been a speechwriter for conservative media tycoon Rupert Murdoch.

In a 6,000-word essay that reemerged on USA Today this week and titled 'Toward a Sensible, Coherent Trumpism' Anton wrote: "'Diversity' is not 'our strength'; it's a source of weakness, tension and disunion. America is not a 'nation of immigrants'; we are originally a nation of settlers, who later chose to admit immigrants."

The piece was written under a Latin pseudonym which the Weekly Standard revealed as being Michael Anton in 2017.

Immigration today, he added, is not a boon to the economy. "It undercuts American wages, costs Americans jobs and reduces Americans' standard of living."

A key priority for the US government, he said, is "a simple reassertion of American nationhood and sovereignty". That, he argued, begins with regaining control over US borders and dismantling "insane immigration policies".

Among the policies he cited is the global Green Card lottery the US runs every year, known as the Diversity Immigrant Visa programme which has been in effect since 1990. Several attempts have been made to disband it in the years after the 11 September 2001 attacks.

"Mass immigration has overwhelmed, eroded and de-Americanised formerly American communities," he wrote, and it "must be faced squarely".

Anti-Islam remarks

In that very same essay, which outlined Anton's isolationist foreign policy views, he insisted that Islam "is not a 'religion of peace'" and that it is simply incompatible with "the modern West".

"It's a militant faith that exalts conversion by the sword and inspires thousands to acts of terror - and millions more to support and sympathise with terror," Anton said.

"If it's ever to change, change will have to come from within Islam. As the experience of Europe has decisively shown, we in the West don't have the power to change Muslims. But the reverse is true: when we welcome them en masse into our countries, they change us - and not for the better."

Anton conceded: "Yes, of course, not all Muslims are terrorists, blah, blah, blah, etc."

But he continued to push a largely white settler 'America First' narrative. 

"Even so, what good has Muslim immigration done for the United States and the American people? If we truly needed more labour - a claim that is manifestly false - what made it necessary to import any of that labour from the Muslim world?"

Those arguments were woven into his anti-foreign intervention stance, which he made clear with the example of the war on Iraq.

"'American exceptionalism' does not require, or even encourage, us to democratise the world - a task of which we are in any case incapable," Anton wrote, calling the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 "a strategic and tactical blunder that destroyed a country… and harmed American interests".

Upon his exit from the White House in 2018, just as foreign policy hawk and former US ambassador to the UN John Bolton came on board as Trump's national security adviser, CNN described Anton as "well-liked by his White House colleagues" and "known as the rare conservative intellectual that joined the Trump administration".

Anton is currently a politics lecturer and research fellow at Hillsdale Colleges Kirby Center in Washington DC. 

While the role of State Department director of policy planning ranks as high as an assistant secretary of state, it does not require Senate confirmation.