What did Donald Trump do today?

He appointed an out-and-proud racist to a top State Department position.

Darren Beattie was a speechwriter during Trump's first term, but was fired in 2018, when it came to light that he'd attended a white nationalist conference in 2016.

Since then, Beattie has leaned hard into white supremacist ideas. A few months ago, for example, he tweeted that "competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work," as explicitly opposed to women or non-whites.

Beattie's loathing of women and minorities appears to be genuine, and not just ideological trolling, as he's targeted them even when they are conservative Republicans. In 2021, he tweeted that Republican Sen. Tim Scott, a Black man, "needs to learn his place" and "take a knee to MAGA." He used the exact same language in a tweet about Kay Coles James, a Black woman who was the president of the Heritage Foundation, an ultra-conservative think tank.

Today, he was promoted into a senior leadership position at the State Department, as Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy. In this role, he will be tasked with "strengthening the relationship between the people and Government of the United States and citizens of the rest of the world," some of whom are neither white nor male. 

The White House is not responding to requests for comment on Beattie's hiring. It's not clear precisely how he rehabilitated himself in Trump's eyes, but one factor might be that his first job after being fired was as a speechwriter for then-Rep. Matt Gaetz, the now-disgraced figure who talked Trump into nominating him as Attorney General. He's also aligned himself with Trump by praising the Putin regime in Russia and saying that it was less of a threat to the United States than NATO.

Why does this matter?

• Staffers who were fireable as racist embarrassments in a president's first term shouldn't be top-level picks for the second.

• Government officials demanding that women and minorities "learn their place" isn't something most Americans want to go back to.

• There are enough white supremacist trolls in the executive branch already.