The Donald Trump who promised he would surround himself with only the best people seems instead, unsurprisingly, to be surrounding himself with conspiracy-promoting World Net Daily writers.
Donald Trump is reportedly considering appointing Clare Lopez, an anti-Muslim conspiracy theorist, to serve as his deputy national security adviser.
Lopez is the vice president of the Center for Security Policy, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank that focuses on the threat of Islamic jihad. She was on a short list of names that the Daily Caller reported as coming directly from the Trump transition team.
That would be Frank Gaffney's think tank, the one that believes the Muslim Brotherhood has infiltrated not only the government but the conservative movement itself. Their biggest claim to fame is their insistence that conservative anti-tax guru Grover Norquist is a secret ally of the Muslim Brotherhood; when they demanded the conservative CPAC conference remove Norquist and other "secret Muslims" from the board, CPAC kicked them out.
This did not sit well with Steve Bannon, who was then well into the process of making Breitbart "news" an "alt-right" white nationalist site. So Steve Bannon reserved a room during CPAC himself, introducing Gaffney and the others as having been oppressed by the nasty conference conservatives, at which Frank Gaffney and the other conspiracy theorists repeated their claims that Grover Norquist was a secret Muslim Brotherhood ally.
Clare Lopez, for her part, outlines her group's various lunatic anti-Muslim conspiracies on Breitbart and on World Net Daily, two of the most-known conservative conspiracy sites. She and her fellow conspiracy-inventors are convinced that everyone from Clinton's aide Huma Abedin to Grover Norquist are secretly allies of terrorists; the group's evidence for this consists solely of any drawable lines between their targets and any ethnic Muslim anywhere. They are absolutely unhinged, and for a long while were shunned in conservative circles—until Steve Bannon used his own power to re-mainstream them over the objections of those "serious" conservatives by giving them a large public platform and deriding conservatives who don't ascribe to their lunacy.
This is the person in the running to be Trump's deputy national security adviser: the woman who believes secret Muslims have infiltrated all ranks of our government and politics, and has advocated for a return to the McCarthy era of investigating and rooting out Muslims and Muslim-enablers.