Milbank: The latest example of a Trump adviser going bananas

• The White House speech writer who resigned in August over his participation in a white-nationalist conference.

• The homeland security adviser who quit in August over his emails with white nationalists using Nazi terminology.

• Another homeland security adviser who called black people lazy and promiscuous.

• The AmeriCorps spokesman who disparaged blacks, Muslims, gays, women and immigrants.

Exposed by CNN, the Atlantic or The Washington Post, most have lost their jobs.

But why the double standard? These Neanderthals were just aping the president’s behavior.

White nationalist themes

Trump’s closing theme for the 2018 midterms is becoming a grim reprise of the white-nationalist themes that propelled him in 2016.

In Iowa on Tuesday, speaking of the (European) Americans who settled the plains, Trump said: “These courageous patriots did not shed their blood, sweat and tears so that we could sit at home while others tried to erase their legacy and destroy our proud American heritage.”

Destroying “our” heritage: It’s a common theme of white nationalists, and Trump has deployed a variant six times in the past three weeks. “A vote for Republicans is a vote … to reclaim America’s true heritage and righteous destiny. We’re losing that with these crazy loco people,” he said on Saturday.

And just which “locos” destroy Americans’ “true heritage”?

In Iowa, Trump began by attacking the “phony protesters” of Brett Kavanaugh. He moved on to mock Democratic Sens. Elizabeth Warren (“Pocahontas” with “high cheek bones”), Cory Booker (“ran Newark into the ground”) and Dianne Feinstein (the audience chanted “Lock her up!”). Judging from Trump’s targets, those defiling American patriots’ heritage are almost exclusively women, racial minorities and Jews. By contrast, he gave a warm shout-out to Iowa Rep. Steve King, the anti-immigrant legislator who said “we can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.”

This all flows naturally from the man who, among many other things, demanded Obama’s birth certificate, spoke well of neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, disparaged countries in Africa and elsewhere, tried to disqualify a judge based on ethnicity, made false claims about black violence and called Mexicans rapists.

But it is depressing that Trump and his Republican allies believe they can hold back a blue wave only by redoubling efforts to make supporters fear that women and minorities threaten “America’s true heritage.”

My colleague Max Boot, in his new book, “The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right,” writes that “coded racial appeals had at least as much, if not more, to do with the electoral success of the modern Republican Party than all of the domestic and foreign policy proposals crafted by well-intentioned analysts like me.”

Now it’s no longer coded. Trump might just as well wave a banana.