Although he worked mostly behind the scenes during Donald Trump’s first administration and may have escaped the notice of many Americans, Stephen Miller was, and still is, the Darth Vader of MAGA white nationalism. One has only to look at him to perceive that he exudes pure evil, and if anyone doubts how evil he really is, confirmation comes quickly when he opens his mouth and speaks.
Miller was, and is, the author of some of Trump’s most dystopian speeches. During Trump 1.0, he served as a policy advisor and was director of speechwriting for the functionally illiterate president. Miller helped to write Trump’s inaugural “American Carnage” address. His politics have been characterized as far right and xenophobic.
It was difficult to keep track of who was in and who was out during the first round of Donald Trump versus Everyone Else on the Planet, because they cycled through at lightning speed; in fact, I often imagined a large turnstile behind the front door of the White House. But Miller endured, presenting as a bloodless, Roy Cohen-like Svengali of cruelty.
Miller was also the chief architect of Trump’s Muslim travel ban and brutish southern border policy. As that architect, he stymied the publication of government studies showing that refugees have a net-positive impact on the economy. He was thrilled to work for a president who lied incessantly about the character and behavior of refugees. Miller couldn’t wait to ban Muslims and couldn’t wait to permanently separate distraught children from their distraught parents at the border, after which those distraught children were placed in cages—for who among us could possibly resist the urge to terrify and traumatize helpless children multiple times in a single day?
In short, Stephen Miller is a creep.
As a White House spokesman, Miller repeatedly made false claims of widespread voter fraud. Emails discovered in 2019 also revealed that Miller had disseminated articles gleaned from white nationalist publications that espoused loony-tune conspiracy theories about minorities. I find this tidbit extra fascinating, since Miller is the descendent of Jewish refugees and grew up in a Jewish home.
In my opinion, any child or grandchild of refugees has an obligation to at least try to view other refugees through the lens of basic human decency and compassion. The grandchild of refugees who fled the deadly pogroms of Belarus and found sanctuary in America should be revolted by the bigotry of the white nationalist movement. Thus, you can add “bad Jew” to his résumé.
After Trump lost the 2020 election and failed to get the result overturned by the judiciary or state legislatures, Miller (along with co-author of the “Green Bay Sweep” strategy, Peter Navarro) took to the airwaves to describe their intent to send “alternate” slates of electors to Congress. They appeared to be completely unconcerned that what they were proposing and plotting was unconstitutional and the prelude to an insurrection.
On January 6, 2021, Miller prepared the remarks that Trump delivered at the rally on the Ellipse. That speech, and others like it, were all the accelerant necessary to turn that malevolent clambake into a 10-alarm fire. During and after the speech, many of the attendees, correctly interpreting the speeches as a call to arms, marched to the Capitol both to prevent the election from being certified and to hang Mike Pence.
Post-presidency, Miller remained in Trump’s inner circle as a top lieutenant and advisor. During the Biden interregnum, Mr. Miller founded the uber-right-wing America First Legal Foundation, designed to dismantle, through lawsuits, equal rights for women, racial minorities, immigrants, and LGBTQ+ persons, along with destroying public education, affirmative action, and any other program that existed to provide equal opportunity and equal access to anyone who wasn’t white, male, and rich. Miller also had his fingerprints all over the draconian Project 2025, his how-to manual for ending democracy.
Since reentering the White House, Miller has been diligently “flooding the zone” as he works overtime to implement every last particle of Project 2025. By my reckoning, he is nearing completion of that particular mission.
He has authored many of Trump’s executive orders: attempting to end birthright citizenship; withdrawing the United States from the World Health Organization (you know, the one that keeps adults and children from dying of preventable illness and sends desperately needed emergency medical services to war zones); the ridiculous tariffs; the immigration bans.
Miller is not only a racist white nationalist—he is an isolationist who is hard at work massaging the boss into withdrawing from our leadership role on the world stage. The policies he promotes have resulted in Donald Trump becoming an international irrelevancy, and Trump knows it. Trump left the G-7 in the middle of the night last weekend because the level of indifference to him was palpable. His excuse was that he had to rush back to D.C. to somehow “manage” the military escalation between Iran and Israel, when the entire world knows that neither Ayatollah Ali Khamenei nor Benjamin Netanyahu give a rip about what Trump thinks or what Trump wants.
Stephen Miller is the individual behind revoking habeas corpus and due process for refugees, suing law firms involved in challenging Trump during and after his previous term in office, and withholding funds from the world-class universities perceived as not supportive enough of Israel’s destruction of Gaza.
I thought that in Trump 2.0 Stephen Miller might become the Director of Homeland Security (DHS), but evidently, Trump preferred Kristi Noem, the Botox Barbie who enjoys accessorizing with combat gear and Rolexes. Nevertheless, Miller is now an advisor to DHS Noem and of course continues to serve as a presidential liaison to Trump’s devoted coalition of racist white nationalists. He also advises that other fiendish, air-brushed Trumpette, Pam Bondi. Perhaps he and the girls get together on Friday nights to giggle, violate the Constitution, and braid each other’s hair.
He is relentless, cruel, and without a soul. He is a malignancy, a carbuncle, a malformed lump on the body politic, a sinister, hissing Trump-whisperer, a villain. He has made it his mission to install Donald Trump not as Dictator for a Day, but as Dictator for Life.
So far, everything seems to be going according to Stephen Miller’s plan, guided by Stephen Miller’s hatreds, and fueled by Stephen Miller’s malice. So, to anyone who thinks that we are going to have a clean election in 2026, all I can say is, “Think again.”
These people are never leaving office.
