Stephen Miller Leads the Way on Violent Rhetoric

Jonathan Chait: “Stephen Miller delivered a eulogy for Charlie Kirk that served as a battle cry for the Trump administration’s state-sponsored war on his perceived foes—a war for which Miller is the primary strategist. The speech was a jarring piece of rhetoric. It is a perfect encapsulation of the ethos of Trumpism, boiling away the president’s idiosyncratic habits of mixing insult comedy and weird digressions into his rhetoric and leaving, in Miller’s tongue, the residue of pure ideology and will to power.”

“Miller’s theme was that President Donald Trump’s side embodies pure good, his opponents pure evil, and the former is destined to utterly destroy the latter. Republicans have never stopped complaining that Hillary Clinton once described a portion of Trump’s base as “a basket of deplorables.” Yet over the weekend the president’s most powerful adviser depicted half the country as worthless, irredeemably wicked, and fated for destruction.”