“It appears Stephen Miller, noted white nationalist and architect of Trump’s child-separation policy, hasn’t been able to unload his luxury condo at CityCenterDC,” the Washingtonian reports.
Dobbs Attacks Stephen Miller for Not Helping Trump
Fox Business host Lou Dobbs attacked White House adviser Stephen Miller for not doing enough to help President Trump in his efforts to overturn the election, The Hill reports.
Said Dobbs: “Why don’t you guys jump and salute Ted Cruz and say, ‘Yes, we want you on the team’ now? My God, this is not a time for internecine nonsense on the part of the Republican Party, which is watching its blood drain into the streets because they’re gutless!”
The exchange is worth watching.
How Stephen Miller Manipulates Trump
New Yorker: “Miller wasn’t so much channeling Trump as overtaking him. Inside the White House, he was known as a ‘walking encyclopedia’ on immigration, and the President’s political advisers, who acknowledged that campaigning on the issue had been the key to Trump’s victory in 2016, deferred to him as an expert. Those with reservations—like Rex Tillerson, the Secretary of State, and H. R. McMaster, the national-security adviser—had other responsibilities. Miller could outmaneuver them if he used the right interagency channels. He sent e-mail sparingly and avoided calling officials directly to issue orders, relaying his messages through intermediaries.”
“Since Trump could rarely comprehend the full substance of his own Administration’s agenda on immigration, it fell to Miller to define what victory looked like.”
Bonus Quote of the Day
“Every day Stephen Miller remains in the White House is an emergency.”
— Hillary Clinton, on Twitter.
Emails Show Stephen Miller’s Affinity for White Nationalism
“In the run-up to the 2016 election, White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller promoted white nationalist literature, pushed racist immigration stories and obsessed over the loss of Confederate symbols after Dylann Roof’s murderous rampage,” according to leaked emails reviewed by Hatewatch.
“The emails, which Miller sent to the conservative website Breitbart News in 2015 and 2016, showcase the extremist, anti-immigrant ideology that undergirds the policies he has helped create as an architect of Donald Trump’s presidency.”
Stephen Miller Is Getting Married
White House adviser Stephen Miller got engaged over the weekend to Katie Waldman, an aide to Vice President Mike Pence, Bloomberg reports.
Behind the Rise of Stephen Miller
New York Times: “The story of Mr. Miller’s rise has been told with a focus on his pugnacity and paradoxes. Known more for his enemies than his friends, he is a conservative firebrand from liberal Santa Monica, Calif., and a descendant of refugees who is seeking to eliminate refugee programs. He is a Duke graduate in bespoke suits who rails against the perfidy of so-called elites. Among those who have questioned his moral fitness are his uncle, his childhood rabbi and 3,400 fellow Duke alumni.”
“Less attention has been paid to the forces that have abetted his rise and eroded Republican support for immigration — forces Mr. Miller has personified and advanced in a career unusually reflective of its times.”
Democrats Take Aim at Stephen Miller
“House Democrats are sharpening their focus on White House immigration adviser Stephen Miller, with key lawmakers saying he should be brought before congressional committees to testify about his role in recent policy controversies,” the Washington Post reports.
A Stephen Miller Special
McKay Coppins: “The 33-year-old White House speechwriter has a hand in virtually everything the president reads from a teleprompter. But as one of the most strident immigration hawks in the West Wing, Miller has been especially influential over the past two years in shaping the way Trump talks about his signature issue. Tuesday night was reportedly no exception.”
“While it’s impossible to say just how much of the address he wrote, all of the tics and tropes of Millerian rhetoric were on display. The scary immigrants (‘vicious coyotes and ruthless gangs’). The gory anecdotes (a veteran ‘beaten to death with a hammer by an illegal alien’). The decidedly un-Trumpian flourishes (‘a crisis of the heart, and a crisis of the soul.’)”
“In setting the stage for Trump’s prime-time address, White House officials had insisted that the president was making a good-faith effort to win over skeptics of his border-wall proposal and get the government reopened. But the speech he ended up giving was not calibrated for persuasion. It was, by and large, dark, divisive, and shot through with the kind of calculated provocation that rallies the president’s fans and riles his enemies. It was, in other words, classic Stephen Miller.”
Stephen Miller’s Uncle Speaks Out
“The uncle of White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller said Friday that the caravan of Central American migrants seeking asylum is just like his Jewish ancestors who fled Europe and came to the US as refugees before World War II,” CNN reports.
Said David Glosser: “They are just like our family. We needed to come here. We needed to find someplace to go and those that couldn’t suffered the consequences.”
Quote of the Day
“He was a strange dude. I remember he would take a bottle of glue — we didn’t have glue sticks in those days — and he would pour the glue on his arm, let it dry, peel it off and then eat it… he had such strange personal habits. He was a loner and isolated and off by himself all the time.”
— Teacher Nikki Fiske, quoted by the Hollywood Reporter, recounting having White House adviser Stephen Miller in her third grade class.
Miller Urged Trump to End Chinese Student Visas
“White House hawks earlier this year encouraged President Donald Trump to stop providing student visas to Chinese nationals, but the proposal was shelved over concerns about its economic and diplomatic impact,” the Financial Times reports.
“As the administration debated ways to tackle Chinese espionage, Stephen Miller, a White House aide who has been pivotal in developing the administration’s hardline immigration policies, pushed the president and other officials to make it impossible for Chinese citizens to study in the U.S.”
Stephen Miller Wins Again
NBC News: “Days before the Trump administration announced plans to slash the number of refugees allowed into the U.S. to its lowest level in 40 years, Stephen Miller made his case for fewer refugees to a room of senior officials at the White House. His sales job was made easier by the absence of top officials who disagree with his stance. They weren’t there because they weren’t invited.”
“Missing from the room last Friday were U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley and the head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, Mark Green, both of whom have promoted a more generous policy toward refugees… Miller’s victories on the Muslim travel ban, limiting legal immigration and separating migrant families at the border show his skill in pulling bureaucratic levers, blocking opponents from key meetings, restricting the flow of information and inserting his allies in key positions.”
Stephen Miller Condemned by Childhood Rabbi
The childhood rabbi to Stephen Miller, special adviser to Donald Trump and a key architect of his “zero-tolerance” immigration policies, criticized his former charge as a purveyor of “negativity, violence, malice and brutality” who had learned nothing from his Jewish spiritual education, The Guardian reports.
Stephen Miller’s Uncle Speaks Out
Stephen Glosser, uncle of White House aide Stephen Miller, writes in Politico:
“I have watched with dismay and increasing horror as my nephew, who is an educated man and well aware of his heritage, has become the architect of immigration policies that repudiate the very foundation of our family’s life in this country.“
“If my nephew’s ideas on immigration had been in force a century ago, our family would have been wiped out.”
Stephen Miller Gets Back at His Critics
From the Washington Post:
One night, after Miller ordered $80 of takeout sushi from a restaurant near his apartment, a bartender followed him into the street and shouted, “Stephen!” When Miller turned around, the bartender raised both middle fingers and cursed at him, according to an account Miller has shared with White House colleagues.
Outraged, Miller threw the sushi away, he later told his colleagues.
Jonathan Chait: “This account — which, again, comes from Miller himself — shows a high-level presidential adviser responding to a completely nonviolent and nonthreatening gesture by throwing away his own food. The story does not explain why throwing away his own sushi in any way advanced his cause.”
Stephen Miller Stays In the Shadows
“Stephen Miller, the architect of President Donald Trump’s hard-line immigration policies, was noticeably absent from public view this week as the White House first vociferously defended and then caved on separating migrant children from their parents,” Politico reports.
“That wasn’t an accident. Among White House insiders, there is a sense that the president’s senior adviser for policy is a bad front man for the issue he’s most passionate about. Miller stayed entirely out of the spotlight during days of mounting political pressure, though behind the scenes he visited Capitol Hill on Tuesday night along with Trump to sell House Republicans on immigration legislation.”
“While other White House aides, like national security adviser John Bolton and National Economic Council director Larry Kudlow, are prized by Trump for their smooth defense of his policies on television, Miller is the opposite, valued as a source of ideas that the president believes appeal to his base.”
Stephen Miller’s Ancestor Flunked Naturalization Test
Yahoo News: “A photo of Nison (aka Max) Miller stares out from the screen, sullen and stern, in faded black and white. ‘Order of Court Denying Petition’ is the title of the government form dated ’14th November 1932,’ to which it is attached, the one in which Miller is applying for naturalization as an American citizen.”
“And beneath the photo, the reason given for his denial: Ignorance.”
“Nison Miller is the great-grandfather of White House adviser Stephen Miller, who has taken credit for being one of the chief architects of the administration’s family separation policy.”
