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.”

“Every day Stephen Miller remains in the White House is an emergency.”

— Hillary Clinton, on Twitter.

White House adviser Stephen Miller got engaged over the weekend to Katie Waldman, an aide to Vice President Mike Pence, Bloomberg reports.

“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.

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.”

“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.

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.”