https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/06/us/politics/stephen-miller-foreign-policy.html
Stephen Miller Offers a Strongman’s View of the World
President Trump’s trusted adviser is casting his hard-right gaze abroad, saying the world must be governed by “force.”
Stephen Miller Offers a Strongman’s View of the World
President Trump’s trusted adviser is casting his hard-right gaze abroad, saying the world must be governed by “force.”
PHOTO: Mr. Miller has the president’s complete trust, a staff of over 40 people, and several big jobs that include protecting the homeland and securing territories further afield. Credit: Eric Lee/The New York Times
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by Katie Rogers
January 6, 2026
New York Times
[Katie Rogers is a White House correspondent who has covered both Trump administrations. She reported from Washington.]
Stephen Miller has spent the bulk of his White House career furthering hard-right domestic policies that have resulted in mass deportations, family separations and the testing of the constitutional tenets that grant American citizenship.
Now, Mr. Miller, President Trump’s 40-year-old deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security adviser, is casting his hard-right gaze further abroad: toward Venezuela and the Danish territory of Greenland, specifically.
Mr. Miller is doing so, the president’s advisers say, in service of advancing Mr. Trump’s foreign policy ambitions, which so far resemble imperialistic designs to exploit less powerful, resource-rich countries and territories the world over and use those resources for America’s gain. According to Mr. Miller, using brute force is not only on the table but also the Trump administration’s preferred way to conduct itself on the world stage.
“We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” Mr. Miller told Jake Tapper of CNN on Monday, during a combative appearance in which he was pressed on Mr. Trump’s long-held desire to control Greenland.
“These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time,” he said.
This aggressive posture toward Greenland — and in turn, the rest of the world — is a perfect encapsulation of the raw power that Mr. Trump wants to project, even against Denmark, the NATO ally that controls Greenland. The moment also illustrates how people like Mr. Miller have ascended to the inner circle of a leader who has no interest in having his impulses checked, and how they exert their influence once they arrive there.
PHOTO: Trump administration officials say taking over Greenland is necessary for U.S. national security. Credit: Ivor Prickett for The New York Times
The moment also shows just how differently Mr. Trump has operated in his second term from how he did in his first.
About midway through his first term, the president began joking with his aides about his desire to buy Greenland for its natural resources, like coal and uranium. At the time, his advisers humored him with offers to investigate the possibility of buying the semiautonomous territory. They did not think Mr. Trump was serious, or that it could ever actually happen. Those advisers are gone.
Flash forward to the second term. Mr. Miller has the president’s complete trust, a staff of over 40 people, and several big jobs that include protecting the homeland and securing territories further afield. A first-term joke made in passing about purchasing Greenland for its natural resources is now a term-two presidential threat to attack and annex the Danish territory by force if necessary, under the guise of protecting Americans from foreign incursions.
“Right now, Greenland is covered with Russian and Chinese ships all over the place,” Mr. Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on Sunday evening. “We need Greenland from the standpoint of national security.”
On Monday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told lawmakers that Mr. Trump plans to buy Greenland rather than invade it, though the White House later said the president had not ruled out the use of military force.
Russia and China are active in the Arctic Circle, but Greenland is not surrounded by their ships, and the United States has a military base on Greenland. Mr. Trump has also focused on Greenland because of its potential wealth of critical minerals.
Another crucial takeaway from the first Trump term that rings true to Mr. Miller’s rise: What was once mocked is now a threat to be taken seriously.
Mr. Miller, 40, grew up in wealthy Santa Monica, Calif., and attended a left-leaning high school. There, he was once booed and yanked off the stage during a campaign speech for student government in which a central plank of his platform was to investigate school janitors for inadequately picking up trash. His former classmates recalled that he seemed to enjoy the attention.
A quote from his 2003 yearbook is attributed to President Theodore Roosevelt: “There can be no 50-50 Americanism in this country. There is room here for only 100 percent Americanism, only for those who are Americans and nothing else.”
As a student at Duke University, Mr. Miller achieved some notoriety in conservative circles for defending three Duke lacrosse players who had been accused of rape.
“With the players at last nearing release from criminal charges, we are reminded that justice is not always swift,” Mr. Miller wrote in a column for the school paper in 2007. “Instead, it is often a crawl, gently creeping forward, which, if enough momentum builds, can turn into an avalanche. Unified, we can marshal this momentum.”
It later turned out the rape allegations were false.
After graduating, he found his way to Washington and by 2009 he was working for Jeff Sessions, then a senator from Alabama. Mr. Miller has come a long way from his work as a Senate staff member who regularly flooded inboxes across Washington with horror stories of undocumented immigrants. What then seemed to recipients as late-night, xenophobic fever dreams from a nameless staff member went unrecognized for what they really were: a set of deeply held beliefs that helped animate Mr. Trump’s first presidential campaign and, later, helped clinch his second term.
Listen to this article · 9:15 minutes
Learn more
by Katie Rogers
January 6, 2026
New York Times
[Katie Rogers is a White House correspondent who has covered both Trump administrations. She reported from Washington.]
Stephen Miller has spent the bulk of his White House career furthering hard-right domestic policies that have resulted in mass deportations, family separations and the testing of the constitutional tenets that grant American citizenship.
Now, Mr. Miller, President Trump’s 40-year-old deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security adviser, is casting his hard-right gaze further abroad: toward Venezuela and the Danish territory of Greenland, specifically.
Mr. Miller is doing so, the president’s advisers say, in service of advancing Mr. Trump’s foreign policy ambitions, which so far resemble imperialistic designs to exploit less powerful, resource-rich countries and territories the world over and use those resources for America’s gain. According to Mr. Miller, using brute force is not only on the table but also the Trump administration’s preferred way to conduct itself on the world stage.
“We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” Mr. Miller told Jake Tapper of CNN on Monday, during a combative appearance in which he was pressed on Mr. Trump’s long-held desire to control Greenland.
“These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time,” he said.
This aggressive posture toward Greenland — and in turn, the rest of the world — is a perfect encapsulation of the raw power that Mr. Trump wants to project, even against Denmark, the NATO ally that controls Greenland. The moment also illustrates how people like Mr. Miller have ascended to the inner circle of a leader who has no interest in having his impulses checked, and how they exert their influence once they arrive there.
PHOTO: Trump administration officials say taking over Greenland is necessary for U.S. national security. Credit: Ivor Prickett for The New York Times
The moment also shows just how differently Mr. Trump has operated in his second term from how he did in his first.
About midway through his first term, the president began joking with his aides about his desire to buy Greenland for its natural resources, like coal and uranium. At the time, his advisers humored him with offers to investigate the possibility of buying the semiautonomous territory. They did not think Mr. Trump was serious, or that it could ever actually happen. Those advisers are gone.
Flash forward to the second term. Mr. Miller has the president’s complete trust, a staff of over 40 people, and several big jobs that include protecting the homeland and securing territories further afield. A first-term joke made in passing about purchasing Greenland for its natural resources is now a term-two presidential threat to attack and annex the Danish territory by force if necessary, under the guise of protecting Americans from foreign incursions.
“Right now, Greenland is covered with Russian and Chinese ships all over the place,” Mr. Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on Sunday evening. “We need Greenland from the standpoint of national security.”
On Monday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told lawmakers that Mr. Trump plans to buy Greenland rather than invade it, though the White House later said the president had not ruled out the use of military force.
Russia and China are active in the Arctic Circle, but Greenland is not surrounded by their ships, and the United States has a military base on Greenland. Mr. Trump has also focused on Greenland because of its potential wealth of critical minerals.
Another crucial takeaway from the first Trump term that rings true to Mr. Miller’s rise: What was once mocked is now a threat to be taken seriously.
Mr. Miller, 40, grew up in wealthy Santa Monica, Calif., and attended a left-leaning high school. There, he was once booed and yanked off the stage during a campaign speech for student government in which a central plank of his platform was to investigate school janitors for inadequately picking up trash. His former classmates recalled that he seemed to enjoy the attention.
A quote from his 2003 yearbook is attributed to President Theodore Roosevelt: “There can be no 50-50 Americanism in this country. There is room here for only 100 percent Americanism, only for those who are Americans and nothing else.”
As a student at Duke University, Mr. Miller achieved some notoriety in conservative circles for defending three Duke lacrosse players who had been accused of rape.
“With the players at last nearing release from criminal charges, we are reminded that justice is not always swift,” Mr. Miller wrote in a column for the school paper in 2007. “Instead, it is often a crawl, gently creeping forward, which, if enough momentum builds, can turn into an avalanche. Unified, we can marshal this momentum.”
It later turned out the rape allegations were false.
After graduating, he found his way to Washington and by 2009 he was working for Jeff Sessions, then a senator from Alabama. Mr. Miller has come a long way from his work as a Senate staff member who regularly flooded inboxes across Washington with horror stories of undocumented immigrants. What then seemed to recipients as late-night, xenophobic fever dreams from a nameless staff member went unrecognized for what they really were: a set of deeply held beliefs that helped animate Mr. Trump’s first presidential campaign and, later, helped clinch his second term.
Mr. Miller with President Trump at the White House in 2017. Credit: Al Drago/The New York Times
After amassing enough power to shape the administration’s crackdown on immigration into the United States and disparage entire communities of immigrants, as well as their children, Mr. Miller is echoing Mr. Trump’s foreign policy goals.
On CNN, Mr. Miller reiterated Mr. Trump’s intent to rule Venezuela and exploit its vast oil reserves after U.S. forces launched a raid on the Venezuelan capital and seized President Nicolás Maduro and his wife. And he said that no one would fight back if the United States were to decide to use its military to annex Greenland.
Republicans in Washington know that Mr. Miller is channeling the president when he speaks. The two spent the four years that Mr. Trump was out of power speaking on nearly a daily basis, “talking about what a second term agenda might look like before many of us even dreamed that there would be a second term,” said Senator Jim Banks, Republican of Indiana.
Mr. Banks called Mr. Miller “the smartest guy I’ve ever met in Washington,” and said that Mr. Miller had made sacrifices to do his work, including facing threats and moving his family into military housing in Washington. He said Mr. Miller was not going to back down.
“He’s often represented as an ideologue,” Mr. Banks said. “He’s incredibly pragmatic.”
At least one Republican has publicly criticized Mr. Miller’s remarks about Greenland. Representative Don Bacon, a retiring Republican congressman from Nebraska, called Mr. Miller’s comments “really dumb.” On X, Mr. Bacon said: “There is no up side to demeaning our friends. But, it is causing wounds that will take time to heal.”
Mr. Miller, of course, has the full backing of the Trump White House.
“The president has been driving all policy and Stephen faithfully executes what the president wants,” Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said in a statement. “Whether it’s immigration, crime, trade, Greenland or Venezuela.”
She downplayed the idea that Mr. Miller was driving policy decisions and disputed the notion that Mr. Miller was on television promoting his views more often lately; she noted that he had been on television more than 200 times in 2025. The assignments were what had changed.
Mr. Miller during an interview with CNN in October. He appeared on TV more than 200 times in 2025, according to the White House press secretary. Credit: Anna Rose Layden for The New York Times
Ms. Leavitt did not say which aspects of Venezuela Mr. Miller would be most focused on going forward, but she said he and a host of other administration figures, mainly the vice president and Mr. Rubio, would be involved in strategizing over the military and economic future of the country.
Mr. Miller did not respond to a request for comment for this article.
His wife, Katie, also did not respond to a request for comment about her husband’s role in the administration. Ms. Miller, 34, a former administration official who now runs a politics and lifestyle podcast, shared a photo of Greenland on social media on Saturday, after American forces had invaded Venezuela. In it, the territory was covered with the stars and stripes of the American flag. “SOON,” she captioned the photo.
Questions about Mr. Trump’s intentions for Greenland followed from there.
“I just wanted to reset, Jake, by making clear that has been the formal position of the U.S. government since the beginning of this administration, frankly, going back into the previous Trump administration, that Greenland should be part of the United States,” Mr. Miller said on CNN on Monday evening. “The president has been very clear about that. That is the formal position of the U.S. government.”
This week, Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen of Denmark urged Mr. Trump to “stop the threats” to annex Greenland, in effect attacking a NATO ally. Ms. Frederiksen said that the threats were “unacceptable pressure” but that they must be taken seriously.
“I believe that he means it,” she said in an interview with DR, the Danish broadcaster.
For decades, it has been clear that Mr. Miller does, too.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Katie Rogers is a White House correspondent for The Times, reporting on President Trump.
See more on: U.S. Politics, Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, Marco Rubio
https://zeteo.com/p/who-is-stephen-miller-trump-immigration-fascism
Sinister, Malevolent, Venomous: Stephen Miller Is Like No Other White House Aide in Modern US History
Miller, the deputy White House chief of staff, has never hidden his disfigured and dangerous psyche. But now Donald Trump has empowered him to execute his fascist impulses.
by John Harwood
October 9, 2025
Zeteo
Miller speaks with the media outside the White House on May 9, 2025. Photo by Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images
Over four decades as a journalist, I’ve covered seven presidents, 20 Congresses, and thousands of staffers. I’ve never encountered one as sinister as Stephen Miller.
I see it in the darkness of his eyes, the venom of his words, the malevolence of his affect. And also by the deliberate brutality of his campaign from the White House to deport immigrants and crush dissenters.
That Miller serves as the president’s top domestic policy adviser demonstrates the unique depravity of Donald Trump’s second presidency. So does the fact that Kash Patel commands the FBI, Kristi Noem directs the Department of Homeland Security, Pete Hegseth peacocks around the Pentagon, Pam Bondi stains the office of attorney general, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. runs the Department of Health and Human Services.
Donald Trump assembled this team to suit his twisted visions of vengeance, destruction, and self-aggrandizement. Never has a collection of people so unbalanced, unqualified, and unfit controlled the levers of federal government power.
This deserves a constant reminder.
The administration and its allies, hoping to mollify swing voters as well as excite their MAGA base, want Americans to think of this moment as just another swing of the political pendulum. But it isn’t.
During its long descent into extremism, the GOP has consistently deflected criticism by citing past Democratic actions and claiming “both sides do it.” They don’t. And the falsity of their false equivalencies has never been so easy to see.
https://www.nytimes.com/…/stephen-millers-dystopian-america…
Stephen Miller’s Dystopian America
Language is a tool for shaping minds, and Miller knows how to weaponize it.
by Jean Guerrero
August 28, 2020
New York Times
PHOTO: Stephen Miller, White House senior adviser. Credit: Erin Schaff/The New York TimesOver the past week, the Republican National Convention sought to conjure a “radical left” hellscape.
Speakers conflated anti-racist protesters with deranged criminals out to destroy the country. Donald Trump Jr. called Joe Biden “the Loch Ness monster,” while the conservative activist Charlie Kirk praised Donald Trump as “the bodyguard of Western civilization.” In his speech on Thursday, the president denounced “mob rule.” “Your vote will decide whether we protect law-abiding Americans, or whether we give free rein to violent anarchists and agitators, and criminals who threaten our citizens,” he said.
The language at the convention comes from the “white genocide” conspiracy theory, which warns, among other things, that brown and Black people will destroy white civilization with the help of their anti-racist allies. It echoed that of the racist-dystopian novel “The Camp of the Saints,” which Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s senior policy adviser and speechwriter, promoted in 2015 through the right-wing website Breitbart.
The book, by the French author Jean Raspail, characterizes “anti-racists” as an apocalyptic “mob” of “agitators” and “anarchists,” and depicts the destruction of the white world by brown refugees described as “monsters,” “beasts” and “toiling ants teeming for the white man’s comfort.” He wrote of a world where “anti-racists” are “servants of the beast” tainted by the “milk of human kindness.” Empathy and interracial ally-ship are associated with primitive bodily functions.
Language is a tool for shaping minds, and Mr. Miller knows how to weaponize it. It’s why he draws from books like Mr. Raspail’s to shape rhetoric. It’s why, in 2015, he asked writers at Breitbart to produce an article about the parallels between the book and real life that painted the book as prophetic. It’s also why he inserts vivid, gory descriptions of crimes ostensibly committed by migrants into Mr. Trump’s speeches.
In July, Mr. Miller told Tucker Carlson that the federal crackdown on anti-racist protesters in Portland, Ore., was about “the survival of this country.” In an interview with the radio host Larry O’Connor that month, he said the priority of the administration was protecting America from the dangers of “cancel culture,” which he described as “a very grave threat to American freedom.”
Mr. Trump is leaning on Mr. Miller’s dystopian vision to stoke white fear the way Mr. Miller did in 2016, when he helped his boss depict Democrats as elites seeking to “decimate” America through immigration. This time around the targets have expanded beyond Mexicans and Muslims to include Black Lives Matter protesters and their allies. The Trump campaign’s strategy is to cast the president’s opponents as an existential threat to the nation.
The term “cancel culture,” used throughout the Republican convention, lumps together and demonizes critics of white male supremacy, in an attempt to silence them. The use of the term in this context allows the far right to dictate the terms of the conversation, as does the news media’s reluctance to call Mr. Trump and his chief adviser what they are: traffickers in hate, pushing a white nationalist agenda through narratives about national identity, prosperity and security.
Mr. Miller seeks to re-engineer immigration into this country to keep brown and Black people out, because he sees them as threat to America’s prosperity and national security. It explains why his policies disproportionately affect migrant families from Latin America and Africa, and why the federal government is using force against anti-racist protesters in cities run by Democrats.
This obsession with the supposed dangers of people of color, particularly immigrants or left-wing extremists, ignores reality. Right-wing extremists have committed the most terrorist attacks in the United States since the 1990s.
Officials say that a 17-year-old named Kyle Rittenhouse opened fire on people during a protest in Kenosha, Wis., on Tuesday, killing two and wounding a third. Mr. Rittenhouse, a supporter of Mr. Trump and the pro-law enforcement “Blue Lives Matter” movement, traveled to Kenosha from his home in Antioch, Ill., in response to online appeals from a right-wing militia group to “protect” businesses, property and lives from “rioters,” investigators say.
Last August, a gunman drove to a Walmart in El Paso, targeting Hispanics in massacre that left 23 people dead. The man charged in the killings, Patrick Crusius, wrote an anti-immigrant manifesto that spoke of a “Hispanic invasion of Texas,” mirroring Mr. Trump’s characterization of migrants from Central and South America as perpetrating “an invasion of our country.”
False Black and brown crime statistics are a common recruiting tactic in white supremacist circles; the website American Renaissance, which Mr. Miller also promoted through Breitbart, pumps out misleading statistics characterizing people of color as more prone to violence. These words take on a life of their own and serve to further radicalize an already divided citizenry.
Mary Ann Mendoza, an “angel mom” whose son was killed by a driver who was in the United States illegally, was scheduled to speak at the Republican convention. She was dropped from the convention lineup after she retweeted an anti-Semitic QAnon conspiracy theory. Mr. Miller has repeatedly given her a platform from which to spew fabricated migrant crime statistics that inaccurately paint migrants as more innately violent than citizens.
As Mr. Trump increasingly adopts the playbook of white supremacists, a new solidarity is emerging among white, Black, brown and other groups as they confront the growing threat of right-wing extremism together. The Joe Biden-Kamala Harris ticket reflects this new solidarity.
“Trump knows that if we find real solidarity, it’s a wrap,” said Aida Rodriguez, an Afro-Latina activist. “We’re all waking up to it, and you’re going to see it in November.” These alliances are a real-life manifestation of the mob of Mr. Miller’s nightmares. But that “mob” will not destroy America, as he imagines. It will destroy the white supremacist fantasy he and so many others live inside.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Jean Guerrero (@jeanguerre), an investigative journalist, is the author of the book “Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump and the White Nationalist Agenda.”
A version of this article appears in print on Aug. 29, 2020, Section A, Page 27 of the New York edition with the headline: The G.O.P.’s Dystopian America. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/stephen-miller-hatemonger-biography/
Books & the Arts
The Loyalist
The cruel world according to Stephen Miller.
by David Klion
March 10, 2025
The Nation
[This article appears in the April 2025 issue.]
Illustration by Joe Ciardiello.If the only thing one knew about Stephen Miller was that he was a white man, it might be sufficient to explain his alignment with Donald Trump—after all, 60 percent of that demographic supported Trump against Kamala Harris last fall. But identity is complicated, and every other aspect of Miller’s points to the opposite conclusion. At 39, Miller is a millennial (51 percent of voters age 30 to 44 voted for Harris); he was raised Jewish in a Reform congregation (84 percent of Reform Jews voted for Harris) and grew up in Santa Monica, California (Santa Monica’s precincts ranged from 71 to 86 percent for Harris); he has parents with advanced degrees and himself graduated from top-ranked Duke University (56 percent of college graduates and a likely 75 percent of students at Duke voted for Harris); and he has lived his entire postcollegiate life in the District of Columbia (92 percent of DC voters went for Harris).
Books in review:
by Jean Guerrero
William Morrow, 2021
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Miller has the profile not of a typical Trump supporter but of a garden-variety liberal Democrat. Nevertheless, he is arguably one of the president’s most influential and ideologically fervent loyalists. Having previously served as chief speechwriter and a senior adviser for policy in Trump’s first term, this year he returned to the West Wing as deputy chief of staff for policy and Homeland Security adviser in Trump’s second—roles that mark him as one of the most powerful people in the Trump White House and, by extension, the world. As a January New York Times profile put it, “Mr. Miller was influential in Mr. Trump’s first term but stands to be exponentially more so this time.”
One of the architects of the attempted “Muslim ban” as well as the infamous child-separation policy during Trump’s first term, Miller has now pledged to oversee “the largest deportation operation in American history,” indiscriminately targeting the roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants believed to be living in the United States, with the full coercive power of the executive branch. To whatever extent he is successful, he will transform America demographically, culturally, and economically in ways he has fantasized about since his early teens; in many respects, he already has.
How to make sense of Miller and his trajectory? While he has made his share of public appearances to push his ultra-nativist views, he rarely speaks about his own political evolution. To date, the only authoritative biography of Miller is Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda, by the reporter Jean Guerrero. Published in 2020, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic and during a presidential election that saw voters reject Trump, the book was well received by reviewers but arrived at a moment when Miller seemed, mercifully, to be fading in relevance. But the story Guerrero recounts is an urgent one, packed with insights into the kind of personality that self-radicalizes toward the far right in the unlikeliest of circumstances. As we now know, Miller was only just getting started during Trump’s first term. The particular brand of virulent xenophobia he represents is now politically ascendant, and his biography is inescapably central to the history of the present.
Stephen Miller was born in 1985 and raised in the coastal paradise of Santa Monica—a semi-urban enclave of wealthy and mostly white liberals, undergirded by the omnipresent labor of immigrants who are neither white nor wealthy. “Laborers maintain this world,” Guerrero notes, most often laborers from Mexico and Central America. The rest of California in the 1980s and ’90s, however, was neither placid nor uniformly liberal. During Miller’s childhood and adolescence, the state was a hotbed of anti-immigrant sentiment and racial backlash.
Miller was 6 years old when the Los Angeles Police Department’s savage beating of Rodney King set off a wave of protests and riots across the city. California’s Republican governor, Pete Wilson, won reelection on an anti-immigrant platform when Miller was 9, campaigning on Proposition 187 to deny nonemergency services to undocumented immigrants. Right-wing talk radio, spearheaded by but not limited to Rush Limbaugh, took off nationwide during the 1990s and stoked racist and xenophobic sentiment for anyone inclined to listen to it. Santa Monica may have been a haven for well-to-do veterans of the New Left (Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda lived there for decades), but they were thriving amid the cognitive dissonance produced by a functional racial caste system upon which many of them relied and a state that was a harbinger of our ugly political moment.
Miller is a product of some of the same cognitive dissonance. The story of how he came to be born in Santa Monica, as Guerrero reminds us, begins with his ancestors’ immigration to escape antisemitism. Both sides of his family, the Millers and the Glossers, arrived in the United States from Russia’s impoverished Pale of Settlement in the early 20th century. From then on, they both had typically American Jewish social ascents. On the Miller side, one generation’s success selling groceries and rolling cigars in Pittsburgh led to the next generation’s success in law and real estate in Los Angeles; on the Glosser side, a family-owned department store served as a community pillar in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, until it was acquired and liquidated in a leveraged buyout in the 1980s.
Stephen’s father, Michael Miller, a Stanford-educated lawyer, cofounded a firm focused on corporate and real estate law; he also became deeply involved in his father’s real estate business and helped to reconstruct the world-famous Santa Monica Pier. Stephen’s mother, Miriam Glosser, graduated from the Columbia University School of Social Work and worked with troubled teens before eventually pivoting to the family real estate business as well. As a child, Stephen grew up in a $1 million, five-bedroom home in the North of Montana section of Santa Monica, one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Greater Los Angeles. He had Latin American–born housekeepers who cooked family meals and cleaned up after him and his siblings.
This comfortable lifestyle was disrupted in 1994, when the Millers had a run of terrible luck: A major earthquake inflicted $20 billion in property damage in Southern California, including on a number of properties managed by the family firm. This came at a particularly inopportune moment, as Michael Miller was in the midst of an acrimonious legal battle with his former partners in the law firm he’d started, the upshot of which was that he found himself hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt.
In 1998, when Stephen was 13, the family sold its imposing home and moved to a smaller house by a freeway underpass near the working-class Hispanic neighborhood of Pico, though still in a majority-white middle school district. The area was beginning to gentrify, and the Millers would refinance the house three times over the next four years as their fortunes gradually recovered.
If there is a sociological explanation for Miller’s politics, Guerrero implies, perhaps it lies in this period. In the aftermath of the 2008 housing crisis, many of Miller’s peers found themselves downwardly mobile, locked out of the housing market and denied opportunities that prior generations had taken for granted—experiences that have inclined many millennials toward a more socialistic politics than previous cohorts. But Miller’s brush with downward mobility came much earlier, with his affluent boomer parents experiencing the shock of material insecurity during the 1990s, a decade that is more typically remembered as a period of unprecedented economic prosperity. Though Miller was never anywhere close to working-class, and his family’s finances rebounded in time for him to enjoy the benefits of an elite university education and a parentally subsidized down payment on a DC condo (though recently his parents had another bit of bad luck, as their home was destroyed in the Los Angeles wildfires in January), he did pass through a period of acute economic and status anxiety during a very impressionable age.
But sociology can only explain so much; it is hard to escape the sense that there was something fundamentally malevolent about Miller from the start. Another person in his shoes might have grasped that this anxiety was the product of his parents’ business difficulties and sheer geological misfortune, but the adolescent Miller sought out other culprits. With his economic privilege in seeming jeopardy, he leaned much harder into his privilege as a white, native-born American.
Guerrero spoke with Jason Islas, a working-class Mexican American who was Miller’s friend in middle school and attended his lavish bar mitzvah. Though the two initially bonded over Star Trek, Miller abruptly ditched Islas as a friend the summer after middle school, citing his Latino heritage as a justification. “The conversation was remarkably calm,” Islas told Guerrero. “He expressed hatred for me in a calm, cool, matter-of-fact way.”
In middle school, Miller was already drawn to right-wing subcultures that distinguished him from his peers, purchasing a subscription to Guns & Ammo magazine and finding himself inspired by the writings of Charlton Heston and Wayne LaPierre on the Second Amendment. His father was also moving right, alienated by bad relationships and burned bridges with his liberal Santa Monica cohort, and Stephen seems to have inherited his father’s contrarian streak. By the time he enrolled in the public Santa Monica High School, which Guerrero portrays as neatly internally segregated between professional-class, college-bound whites and working-class Hispanics, he was a full-fledged conservative provocateur.
For Miller, a key entry point to the right was The Larry Elder Show, whose Black host had built a following among right-wing Angelenos for his verbal assaults on political correctness and liberal shibboleths. Miller called in to the show and invited Elder to speak at his high school, and he subsequently became a frequent guest, a precocious teen reactionary holding forth on his high school’s alleged anti-Americanness in the wake of the 9/11 attacks before an audience that spanned Southern California.
Miller’s provocations became more outlandish as he advanced through his teens. He cultivated a mid-century gangster affect: He listened to Frank Sinatra, enjoyed gambling, and styled himself after Ace Rothstein, the Robert De Niro character in Casino. He was known for arguing with teachers, hijacking school events, and winning attention with his outrageous antics. In both high school and college, he would be repeatedly observed throwing trash on the floor and then insisting that the custodial staff pick it up. (“Am I the only one here who is sick and tired of being told to pick up my trash when we have plenty of janitors who are paid to do it for us?” he is quoted as saying at one point.) A number of students and faculty found this behavior appalling, but Miller’s shameless transgressiveness at least got him a lot of attention.
His willingness to upset liberals and thrive on their outrage put Miller on the radar of David Horowitz, the nationally notorious firebrand whose red diaper upbringing and early career involvement with the Black Panthers were followed by an abrupt rightward turn beginning in the 1970s. By the early 2000s, Horowitz had become a leading conservative ideologue who specialized in identifying and recruiting young talent. After discovering Miller on The Larry Elder Show, Horowitz went on to serve as something of a career guru to him. He helped Miller craft an image as an outspoken champion of free speech at a hostile liberal high school, which Miller exploited to secure a photo spread in the Los Angeles Times. This publicity, Guerrero speculates, might also have helped Miller gain admission to Duke University despite an antagonistic relationship with his high school administration.
In 2003, Miller entered Duke, where he continued the shtick he’d developed at Santa Monica High: the performative littering, the trolling classroom monologues, the Larry Elder Show appearances lambasting the university administration for its supposed leftism, and the fruitful relationship with Horowitz. He quickly established a Duke chapter of Horowitz’s Students for Academic Freedom, which he used to assail the Palestine Solidarity Movement, to attack feminism and multiculturalism, and to champion the white members of the Duke lacrosse team who were accused (falsely, it turned out) of raping a Black stripper in 2006. This last incident, which drew sustained national attention, gave Miller the opportunity to appear on The O’Reilly Factor and Nancy Grace while he was still an undergrad.
Miller’s TV appearances proved to be the perfect launchpad for a career in Republican politics after graduation. Horowitz helped, too, introducing Miller to Representative Michelle Bachmann, from whose office Miller quickly rose to serve as press secretary for Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions. It was in this job that Miller met Steve Bannon, then affiliated with the emerging right-wing tabloid site Breitbart; Bannon, a longtime Los Angeles resident, recognized Miller from his Larry Elder spots. Breitbart and an increasingly extensive network of alternative right-wing media outlets enabled Miller, working with Sessions, to play a central role in the successful effort to kill the Obama administration’s effort at bipartisan immigration reform in 2014.
By this point, Miller had become much more deeply immersed in the literature and online forums of the extreme right and was taking direct inspiration from Jean Raspail’s novel The Camp of the Saints, with its dystopian vision of a horde of nonwhite migrants invading the West. Soon he also began to develop ties with leading right-wing media figures like Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham, Tucker Carlson, and the anti-immigration think tanker Mark Krikorian.
Perhaps the most vocal advocate against immigration in that media space was one Donald Trump, who had leveraged his celebrity to become the leading exponent of the “birther” conspiracy theory during the Obama years, impressing Miller greatly in the process. “Our whole country is rotting, like a third world country,” Trump told Breitbart in the wake of the Obama immigration bill’s defeat, prompting Miller to e-mail his friends that “Trump gets it…. I wish he’d run for president.” When Trump began his long-shot campaign the following year, Miller, barely 30, joined up, and the two quickly hit it off. Where more traditional young Republicans might have spent their early careers preparing to work for a more conventional Republican candidate like Jeb Bush or Chris Christie, Miller had presciently spent his preparing for a candidate like Trump. And with Trump’s victory came opportunities to do the kinds of things that his more seasoned peers might never have proposed.
Literally from Day 1, Miller set the tone for Trump’s first presidency: “This American carnage stops right here and stops right now,” the most memorable line in Trump’s 2017 inaugural address, came from Miller’s pen. A wave of executive orders empowering Immigration and Customs Enforcement, targeting sanctuary cities, ordering the construction of a border wall, and suspending immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries soon followed, all of them pushed and heavily shaped by Miller. It was Miller who made the once-obscure Salvadoran gang MS-13 an obsession of the Trump administration, and Miller who emerged as one of the top internal advocates for the family separation policy that became a national scandal in 2018.
In addition to the president himself, Miller built a close relationship with Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, ensuring a level of family trust that protected him from the turnover for which the Trump administration became infamous. If xenophobia was the policy through line for most of Miller’s efforts, competent bureaucratic maneuvering and absolute loyalty to Trump were what empowered him to execute his agenda. Miller’s fingerprints are likewise all over the early initiatives of Trump’s second term, including turning legal refugees away from the United States, suspending foreign aid, launching ICE raids on major cities, and leaning on the major tech companies to ban diversity initiatives.
The world according to Stephen Miller is a cruel and callous one, in which America is strictly for unhyphenated Americans and those here “illegally” must be forcibly returned to the “failed states” where they were born. To Miller, the crumbling American heartland is being preyed on not by rapacious capital but by an invading army of gangsters, thugs, and terrorists waved in by coastal liberal elites—in other words, by exactly the kind of people he has always lived among.
Part of why Guerrero was able to speak with so many of Miller’s acquaintances—including his estranged uncle David Glosser, who has compared his nephew to the Nazis—is that Miller is so unrepresentative of the world he grew up in. Interviewees throughout Hatemonger regularly express shame and horror rather than pride at Miller’s steady climb to the heights of political power; one gets the sense that speaking to the media is a form of penance for some of them.
At the same time, Miller’s rise wasn’t exactly a fluke. It was facilitated not only by his family’s baseline wealth and privilege and the social capital they afforded, but by Miller’s demonstrated talent for hacking the weaknesses of liberal elite culture itself. Miller is an extreme case, yet anyone who grew up in similar communities or attended similar schools can recognize him as a very particular type of guy. His hateful tirades weren’t popular at Santa Monica High or at Duke, but they consistently drew attention; students and faculty often pushed back hard against his constant trolling, but in doing so they played right into his hands. Teachers who wanted to encourage open debate and free speech gave him a platform regardless of whether he was arguing in good faith; mainstream and liberal media outlets continued to promote him in the name of provocation and ideological diversity. Like Trump himself, Miller intuitively grasped that being hated in elite liberal environments was better than being ignored, and that embracing the language and tactics of conservative media offered a means for a strange and argumentative kid to stand out from a crowd of generic achievers and to fast-track his way to influence.
This isn’t to say that Miller’s act is entirely cynical. It’s clear that beneath all the performative cruelty and amoral careerism, there’s an authentic core of seething, visceral, unquenchable hatred that defies any easy explanation. It’s true, as Guerrero documents, that such bigotry circulated widely in Southern California and elsewhere in the 1990s, and it’s true that far-right voices on talk radio and later on the Internet continually grew in influence as Miller came of age, but none of that by itself explains why Miller is the way he is.
Despite his obvious intelligence and his elite pedigree, Miller didn’t arrive at his views via serious reading—his is not the classical conservatism of Edmund Burke, the libertarianism of Friedrich Hayek, the neoconservatism of Irving Kristol, or the paleoconservatism of Samuel Francis—and he’s never presented himself as an intellectual in his own right in the manner of, say, his White House colleague Michael Anton. His ideas are not just monstrous and reactionary but banal and simplistic; he lacks the imagination that is a prerequisite for empathy. But in a way, this makes him the ideal conservative for the Trump era: His ideology is not refined, abstracted, or euphemized away from its real object. He’s told us exactly what he intends to do.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
David Klion
David Klion is a columnist for The Nation and a contributor at various publications. He is working on a book about the legacy of neoconservatism.
