FASCIST AMERICA 2026: Ongoing LIVE Coverage of the Horrific Fallout From the Murderous Carnage of ICE and the Massive Protests Against Their Criminal Actions by Citizens of Minneapolis Minnesota

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2026/01/07/us/minnesota-shooting-ice

Officials Dispute Federal Account of Fatal ICE Encounter in Minnesota

Federal officials said a woman was trying to kill agents with a car in Minneapolis. City and state officials called that account false, demanding an end to the immigration crackdown.

Published Jan. 7, 2026

 

Updated Jan. 8, 2026, 11:18 a.m. ET

Video

Federal Agent Fatally Shoots Woman in Minneapolis

2:13

Federal officials claimed that the 37-year-old woman was trying to kill agents with a car in Minneapolis, while city and state officials disputed their account. Credit:  David Guttenfelder/The New York Times

Pinned


Julie BosmanMitch Smith and Dan Simmons

Reporting from Chicago and Minneapolis

 
Here’s what to know.

State and local officials demanded an end to the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in Minnesota after a federal officer shot and killed a 37-year-old woman in Minneapolis on Wednesday.

Details remained in dispute, with President Trump saying on social media that the agents had acted in self-defense, while state and local officials described federal accounts of the shooting with terms like “propaganda” and “garbage.”

Federal officials defended the use of force, saying the woman had “weaponized her vehicle” before being shot. At a news conference, Kristi Noem, the Homeland Security secretary, said the woman was “stalking” officers, and that the agent who killed her “used his training to save his life and those of his colleagues.”

Mayor Jacob Frey called the accounts of federal officials “bullshit,” describing the shooting instead as “an agent recklessly using power that resulted in somebody dying, getting killed.” Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota posted on social media, “Don’t believe this propaganda machine.”

Connor Janeksela, 30, who lives on the street where the shooting took place, described what he saw: “One of the ICE agents tried to rip her door open, and another one got in front of the vehicle and then shouted, ‘Stop!’ before firing three times within a second of saying, ‘Stop.’”

In his own news conference, the governor said the shooting was predictable. “We have been warning for weeks that the Trump administration’s dangerous, sensationalized operations are a threat to our public safety,” Mr. Walz said, adding that it cost a person her life on Wednesday.

Here’s what we’re covering:

What videos show: Footage of the shooting posted on social media and verified by The New York Times show two federal agents trying to get a woman to exit a vehicle that is partially blocking a street. The driver reverses, then pulls forward and begins to turn. A third agent pulls out a gun and fires a shot, then continues firing as the vehicle moves past him. Watch the footage ›

Victim identified: The woman who was killed by federal immigration agents was identified as Renee Nicole Good by two officials in Minnesota with knowledge of the investigation who were not authorized to share details. The Minneapolis police chief, Brian O’Hara, said in an earlier news conference that there was “nothing to indicate that this woman was the target of any law enforcement investigation.” Read more ›

Calls for calm: Governor Walz asked for people to protest peacefully, adding that the state’s National Guard troops were prepared to deploy if demonstrations got out of hand. On Wednesday night, thousands gathered for a vigil, packing several blocks around the site of the shooting and yelling chants against Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The shooting was about a mile from where George Floyd was killed by the police in 2020. Read more ›


Other shootings: In the last four months alone, immigration officers have fired on at least nine people in five states and Washington, D.C. All of the individuals targeted in those shootings were, like the woman killed on Wednesday, fired on while in their vehicles. Read more ›

Jan. 8, 2026, 1:42 a.m. ETJan. 8, 2026

Jesus Jiménez

Reporting from Los Angeles

Outside a complex of federal buildings in downtown Los Angeles, about two dozen protesters gathered with drums and flags, chanting, “ICE out of L.A.” The crowd was small compared with the ones last summer, when protesters took to the streets of downtown for days, prompting Trump to send National Guard troops to the area.

Jan. 8, 2026, 12:19 a.m. ETJan. 8, 2026

Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs

Reporting from Minneapolis

There are candles and bouquets of flowers around a makeshift memorial to Renee Good at one corner of the intersection where she was killed. Signs, too. Several urge peace and one reads, “ICE in drinks, not communities!”


Credit:  Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs/The New York Times

Scenes From Minneapolis

Jan. 8, 2026, 12:07 a.m. ETJan. 8, 2026

Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs

Reporting from Minneapolis

There is no obvious police presence here and the crowd is subdued. People occasionally chant slogans opposing the Trump administration’s deportation efforts, but they are mostly mingling and chatting with each other.


Jan. 8, 2026, 12:02 a.m. ETJan. 8, 2026

Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs

Reporting from Minneapolis

A few hundred people are paying respects, late into the night, to Renee Good, the woman who was killed by a federal immigration agent here earlier in the day. Mourners and activists sit around two small firepits, burning wood to stay warm, at the icy intersection of Portland Avenue and 34th Street in South Minneapolis, where the shooting took place.


Jan. 7, 2026, 11:04 p.m. ETJan. 7, 2026

Dan Simmons

Reporting from Minneapolis

A new group of protesters is at the scene of the shooting and has taken over the intersection where the victim, Renee Good, was killed. They are chanting loudly against ICE intervention in Minneapolis. The police are not here.



Credit:  Dan Simmons for The New York Times


Jan. 7, 2026, 10:16 p.m. ETJan. 7, 2026

Mitch Smith

Reporting from Chicago

Minneapolis Public Schools said it was canceling classes on Thursday and Friday “due to safety concerns related to today’s incidents around the city.”


Jan. 7, 2026, 9:43 p.m. ETJan. 7, 2026

Pooja Salhotra

Representative Robin Kelly, Democrat of Illinois, announced plans to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem following the shooting. Kelly, whose district includes part of the Chicago area that was targeted by federal immigration officers, accused Noem of obstruction of justice, violation of public trust and self-dealing. Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois also criticized federal agents’ actions, calling for Noem’s resignation.


Jan. 7, 2026, 9:33 p.m. ETJan. 7, 2026

Dan Simmons

Reporting from Minneapolis

Bella Bessantez, 48, lives directly across the street from the scene of the shooting. After witnessing the shooting, seeing the sea of people at the vigil from her second-floor balcony brought some hope, she said. “I’m happy to see the unity of the people,” she said.

Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York Times

Jan. 7, 2026, 9:09 p.m. ETJan. 7, 2026

Mitch Smith

Reporting from Chicago
Minnesota was long at odds with the Trump administration. It’s boiled over.

Video

Minnesota Governor Condemns ICE Shooting

0:49

Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota slammed the fatal shooting of a woman by an immigration agent. President Trump said that the agents had acted in self-defense. Credit:  Stephen Maturen/Getty Images

After a federal immigration agent fatally shot a woman in Minneapolis on Wednesday, Mayor Jacob Frey called the U.S. government’s account of what happened “bullshit.” State legislators chimed in, lamenting a “hostile federal government.” And Gov. Tim Walz derided what he called a federal “propaganda machine,” saying that the shooting was both “totally predictable” and “totally avoidable.”

The outpouring of anger from the Democrats who govern Minnesota marked a boiling-over point in a rhetorical fight with the Trump administration that had been building for weeks.

The next steps in that dispute seemed uncertain.

Federal officials, who vowed to continue a surge of immigration enforcement work in the Minneapolis area despite protests, defended the shooting on Wednesday as necessary and lawful.

“This is the direct consequence of constant attacks and demonization of our officers by sanctuary politicians who fuel and encourage rampant assaults on our law enforcement,” said Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security.

Mr. Frey and Mr. Walz both warned demonstrators to stay peaceful, stating their belief that the federal government was looking for a pretext to deploy the military on Minnesota’s streets.

“Do not take the bait,” Mr. Walz said. “Do not allow them to deploy federal troops into here. Do not allow them to invoke the Insurrection Act. Do not allow them to declare martial law.”

Bad blood between Mr. Walz and President Trump is nothing new. Mr. Trump has long criticized the governor’s handling of the riots that followed the police killing of George Floyd in 2020, and the pair exchanged campaign-trail insults in 2024 when Mr. Walz was the Democratic nominee for vice president. When a gunman killed a Democratic Minnesota state legislator and her husband last year, Mr. Trump said he had no plans to call Mr. Walz, whom he described as “whacked out.” Mr. Walz, for his part, criticized immigration agents last year as “Donald Trump’s modern-day Gestapo.”

But that mutual distaste morphed into a far more tangible clash in recent weeks, as the president and his allies portrayed Minnesota as a failure of liberal governance, citing a fraud scheme that resulted in hundreds of millions, even billions, of dollars being pilfered from social service programs. The president began describing Minnesota’s large Somali diaspora, whose members make up a majority of the fraud defendants, in especially derisive terms. Immigration agents briefly surged into the state last month, sometimes clashing with residents.

All of it was prelude to this week, when the federal government announced the deployment of around 2,000 agents to the Minneapolis area in what it said was its “largest operation to date.” The mobilization, they said, was necessary to crack down on fraud and to root out illegal immigrants. Plans for the surge continued after Mr. Walz announced on Monday that he was dropping his campaign for a third term as governor.

“Dropping out of the race won’t shield him from the consequences of his actions,” a White House spokeswoman, Abigail Jackson, said.

As the agents began arriving in Minnesota, state and local leaders warned that it would create chaos and that people could get hurt.

When that prediction came true on Wednesday, federal officials blamed the woman who was killed and “sanctuary politicians.” Minnesota leaders said it was the fault of the federal government.

Jan. 7, 2026, 8:09 p.m. ETJan. 7, 2026

Christina Morales
The victim in the ICE shooting was remembered for her kindness.

Video

Thousands Gather at Vigil for Minnesota Woman Fatally Shot by ICE

0:50

A memorial for Renee Good, a 37-year-old U.S. citizen who was killed by a federal agent, drew a crowd in Minneapolis.CreditCredit...Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York Times

The woman killed by a federal agent on Wednesday in Minneapolis was remembered as a compassionate, giving person.

The woman, identified by the authorities as Renee Nicole Good, 37, was a cherished Minnesotan, said State Representative Leigh Finke of St. Paul, Minn., who paid tribute to her in a statement. Ms. Good was “a loved and celebrated community member, who has now been stripped away fro

Ms. Good, a U.S. citizen, lived in Minneapolis with her partner, according to an interview with her mother, Donna Ganger, in The Minnesota Star Tribune, which said that Ms. Good had a 6-year-old child.

Federal officials said an ICE agent shot and killed Ms. Good in self-defense, and they accused her of trying to use her vehicle to run over law enforcement officers. Local officials have strongly disputed that account.

Ms. Ganger told The Star Tribune that her daughter “was one of the kindest people I’ve ever known,” adding that she was “loving, forgiving and affectionate.”

Ms. Ganger declined a request for additional comment, and other family members could not be immediately reached.

Ms. Finke condemned the federal immigration operation that led to the fatal encounter, calling for those activities to end, “as well as full transparency and accountability to ensure justice for the victim.”

Mitch Smith, Kevin Draper and Julie Bosman contributed reporting. Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.

FASCIST AMERICA 2026: ICE MURDERS RENEE NICOLE GOOD!--Hold ICE Accountable for its Deadly Actions

https://zeteo.com/p/ice-cold-blooded-murder

ICE Cold-Blooded Murder

 
A masked federal agent guns down a US civilian in broad daylight, Donald Trump wants to balloon the military budget, and is perennial MAGA loser Kari Lake running for Senate again? 

by Peter Rothpletz
January 8, 2026
Zeteo

I wish I could say “good morning,” but the greeting simply doesn’t apply today, and Zeteo is not in the business of faux-cheeriness for the sake of convention. Peter here, filled with the incandescent rage of 10,000 suns after watching what happened in Minnesota yesterday. But before we get to the Lede, first some housekeeping… My close pal and Dem congressional candidate in NYC, Cameron Kasky, will join Mehdi for a can’t-miss Zeteo Zoom Town Hall TODAY at 4 pm ET to discuss what he saw while visiting the West Bank late last month. The details for signing up are in the ‘Don’t Miss It’ section of this email.

Now, in today’s ‘First Draft,’ an ICE goon shoots a US citizen in the face and kills her, the Trump administration expands on its plan to seize Venezuelan oil, the EU tells the US president he can forget about annexing Greenland, and Republicans revive their gerrymandering-fueled plot to subvert the midterm elections


🚨 Don’t miss our LIVE in-person event in DC: Join Mehdi, Swin, Ro Khanna, Joy Reid, Jim Acosta, Sarah Matthews, Miles Taylor, and another very special political guest for a powerful evening at the Howard Theatre in Washington, DC, to mark one year of Trump, on Tuesday, Jan. 20, 2026!

Get your tickets here!


 

ICE Killed Good


PHOTO: People protest against ICE during a vigil at the site where a woman was shot and killed by an immigration officer earlier in the day in Minneapolis, on Jan. 7, 2026. Photo by Kerem Yucel/AFP via Getty Images

The president of the United States, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, and the squad they’ve amassed with the sorriest dregs of society have, at long last, Made America Great Again. All it took was orphaning a 6-year-old boy.

Renee Nicole Good, self-described on her Instagram profile as a “poet and writer and wife and mom and shitty guitar strummer,” was killed in Minneapolis yesterday afternoon, shot in the head at least once and perhaps three times by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent.

Watch the disturbing video, via this link which was obtained by the Minnesota Reformer:


Good’s “murder,” as described by multiple Democratic lawmakers in the aftermath of the shooting, comes on the heels of the Trump administration deploying some 2,000 ICE officers to the North Star State.

Last night, the president took to social media to claim, despite clear video evidence widely circulating online showing otherwise, Good “violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer, who seems to have shot her in self defense.” He added it’s “hard to believe” the federal agent is even alive.

Trump’s blatantly dishonest smears of Good and her actions stand in stark contrast with how the president has lionized violent Jan. 6 rioters, in particular Ashli Babbitt, who was shot and killed by an officer as she stormed the US Capitol.

The smears feel even sicker once you see the photo of the glove compartment in Good’s car filled with stuffed animals.

FASCIST AMERICA 2026: ABOLISH ICE!

https://truthout.org/articles/ice-agent-shoots-and-kills-woman-at-minneapolis-protest/

News

Immigration
 

ICE Agent Shoots and Kills Woman at Minneapolis Protest

“I have a message to ICE: Get the fuck out of Minneapolis,” said Mayor Jacob Frey after the shooting.

by Sharon Zhang
January 7, 2026
Truthout

 

Members of law enforcement work the scene following a suspected shooting by a federal agent, on January 7, 2026, in Minneapolis, Minnesota.Stephen Maturen / Getty Images

A masked immigration agent shot and killed a woman in Minneapolis during a protest against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on Wednesday.

Officials have not yet released the woman’s identity, but she was identified by Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minnesota) as a U.S. citizen, and local officials cited her as 37 years old. The Department of Homeland Security has confirmed the shooting.

Local reports say that residents were blocking federal agents on a snowy residential road in a protest. The killing was allegedly recorded, captured from multiple angles, with the videos corroborated by witness reports.

Video footage shows a running car stopped perpendicular to the flow of traffic, with a woman in the driver’s seat with the window rolled down. Two federal agents pull up in a truck to join other masked officers at the scene. The agents confront the woman, and a voice is heard saying “get out of the fucking car.” One of the agents rushes to the driver’s door and tries to pull the handle, but it is locked.

As the agent tries to break in, the driver backs up, then begins driving forward, seemingly in an attempt to get around another stopped car and leave the scene. Just as the car begins moving forward, however, another masked federal agent appears around the front of the car and fires at the driver’s head. Three shots can be heard.

One witness told MPR that the federal agent had put his body on the front of the driver’s car at the time. This appears to be the same agent who killed the woman.

“She was trying to turn around, and the ICE agent was in front of her car, and he pulled out a gun and put it right in — like, his midriff was on her bumper — and he reached across the hood of the car and shot her in the face like three, four times,” the witness who lives on the road, Emily Heller, told the outlet.

After the shooting, the car quickly accelerates and slams into another car parked on the other side of the road, footage shows. The driver’s body was slumped over.

The killing apparently occurred less than a mile away from where police officers killed George Floyd in 2020.

Almost immediately after the incident, DHS moved to vilify the woman.

President Donald Trump posted a slowed down clip of the shooting on Truth Social showing the woman turning away from the agent as he shot her. Even though the video directly contradicts his narrative, Trump says she “violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer, who seems to have shot her in self defense,” and “it is hard to believe [the officer] is alive.”

Trump claims the agent is in the hospital, and blamed the “Radical Left” for the shooting. The video footage of the shooting shows the agent was several feet away from the car for what appeared to be his second and third shots.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem went on Fox News just hours after the killing to characterize the killing as self defense.

“Our ICE officers were out on an enforcement action. They got stuck in the snow,” said Noem. “They were attempting to push out their vehicle, and a woman attacked them, and those surrounding them, and attempted to run them over.”

Noem called the incident an “act of domestic terrorism.”

The officials’ comments were immediately ripped as patently untrue and in direct contradiction to witness accounts and video footage.

“You’re lying. There was no attempt to run the officer over and no ICE agents appear to be hurt,” said Omar on X, quoting a DHS statement on the incident. “Get out of our city.”

“Having seen the video myself, I want to tell everyone directly. That is bullshit,” said Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey in a press conference.

Commentators brought up a similar case of a woman in Chicago, Marimar Martinez. In October, a Customs and Border Patrol agent shot Martinez multiple times, with the federal government accusing her of trying to ram the agent’s car.

But Martinez’s legal team has said that it was, in fact, federal agents who rammed her, and body camera footage of the incident released shortly after also contradicted the government’s narrative of the incident. Ultimately, the Department of Justice dropped charges against Martinez.

In a press conference after the shooting, Frey emphasized his call for the Trump administration to withdraw their immigration agents from the city.

“There’s little I can say, again, to make this situation better,” Frey said. “But I do have a message, for our community, for our city. I have a message to ICE: Get the fuck out of Minneapolis.”

This story is breaking and will be updated. 


ABOUT THE AUTHOR:


Sharon Zhang

 

Sharon Zhang is a news writer at Truthout covering politics, climate and labor. Before coming to Truthout, Sharon had written stories for Pacific Standard, The New Republic, and more. She has a master’s degree in environmental studies. She can be found on Twitter and Bluesky.

 

LATEST NEWS UPDATE ON THE MURDER:

 

https://www.startribune.com/she-was-an-amazing-human-being-mother-identifies-woman-shot-killed-by-ice-agent/601559922

News & Politics

 
‘She was an amazing human being’: Mother identifies woman shot, killed by ICE agent

Renee Nicole Good, 37, lived in Minneapolis with her partner just blocks from where she was shot.

By Paul Walsh and Jeff Day
The Minnesota Star Tribune
January 7, 2026

A poster showing a photograph of Renee Nicole Good, 37, hangs on a lamppost at the site where she was shot and killed by a federal agent while she was in her vehicle in Minneapolis on Wednesday, Jan. 7. (David Guttenfelder/The New York Times)

The woman shot and killed by an ICE agent in Minneapolis on Wednesday, Jan. 7, was identified by her mother as 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good.

Good died just a few blocks from where she lived. A woman who answered the door at Good’s home declined to comment.

Donna Ganger told the Minnesota Star Tribune that her daughter lived in the Twin Cities with her partner. Ganger said the family was notified of the death late Wednesday morning.

“That’s so stupid” that she was killed, Ganger said, after learning some of the circumstances from a reporter. “She was probably terrified.”

Ganger said her daughter is “not part of anything like that at all,” referring to protesters challenging ICE agents.

“Renee was one of the kindest people I’ve ever known,” she said. “She was extremely compassionate. She’s taken care of people all her life. She was loving, forgiving and affectionate. She was an amazing human being.”

An Instagram account that appears to belong to Good describes her as a “poet and writer and wife and mom and shitty guitar strummer from Colorado; experiencing Minneapolis, MN.”

Good had previously been married to Timmy Ray Macklin Jr., who died in 2023 at the age of 36. Macklin’s father, Timmy Ray Macklin Sr., was shocked to hear the news that Good had been shot and killed.

He said Good and his son had a child who is now 6 years old.

“There’s nobody else in his life,” Macklin said. “I’ll drive. I’ll fly. To come and get my grandchild.”

Macklin added that Good had two additional children who he believed lived with her extended family.

In 2020 while studying creative writing at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va., Good was awarded the school’s undergraduate poetry prize for “On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs.”

A mini-bio on the English Department’s Facebook page said Good, known then as Renee Macklin, was from Colorado Springs and hosted a podcast with her husband, Tim Macklin.

“When she is not writing, reading or talking about writing,” the post continued, “she has movie marathons and makes messy art.”
 

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https://truthout.org/articles/ice-agent-shoots-and-kills-woman-at-minneapolis-protest/

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FASCIST AMERICA 2026 And The Major Deadly Legacy of January 6, 2021: The Overwhelmingly Clear and Present Danger Of Fascism On Every Single Level of American Life, Culture and Political Economy Has Become Our Quotidian Reality And Is Actively Destroying This Society As We Speak. The Massive Homicidal and Suicidal Evidence Of MAGA, the GOP, And Pathologically Corrupt And Criminally Sociopathic Mob Boss POTUS is EVERYWHERE Whether We Choose To Acknowledge It Or Not

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.”

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

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 Times

Over 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:

Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda
by Jean Guerrero
William Morrow, 2021

Buy this book

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.

January 2026 Issue

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.