Stephen Miller. The most powerful man in the U.S. Surely, you must mean President Trump, who is attempting to dismantle the federal government as we know it. No, I forgot. He is too busy signing executive orders, playing golf, attending sporting events, and explaining why paper straws explode. It must be Elon Musk. Oh, I guess not. Although he is leading his adolescent programmers in attempting to ensure that no one ever again receives a payment from the federal government, he spends too much such time with Trump and Elon’s nose-picking son, R2-D2.
Then certainly, it must be the Speaker of the House, little Mikey Johnson. However, I forgot that he is too preoccupied with waiting for orders from Trump and attempting to pass a reconciliation bill that will never pass the muster of MTG and the Freedom Caucusers. That leaves us with Stephen Miller, Trump’s top aide and the Wizard of Evil. Let’s take a look at the man who wields so much power and hates so many people.
Stephen Miller: Friend to All Humankind
Stephen Miller was born in liberal Santa Monica, California, in 1985. He attended Santa Monica High School and learned to hate at an early age as he was a young devotee of conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh. While there, he challenged Latino students to speak English and protested school announcements in multiple languages. He also successfully convinced the school to require students to recite the Pledge of Allegiance.
From there, he moved on to Duke University, where his reign of terror continued. He got involved with radical right hate groups like the anti-muslim group the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He also organized a speaking event that brought white nationalist Peter Brimelow to campus. He was and is the most infamous white nationalist in the U.S.
On to D.C.
After he graduated, Miller headed to Washington, D.C., to work as the press secretary for former Minnesota congresswoman Michele Bachmann. At the time, Bachmann spread the rumor that the Muslim Brotherhood had infiltrated the U.S. government to bring about America’s demise. He then went to work for Senator Jeff Sessions, who frequently cited reports generated by anti-immigrant hate groups such as the Federation for American Immigration Reform.
In 2013, Sessions and Miller helped defeat a bill that would have provided a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants while at the same time strengthening border security. In his effort to destroy the bill, Miller used the hate publication Breitbart News to spread his anti-immigrant propaganda. When the bill was defeated, the then head of Breitbart News, Steve Bannon, likened Sessions and Miller’s work on defeating the bill to the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
Trump Part I
Shortly after that, he became a policy advisor for presidential candidate Donald Trump. Trump’s campaign had a sharp anti-immigrant theme where he claimed that “they’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” Following Trump’s 2016 victory, Miller moved to the White House as a senior policy advisor. While there, Miller was one of the major forces behind Trump’s most draconian policies, such as the “zero-tolerance” policy. This was the policy that separated children and parents as they crossed the U.S. border from Mexico. This led to the devastating conditions where caged immigrant children were packed together in an unsanitary and cramped environment.
Miller also helped shape Trump’s Muslim ban, which banned entry into the U.S. travelers from certain Muslim countries. He also was instrumental in the rollout of the action to cancel the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. This was an Obama-era program created to protect from deportation undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. as children. Miller opposed the program because, in his words, it would advance the reshaping of the U.S. demographics by replacing native-born citizens.
Post White House
Less than a month after Trump left office in 2021, Miller founded the America First Legal Foundation, which was described as a David vs Goliath (big government and big tech) legal firm. But what they did best was fundraise. They raised $44 million alone in 2022 alone. Some of the money was used to file lawsuits, such as the conservative block of a Biden administration program to offer debt relief to Black farmers, which Miller’s firm declared was discriminatory.
But most of it ($32 million) was spent on advertising to damage democratic candidates in pre-2024 races. In 2022, they paid for ads in swing states that accused the Biden administration of anti-white bigotry. During this time, he was also a Trump advisor and regularly appeared on Fox News, extolling the virtues of the Trump agenda. And most importantly, he spent considerable time drawing up Trump’s second-term playbook.
Trump Redux
In the run-up to the 2024 election, he cultivated relationships with people who could help Trump, like Elon Musk and JD Vance. After Trump was re-elected in November, Miller moved down to Florida to take a leadership role in the transition. Appointed as his deputy chief of staff, he started drafting executive orders that Trump would put into motion in the first days and weeks of his administration.
These orders include an attempt to end birthright citizenship, designating drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, and reinstatement of Title 42, which allows for the sealing of the United States border with Mexico if there is a public health threat. His strategy employs two distinct tactics. The first one is to flood the zone with multiple executive orders, thereby keeping the opposition off balance on how to react.
Secondly, the action should be kept as secret as possible to avoid any obstruction of Trump’s agenda. Usually, these orders would be sent to the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, where a career lawyer, separated from the outgoing administration’s political appointees, would review them for form and legality and suggest changes. The Trump White House employed this practice during their first term, But this go around, Miller is using a group of lawyers from outside the department to vet the bills due to Trump’s distrust of the Justice Department.
It may be Trump’s world, but Stephen Miller is in charge.
