In Profile: The Immigrant Hating Trump Adviser Stephen Miller

Stephen Miller

From a new Washington Post profile:

At President Trump’s speeches and rallies, Stephen Miller often can be found backstage, watching the teleprompter operator. As other White House staffers chat or look at their phones, Miller’s attention remains glued to the controls.


The energy and crowd-thrilling parts of Trump’s speeches usually happen during his impromptu diversions from the planned address. When Trump veers, colleagues say, Miller sometimes directs the operator to scroll higher or lower through the speech, so when the president is ready to pick it up again, he will hit those passages and make those points.

Miller knows where he wants the president to go...

As one of Trump’s longest-tenured and most trusted aides, his influence in the West Wing is rivaled only by Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, they say...

In Trump, Miller has found a champion for his ideological goals. He is the singular force behind the Trump administration’s immigration agenda — making him a crucial White House figure on an issue central to the president’s reelection campaign...

Effusive in praising his boss, Miller said he experienced a “jolt of electricity to my soul” when he saw Trump announce his presidential run, “as though everything that I felt at the deepest levels of my heart were for now being expressed by a candidate for our nation’s highest office before a watching world.”...

His authority has grown in recent months as he engineered a leadership purge at the Department of Homeland Security, removing or reassigning the head of every immigration-related agency in a span of just seven weeks...

Miller rarely, if ever, disagrees with the president in meetings, and instead seeks to convince him behind-the-scenes, with afternoon meetings or visits to the residence or Oval Office...

Among Miller’s co-workers are a few who believe he harbors racist views. “I don’t know what other principle could animate such a laserlike focus,” said one former career official at DHS...

While many of Trump’s advisers favored the president’s rhetoric on the threat of illegal immigrants, they urged him to retain a more welcoming message for those seeking to come to the United States legally. But Miller insisted that slashing those visas should be central to the president’s agenda, because it is central to the electoral map that runs through the Rust Belt and Upper Midwest...

Miller drafts most of the president’s public remarks, sometimes chatting with him beforehand to hear his thoughts and then crafting them into a speech. Trump often does not look at a speech until the plane ride before he gives it, current and former aides said, making Miller’s tone more influential...

One of his favorite tactics is to call “deep in the building” at DHS and other agencies, giving orders to employees several layers beneath the Cabinet secretaries. As DHS secretary, Kelly told Miller to stop doing that and instructed his own employees to alert him when Miller did.

But Miller continued under DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and began convening meetings on Fridays of lower-level employees, where he would alternately scream, demand and encourage, according to attendees. Cabinet heads would sometimes see their own staff leaving the West Wing and ask why they had been there. Nielsen would often find that her subordinates had talked to Miller about a policy without her being involved, current and former officials said...

Miller is obsessed, current and former administration officials said, with boosting deportations. Early in the tenure, he tried to persuade Kelly, as DHS chief, to deport anyone here illegally. Kelly wanted to focus on criminal felons, frustrating Miller, people familiar with the disagreement said.

“He is singularly focused on how to get people out of the country,” a former senior administration official said.

Of course, Miller is totally clueless when it comes to understanding the economics of immigration.
-RW