Stephen Miller: A key engineer for Trump’s ‘America first’ agenda
As a young conservative in liberal Santa Monica, Calif., Stephen Miller clashed frequently with his high school, often calling in to a national radio show to lambaste administrators for promoting multiculturalism, allowing Spanish-language morning announcements and failing to require recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance.
Miller’s outrage did not appear to subside after he graduated. As a Duke University sophomore, Miller penned a column, titled “Santa Monica High’s Multicultural Fistfights,” in which he ripped his alma mater as a “center for political indoctrination.”
“The social experiment that Santa Monica High School has become is yet one more example of the dismal failure of leftism and the delusions and paranoia of its architects,” Miller wrote in the 2005 article for the conservative magazine FrontPage.
In the years before he became a top adviser to President Trump and a leading West Wing advocate for the executive order temporarily halting entry into the United States from seven majority-Muslim countries, Miller was developing his skills as a culture warrior and conservative provocateur eager to condemn liberal orthodoxy — particularly on matters of race and identity. Like Trump, Miller forged that identity while immersed in liberal communities, giving him cachet with fellow conservatives for waging his battles on opposition turf.
Starting as a teenager, with his frequent calls to the nationally syndicated “Larry Elder Show,” Miller made a name for himself in conservative media circles for his willingness to take controversial stands and act as a champion for those on the right who felt maligned by a culture of political correctness.
He produced a canon of searing columns on race, gender and other hot-button issues and, at Duke, became known to Fox News viewers as a leading defender of the white lacrosse players wrongfully accused of raping a black stripper. By his late 20s, Miller was a key aide to then-Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), helping to torpedo a long-sought goal of immigrant advocacy groups to put millions of unauthorized Hispanic immigrants on a path to citizenship.
Today, at 31, he has emerged alongside former Breitbart News chief Stephen K. Bannon as a chief engineer of Trump’s populist “America first” agenda that has roiled the Washington debate over immigration and trade and sparked alarm among traditional U.S. allies abroad.
Miller, whose White House title is senior adviser to the president for policy, has been at Trump’s side for more than a year, joining his campaign in January 2016 when Sessions, who was sworn in Thursday as attorney general, was one of the only Republican officials to endorse the businessman’s candidacy.
While Trump at times revamped his campaign leadership, with Bannon joining relatively late in August 2016, Miller remained a steady presence whose profile and influence grew over time.
He wrote some of Trump’s most strident speeches during the campaign, including his Republican National Convention acceptance address in which Trump declared that “nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it.”
And Miller sometimes served as the warm-up act for Trump at his large campaign rallies, including a rip-roaring speech in Wisconsin during the Republican primary when Miller thrashed Trump’s chief rival, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), for supporting increases in legal immigration that would result in more Muslims entering the country — a position Miller charged that Cruz held with “no regard, no concern” for how it would “affect the security of you and your family.”
After reports of Miller’s central role crafting the order imposing a 90-day ban on citizens of Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen from entering the United States, the young aide has drawn uncomfortable new scrutiny. MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, host of the “Morning Joe” program that is a Trump favorite, recently blasted Miller as a “very young person in the White House on a power trip thinking that you can just write executive orders and tell all of your Cabinet agencies to go to hell.”
For Miller, though, working in the Trump White House is a natural culmination of his young career — a chance to work for a president who appears to share his zeal for getting under the skin of political opponents.
“The way that people on the left abuse and slam people on the right — that’s probably the thing that’s most concerned Stephen,” said Elder, the Los Angeles-based conservative talk-show host who Miller describes as a mentor. “The lack of fairness. The left wing dominance in academia. The left wing dominance in the media. The left wing dominance in Hollywood.”
Miller’s ideological awakening found its roots in a left-leaning high school where he has written that social life and academics were badly segregated, despite what he saw as a devotion among teachers and administrators to multiculturalism.
“My best judgment at the time was that the educational answer that had been provided, which was to reject the melting-pot formula in favor of an educational formula that focused on all the things that made us different, was not working,” he told The Washington Post in an interview.
Miller said he rejects the “provocateur” label, saying it suggests that his intentions are to seek attention rather than what he says is his true goal — “to battle against slim odds, a stacked deck and powerful entrenched forces, in pursuit of justice.”
Miller said he turned away from the more liberal politics of his parents as he grew up in Santa Monica after buying a subscription to Guns & Ammo magazine and becoming familiar with the writings of actor Charlton Heston, a longtime president of the National Rifle Association.
Miller began appearing on Elder’s show, a local broadcast that is aired in 300 markets, after the 9/11 attacks, when he felt his home town lacked sufficient patriotism.
Elder said that Miller called in the first time to voice objections to his school’s failure to recite the Pledge of Allegiance daily as required by state law.
In writings at the time and later, Miller said he lobbied for the pledge recitation against a recalcitrant administration that refused to put the practice in place even after he had flagged the legal violation. “Osama Bin Laden would feel very welcome at Santa Monica High School,” he wrote in a letter to the editor at the time.
“It’s difficult to overstate the extent to which the instructional environment on campus was breathtakingly PC,” Miller said in an interview.
Mark Kelly, who was the principal at the time, said he did not recall the episode as a major fight. When Miller flagged the issue, Kelly said he researched the law and realized that the school, indeed, needed to change its policy and institute the recitation of the pledge. Miller was invited to lead the pledge after it was reinstated.
“Stephen was right,” Kelly recalled.
The victory was a validation for Miller of the necessity to fight powerful figures who opposed his views.
Miller pushed the school administration over his desire to host an on-campus speech by David Horowitz — a onetime Marxist, then controversial far-right conservative — who became an early mentor and would later introduce Miller to Sessions.
Horowitz recalls being immediately impressed with Miller. “One of the things that struck me when I became a conservative was that conservatives don’t have any fight,” Horowitz said. “They don’t have any stomach for it. . . . Stephen Miller had that from the get-go.”
Cultural-identity issues appeared to particularly animate Miller. In a column in his high school newspaper, titled “A Time to Kill,” he urged violent response to radical Islamists.
“We have all heard about how peaceful and benign the Islamic religion is, but no matter how many times you say that, it cannot change the fact that millions of radical Muslims would celebrate your death for the simple reason that you are Christian, Jewish or American,” Miller wrote.
Ari Rosmarin, a civil rights lawyer who edited the student newspaper at time, recalled that Miller was especially critical of a Mexican American student group.
“I think he’s got a very sharp understanding of what words and issues will poke and provoke progressives, because he came up around it and really cut his teeth picking these fights that had low stakes but high offense,” Rosmarin said.
That skill led Miller to become a mini-celebrity in conservative intellectual circles because of his passion, age and home town. He appeared 70 times on Elder’s show before his high school graduation, according to the host.
“He found a really unique role to play that was deeply attractive to national conservatives,” Rosmarin said. “He was like a lonely warrior behind enemy lines.”
In the halls of Santa Monica High School, though, where students and teachers took pride in their ethnic diversity and liberal values, Miller was becoming something of a pariah. That environment prompted Miller to become even more assertive, recalled one of his former teachers.