If there was one thing that terrified Donald Trump’s critics more than the sensational raid he launched to capture Venezuela’s dictator Nicolas Maduro, it was the cavalier way his over-weening policy chief Stephen Miller then sought to justify it.
‘We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else,’ the shaven-headed millennial bluntly told CNN news anchor Jake Tapper last week.
‘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. These are the iron laws of the world that existed since the beginning of time.’
Barely had viewers caught their breath at this outburst of cold-eyed belligerence than Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy and his homeland security adviser, dropped another bombshell as the conversation moved to the sovereign Danish territory of Greenland.
As ‘the power of Nato’, the US should get what it needed, he argued, and ‘so obviously Greenland should be part of the United States’. Obviously. And besides, said Miller with his usual disconcertingly friendly smile, nobody was going to fight the US over the future of Greenland. What he really meant, of course, was ‘nobody in their right mind’.
In case anyone was tempted to assume that Miller, 40, was speaking out of turn and would be rapidly slapped down, the President himself put them right in an interview with the New York Times published a few days ago.
Asked whether he disagreed on any policies with Miller, Trump said: ‘Stephen’s a very strong voice, I don’t think I disagree with him, no.’
Not for nothing is California-born Miller now regarded as the most influential official in the White House – and perhaps the most powerful unelected man in the US.
Trump has described his most loyal servant as sitting ‘at the top of the totem pole’ of his administration. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt says that a continual refrain from the Oval Office is ‘Where’s Stephen? Tell him to get that done.’
Although Miller is of Ashkenazi Jewish extraction, Democrats like to portray him as a jackbooted fascist, Trump’s skinhead bovver boy. According to well-connected journalist and Trump chronicler Michael Wolff, even some of his own colleagues wouldn’t disagree.
Last week, Wolff claimed that, in 2017, when Miller was just a minion in Trump’s first administration, working as a speech writer and policy adviser, Miller’s then boss, Steve Bannon – himself long accused of being on the hard Right – pointed him out to Wolff. ‘Now that is a real fascist,’ Bannon quipped.
Miller needs no introduction on Capitol Hill today. Posters of his face frozen in a typically menacing expression have been plastered around Washington, stamped with ‘creep’ and ‘fascism’.
During Trump’s first term, he became one of the architects of immigration policies lambasted by the Left, such as the Mexican border wall, separating migrant children from their families and the attempted ‘Muslim ban’ (Trump’s 2017 temporary block on travel to the US from seven predominantly Muslim countries).
In Trump’s second term, Miller has picked up where he left off with even more energy. He has promised to oversee the ‘largest deportation operation in American history’ by targeting the country’s estimated 11 million undocumented migrants, in what his opponents say is a demographic transformation towards a whiter country that Miller has dreamed of since he was a teenager.
His own uncle, eminent psychologist David Glosser, has publicly condemned him, claiming that their family – who fled anti-Jewish pogroms in Europe – would have been ‘wiped out’ under his nephew’s immigration crackdown.
Trump has made clear how frustrated he was during his first term at being surrounded by officials who didn’t agree with his more radical ideas and worked to thwart him. He’s had no such problem with Miller who, say sources, is not only one of the few who’s still in favour with the boss but who always defers to Trump.
Sources say they’re in lockstep on how to deal with everyone from undocumented migrants to uncooperative Danish politicians who still bizarrely refuse to hand over Greenland to Uncle Sam.
Even during the four years when Trump was out of power, he and Miller spoke nearly every day, say fellow Republicans.
Senator Jim Banks told the New York Times the pair were ‘talking about what a second term agenda might look like before many of us even dreamed that there would be a second term’.
Banks, incidentally, called Miller the ‘smartest guy I’ve ever met in Washington’ echoing a former House Speaker, who refers to Miller as ‘Trump’s brain’. It was certainly astute of Miller to recognise the value of keeping in with the ex-president.
It’s come at a cost, however. He’s widely accused of being virulently xenophobic, if not outright racist. Miller, wife Katie and their three children are living in protected military housing in the Washington area, selling their $3 million home in Arlington, Virginia, after he faced at least one verified death threat.
Katie, 34, was also followed and photographed around their neighbourhood, a sign of the public’s growing fascination with her as much as him. A hard-Right podcaster and fellow Trumpite, she has eschewed the traditional role of wallflower for political spouses.
Just hours after last week’s Venezuela raid, she had posted on social media a picture of a map of Greenland superimposed with the US flag, commenting: ‘SOON.’
In 2020, the year they married, Vanity Fair dubbed them ‘Trump’s favourite power couple’ waspishly noting that ‘even Goebbels was a ladies’ man’.
They have much in common, including coming from liberal cities but having politically conservative lawyer fathers.
A former Trump administration apparatchik, Katie was Press Secretary for Trump’s first Vice President, Mike Pence, and has remained loyal to the cause – although a little more rebellious given the tattoo inside her lower lip, which spells ‘YOLO’ (‘You Only Live Once’).
In a 2020 book, she was quoted as saying that colleagues at the Department of Homeland Security once sent her to visit child detention centres at the Mexican border ‘to try to make me more compassionate – but it didn’t work’.
Naturally, the more that the Democrats and their Hollywood pals hate them, the more the MAGA movement loves the Millers.
Trump’s critics paint Stephen as calling the foreign policy shots, pointing out how he is more prominent on TV than he used to be.
Left-wingers have declared open season on Miller. Talk show host Jimmy Kimmel crudely calls him ‘Trump’s other little p****’. Others mockingly recirculate a 2003 video of Miller sitting in a school bus joking about Saddam Hussein and his cronies needing to have their fingers cut off.
There are also photos of him indulging his youthful obsession with Star Trek, dressing up as Captain Kirk whose ‘alpha leadership persona’ – said a former school friend – Miller admired.
His 2003 school yearbook offered another gem – he included a quote, attributed to President Theodore Roosevelt, saying that the US only had room for people ‘who are Americans and nothing else’.
Friends say he relishes causing a stink. When he ran for class president at high school in 2002, old video footage shows him complaining to a booing audience that he was ‘sick and tired’ of being told to pick up his trash ‘when we have plenty of janitors who are paid to do it for us’.
Republican politics clearly beckoned and seven years later he got his foot in the door in Washington DC working for Alabama senator Jeff Sessions.
Colleagues insist that, at heart, Miller is a ‘very nice guy’, but charm and tact are not his strong points. Indeed, one ally described him as having ‘the bedside manner of [SS chief] Heinrich Himmler’. He is said to yell at everybody during his daily (even Saturdays) staff meetings – ‘nobody is spared from his wrath’.
If it’s true that ICE agents are, as reported, getting over-stressed by the pressure to keep ramping up their migrant detainment rates, Miller is the one ultimately cracking the whip. He is, an insider told Atlantic magazine, very aware that the ‘clock is ticking’ on the Trump administration.But for his MAGA admirers, he’s doing what he can to reshape America when his predecessors failed so dismally.
