Stephen miller 1 bak

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">capt/bak 9/21</font><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">stephenmiller921</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">main STEVE</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2022/03/stephen-miller-mocked-cell-phone/">https://www.alternet.org/2022/03/stephen-miller-mocked-cell-phone/</a></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">parents plan</font></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">larry elder call in&nbsp;</font></div><div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">santa monica HS pet stephen Miller got attn -- bannon --> trump</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div></div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">promoted primary 12/17 evil pending</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">probably neglected, as jeff laura etc get headlines</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">horowitz mentor</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">4/19 bak</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">html Angelou's</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://thinkprogress.org/fox-news-host-decimates-trump-aide-stephen-miller-racism-hypocricy-8a8b7b4b5db3/</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Stephen Miller, a top White House adviser said to be the architect of the administration’s cruel anti-immigrant policies, went on Fox News Sunday to defend President Donald Trump’s latest round of racist and hypocritical attacks on congresswomen of color. The interview went rather poorly for him.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Host Chris Wallace began the interview by asking Miller about Trump’s recent tweets attacking Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) and demanding that they go back to their home countries (Omar was born in Somalia and came to the United States as a child, the other three are natural-born citizens). Miller responded that the president isn’t a racist because the jobless rate has been falling for racial minorities.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“I think the term ‘racist,’ Chris, has become a label that is too often deployed by left/Democrats in this country simply to try to silence and punish and suppress people they disagree with, speech that they don’t want to hear,” Miller began, asserting that Trump “has been a president for all Americans” because of “historically low black unemployment rates, historically low Hispanic unemployment rates,” and his crackdown on immigration “to protect safety, security, rising wages for all American citizens.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Wallace responded that Trump’s claims that Mexican immigrants are mostly rapists and drug dealers and his proposed total ban on Muslims were “not protecting the American people” but “playing the race card.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">After Miller tried to change the subject to criminal gang members, Wallace shut him down, reminding him that Trump had pushed racist “birther” attacks on Barack Obama. Miller likened those efforts to undermine the legitimacy of the former president to questions that were once raised about John McCain. Wallace quickly fact-checked him, noting that concerns surrounding the late Arizona senator were not racial, but based on the 2008 nominee’s birth in the Panama Canal Zone.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Miller then argued that questioning people’s Americanism is okay as long as you don’t intend it to be racist.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Wallace also fact-checked Miller when he attempted to claim Trump had been “clear” that he disagreed with his supporters’ racist chant — repeating his own attacks on Omar and demanding she be sent back to Somalia.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“No, he was clear after the fact,” he responded. “He let it go on for 13 seconds and [it] was only when it diminished that he started talking again.” Wallace noted that Trump “said nothing there or in his tweet after that rally that indicated any concern about the chant.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/here-are-21-facts-explain-stephen-miller/</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">mick m in on dhs purges?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">basically fired when she told trump he was asking he to do crimes</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Kirstjen Nielsen Steps Down as DHS Secretary</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">miller calling deputies to scream for not being tough enough</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">omg origin of evil: duke lacrosse</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">From their point of view … It reveals a culture where white men are acceptable targets of hate who deserve no sympathy and no due process, and where the left-wing mob wields tremendous power through its command of the public sphere.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">That view connects to a broader assumption shared by many conservatives: that white Christian men are a persecuted minority in modern America.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">To non-conservatives, this sounds absurd. White men are the country’s most powerful and privileged citizens. The party they dominate currently controls two and a half branches of government, and they sit in a disproportionate number of powerful seats in the private sector. But in this argument, conservatives follow a maxim generally attributed to the late provocateur Andrew Breitbart: “Politics is downstream from culture.” By this, Breitbart meant that the balance of power in day-to-day politics is determined, in the long run, by the cultural ideas that shape the way people approach politics.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">With liberal elites largely in charge of the country’s entertainment and higher education, in the Breitbart-conservative view, that means they control the commanding heights in our society.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The concept of white men being the persecuted in America largely comes down to being told they’re wrong, or freaking out over nothing when they’re told it’s something by the right-wing outrage machine. And within the “commanding heights,” whether it be scientists, Hollywood, the media, or Democrats, calling stupid ideas stupid has somehow become “elitist” and evidence of bias. It’s one of the most bitter ironies that the people who bitch and moan about political correctness and wear shirts saying “fuck your feelings” are the ones whining about respect whenever a TV show or movie has a story which steps on their toes, or a science article actually advocates … you know, science which goes against one of their beliefs.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It’s as if we are trying to placate children who want people to hold their hands and play along while they wish really hard for unicorns to be real.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">From Reeeves Wiedeman at New York Magazine:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">After work one day in January 2007, Scott McConnell left his office at the magazine The American Conservative in Arlington, Virginia, and walked to a nearby Thai restaurant that was hosting a panel discussion about the Duke lacrosse scandal… McConnell and his magazine had largely ignored the scandal; identity politics weren’t top of mind for conservative media then, and most outlets weren’t especially interested in defending a group of rich jocks who had hired a stripper. But by January, the case was imploding. The accuser had changed her story more than half a dozen times, one of the players had a well-documented alibi, and DNA tests found no match with any member of the team, a fact the prosecutors initially hid from the defense. McConnell was reminded of The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe’s novel about 1980s New York in which an overzealous prosecutor, the media, and the city’s liberal elite rushed to condemn an innocent white man accused of killing a black man. “There was this palpable yearning among the liberal establishment for guilty white people they could put on trial,” McConnell said, of the lacrosse case.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">McConnell and one of his editors, Michael Dougherty, went to the Thai restaurant panel hoping to find someone to write about the case. They knew most of the speakers — an economics professor, an editor at the WashingtonTimes, a men’s-rights blogger — but their talks were so boilerplate that neither McConnell nor Dougherty could recall much about them. The fourth speaker, however, was a Ph.D. candidate in Duke’s history department who delivered a blistering critique of the Duke faculty’s rush to prejudgment. “Scott and I both thought, Here’s a young guy, he presents himself well, and his talk was the most interesting of the night,” Dougherty said recently. “God, I hate to think that we were part of creating this.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Richard Spencer, the fourth speaker, is now America’s most famous self-identified white nationalist. “In this funny chain of events, the Duke lacrosse case changed the course of my career,” Spencer told me recently. “My life would not have taken the direction it did absent the Duke lacrosse case.” The speech at the Thai restaurant — “Ironic, isn’t it?” he said — pushed him from an academic track toward a more activist one. McConnell commissioned Spencer to write a piece for The American Conservative about the case, and, by the end of the semester, Spencer had dropped out of school to work at the magazine full-time. A year later, he coined the term “alt-right.” … It not only launched Spencer’s career, but that of White House adviser Stephen Miller, too. On the morning of Spencer’s talk at the Thai restaurant, Miller — who was then a senior at Duke — published a column in the student newspaper titled “A Portrait of Radicalism,” just a few days after he appeared on Bill O’Reilly’s Fox News show to chastise Duke’s faculty. Donald Trump didn’t have much to say about the scandal at the time; he hadn’t yet joined Twitter and was devoting his cable-news appearances to his simmering feud with Rosie O’Donnell. But Miller seemed interested in little else. He had become known to some at Duke as the “Miller Outrage Machine” for his willingness to take controversial stands in his biweekly “Miller Time” column, which he wrote for the campus newspaper as a way, he says, to “defend the idea of America.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This sort of behavior is also present in conservative women. Recent research and ponderings attempting to identify why white women support Republicans and conservative policies more than their non-white sisterhood have largely explained the difference through gender roles and subservience to their partners. For example, during the recent hearings for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, Republican women (who are for the most part white) were the only demographic among which support for Kavanaugh increased as the process went along.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Why is that?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">lapierre nra:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">cf trms email says trip to give conduit to djt</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.alternet.org/2019/02/leaked-documents-incriminate-gop-russia-ties-with-nra-as-a-common-denominator/</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Leaked emails obtained by several news outlets contradict the NRA’s denials that it had nothing to do with its members traveling to Moscow to meet top Russian officials on a 2015 trip organized by admitted Russian agent Maria Butina.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Butina, who recently pleaded guilty to federal conspiracy charges after she was accused of working as a Russian agent to infiltrate conservative circles, organized a 2015 trip to Moscow for top NRA officials. While there, they met with Russia’s then-foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, and other prominent figures as part of an apparent Russian campaign to gain influence with American conservatives.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Several NRA officials told the New York Times on Monday that NRA chief executive Wayne LaPierre “was opposed to the trip” and ordered members not to go. “Given Mr. LaPierre’s power within the organization, it is unclear how such a trip would have proceeded at all despite his opposition to it,” the Times noted.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">ABC News reported that internal NRA documents and emails, as well as photos on social media, appear to show that the NRA “was significantly involved in planning” the trip.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Among those who went on the trip was former NRA president David Keene.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">An email obtained by the Daily Beast written by Paul Erickson, Butina’s boyfriend and longtime Republican operative, said that Russian Central Bank official and Butina’s handler Alexandr Torshin offered Keene, who was also a columnist for the Washington Times, an interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“[I]mpressing the NRA’s Russian hosts is also the quickest way to secure a private interview with President Putin on behalf of David Keene and the Washington Times — a plum that was dangled in front of Keene by Torshin himself during a recent Torshin visit to Washington, DC,” Erickson, wrote according to the Daily Beast. “High stakes all around.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Erickson’s email also said that the trip could ease tensions between the U.S. and Russia and pave the way for relations with a future Republican president.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“As we discussed over lunch in Iowa, Russia believes that high level contacts with the NRA might be the BEST means of neutral introduction to either the next American President OR to a meaningful re-set in relations with the Congress under a (God forbid) President Clinton,” he wrote. “This simple good will trip would have enormous diplomatic consequences for a future U.S. / Russia bilateral relationship to the world.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The emails show that Keene played a large part in organizing the trip with Butina, and was angry when another NRA official dropped out of the trip, putting Keene’s plans in jeopardy. Despite LaPierre’s claims, the NRA paid for Keene’s travel expenses, at least, and also bought official NRA “gifts” for the Russian delegation, according to the Times.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Among the members who accompanied Keene were Joseph Gregory, co-chair of the NRA’s Golden Ring of Freedom, a group for donors of $1 million or more; and Pete Brownell, the group’s vice president, who later became its president. Brownell also paid for former Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke, an NRA member, to go on the trip.Brownell later abruptly resigned from the NRA.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., who is leading at least four investigations into the NRA’s ties to Russia, told ABC News that “it’s not credible for the NRA to claim that they played no official role in the 2015 Moscow trip.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Americans would rightly be outraged if they learned that officers of a powerful, taxpayer-subsidized organization were offered personal incentives by the Kremlin in exchange for access to elite Republican circles,” Wyden later told The Daily Beast. “That question is right at the heart of my inquiry.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">After the meeting, Butina wrote to Torshin about the successful trip she organized.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“We should let them express their gratitude now, we will put pressure on them quietly later,” she wrote.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Around the same time, Erickson wrote, in an email obtained by the FBI, that he was “involved in securing a VERY private line of communication between the Kremlin and key [unnamed political party] leaders through, of all conduits, the [unnamed gun-rights organization].”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">When FBI agents raided Erickson’s South Dakota home, they found a note in which Erickson mused, “How to respond to FSB offer of employment?” The FSB is the Russian state intelligence agency, successor to the infamous Soviet-era KGB.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">During this same period, the NRA, relying on an arm of the organization that is not required to disclose its donors, spent a record $30 million helping to elect President Trump, which was nearly three times the $12.5 million it spent to help Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign. The NRA and the Trump campaign went as far as coordinating their ad buys for maximum impact, The Trace reported.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">All this has caught the eye of special counsel Robert Mueller, whose team has been “raising questions about the relationship between the campaign and the gun group,” according to CNN.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Despite mounting suspicions and eyebrow-raising emails, William Hurd, a lawyer for Erickson, dismissed the reports even as his client faces his own possible charges.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hurd told the New York Times, “Anyone who thinks that a freedom-loving group like the NRA is going to get all cozy with Vladimir Putin is living in Fantasyland.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.alternet.org/2019/01/nra-desperately-backpedaling-from-russia-as-investigators-look-closer/</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.alternet.org/2018/12/all-he-has-is-failures-new-report-reveals-why-trumps-most-hated-aide-is-suddenly-in-the-spotlight/</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">He’s one of the few White House figures who can inspire even more revulsion than his boss, but in recent days, he’s been put out on the front lines.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">So why is Stephen Miller suddenly taking center stage?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Miller, a virulently anti-immigrant adviser who found his way under President Donald Trump’s wing through his work with Jeff Sessions, has been behind some of the White House’s cruelest and most inept policies. The infamous Muslim travel ban, which had to go through not one but two complete revisions before it barely passed constitutional muster, was reportedly designed by Miller. He also played a pivotal role, reportedly, in pushing for the immigrant family separation policy, which needlessly traumatized thousands of children in an attempt to deter asylum seekers and led to a massive backlash against the administration. And during the first government shutdown fight over immigration policy at the beginning of 2018, Miller’s efforts to push Trump toward a hardline view were cited as a key reason the negotiations kept falling through.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In the latest round of fights, Miller been one of the White House’s most public spokespeople. He pointlessly yelled at CNN’s Wolf Blitzer in a ridiculously and unnecessarily combative interview. And in an appearance on Face the Nation, he drew attention not only for his petulance and his scowl but also for his patently absurd attempt to hide his baldness. (Being bald is nothing to be ashamed of.)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">According to Yahoo News, the reason Miller has been chosen to represent the administration’s position on the shutdown and immigration debate is that no one else wants to do it. Despite his obvious flaws as a communicator, and his absolute inability to either show or elicit sympathy, when it comes to defending Trump’s outlandish immigration policy stances, Miller is all they’ve got.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Miller is so awful on TV, it’s counterproductive to put him on,” one former official told Yahoo News.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But part of why he’s so awful is because his views are so awful. This shouldn’t be too surprising, given that they appear to be influenced by his early desire to bully Latino kids and other minorities growing up.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Nobody wants to defend Stephen’s positions, so they stick his ass out there,” a former member of Trump’s transition team told Yahoo News. “Stephen’s in the background telling everyone, ‘max pressure, max pressure,’ and saying those things are feasible. Everyone who’s actually worked in policy is like, that can’t work, go defend it yourself.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Trump should realize by now that Miller’s views are both vile and a political loser. In the 2018 midterms, the president doubled down on the demonization of immigrants and stoking fear about the border — only to be dealt a devasting electoral defeat. But the only political move Trump knows is showing his callousness and pandering to the worst parts of his base.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“[Miller is] certainly not judged on his policy successes;&nbsp; all he has is failures,” the former transition team member said. “He shows deference and he makes these outrageous policy suggestions.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">went to pittsburg synangog shooting PR trip?!</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.alternet.org/meanwhile-donald-trumps-white-nationalist-white-house-still-humming-along</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;Trump loves to call nonwhite immigrants and refugees as "vermin" or "invaders" and to suggest they are the "worst people." Yet he has no such strong words for the white nationalists and other racists prevalent throughout his administration.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As CNN reported on Sunday, a policy aide and speechwriter named Darren Beattie "has left the White House" after it was revealed he had spoken at the 2016 H.L. Mencken Club Conference. Mencken represents an unfortunate chapter in American journalism: He was a prominent satirist, columnist and critic of the early 20th century, whose book "The American Language" marked the first serious attempt to study English as spoken in the United States. Mencken's posthumously published diaries, however, made clear that he was an ardent racist and anti-Semite, which has made him something of a hero to the far right.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Mencken Club's annual conference, launched in 2008, has attracted a range of "well-known white nationalists," the CNN report continues, including the briefly famous Richard Spencer. "The schedule for the 2016 conference listed panels and speeches by white nationalist Peter Brimelow and two writers, John Derbyshire and Robert Weissberg, who were both fired in 2012 from the conservative magazine National Review for espousing racist views."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">After CNN inquired about Beattie's involvement with the 2016 Mencken Club conference, the White House apparently asked the network "to hold off on the story for several days last week." It's not clear why CNN complied with that request. Beattie's email address at the White House was still working on Friday evening, the network reported, but "was no longer active by Saturday."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"Mr. Beattie no longer works at the White House," White House spokesman Hogan Gidley told CNN on Friday. "We don't comment on personnel matters."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As for the semi-disgraced Darren Beattie, he told CNN he had indeed spoken at the 2016 Mencken gathering and had nothing to be ashamed of.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"In 2016 I attended the Mencken conference in question and delivered a stand-alone, academic talk titled 'The Intelligentsia and the Right.' I said nothing objectionable and stand by my remarks completely," he told CNN's KFile in an email on Saturday. "It was the honor of my life to serve in the Trump Administration. I love President Trump, who is a fearless American hero, and continue to support him one hundred percent. I have no further comment."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Beattie is not alone. There are many known or obvious white nationalists (which is just a more polite or palatable term for white supremacists) in or around Donald Trump's White House.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Stephen Miller, Donald Trump's senior adviser, has been closely associated with the aforementioned Richard Spencer, perhaps America's best-known white supremacists. Miller himself has a long and public pattern of racism and bigotry towards nonwhites. His beliefs and behavior are so repugnant that his own uncle rebuked him in a scathing public letter published by Politico last week.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Steve Bannon, the former executive chairman of Breitbart News, the self-described "platform of the alt-right," previously served as Trump's senior White House strategist and remains highly influential in Republican politics.&nbsp; He recently met with far-right groups in Europe and encouraged them to treat accusations of racism as "a badge of honor."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Michael Anton, one of Trump's senior national security advisers, is the author of the infamous "Flight 93 Election" manifesto, which explicitly argued that immigration from nonwhite countries and "multiculturalism" are a threat to the West and American values and culture. Anton channels his white nationalist ideology -- as do Miller and Bannon -- under the cover of such Trumpian labels as "populism" and "economic nationalism."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In addition to the heretofore little-known Darren Beattie, there are other people in around the Trump White House, including Carl Higbie, Jamie Johnson and William Bradford, who appear to hold white nationalist and overtly racist views.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Attorney General Jeff Sessions has actively rolled back civil rights protections for African-Americans and other nonwhites, and has advanced a strategy of voter suppression. He actively encourages police thuggery and brutality by refusing to hold law enforcement officers accountable for their behavior, and is using the Department of Justice and the courts to argue that white people -- not black and brown people -- are the actual victims of racism in America.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">And of course Donald Trump has repeatedly displayed his white supremacist views in both his public and private life. He uses violent, eliminationist rhetoric to describe nonwhite immigrants, migrants and refugees; says that the neo-Nazis and white supremacists who rioted in Charlottesville included "very fine people"; has called calls black women "dogs" and suggested that black athletes who protest racism should be deported. Let's not forget that he launched his political career as a prominent advocate of the racist "birther" conspiracy theory that sought to undermine the legitimacy of Barack Obama, the United States' first black president.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Contrary to what Donald Trump's enablers in the news media might argue, Darren Beattie's presence in the Trump administration was not a failure of "vetting" by a disorganized or inexperienced White House. It was a statement of purpose and principles more than anything else: As America's first "white" president, Trump naturally attracts white nationalists and other racists into his orbit.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Indeed, racism almost seems to be a qualification for working in Trump's administration. It is empowering a much broader effort to severely limit the civil rights and human rights of nonwhites in America. The ultimate goal of the Trump administration's "white strategy" is to "make America great again" through racial authoritarianism; in other words, to protect and elevate white power with the ultimate goal of breaking and then destroying the country's post-civil rights era multiracial democracy.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">To that end, Trump and his allies and enablers are doing much more than nurturing what W.E.B. Du Bois famously described as "the psychological wages of whiteness." They are installing a white power regime that new research shows is supported by at least 11 million Americans, and likely many more.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">When Trump took control of the White House he chose (with Bannon's encouragement) to replace a portrait of the Statue of Liberty with one of Andrew Jackson. To casual or generous observers this was a reference Trump's alleged populist" appeal to the "white working class" voters who purportedly gave him the presidency. But as is so often true, the deeper truths behind Trump and Bannon's choice are more revealing.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Andrew Jackson led an ethnic cleansing campaign against the Seminoles as well as the former black slaves in Florida. He was also a literal "slave driver"who bought and sold black people as human property. "The American Slave Coast," an award-winning book by Ned and Constance Sublette, explains this history:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Failing to sell the slaves himself, Jackson drove the unsold slaves back to Nashville, taking the unheard-of step of driving a coffle [or a chained train] of slaves from the destination back to the point of origin, through Choctaw and Chickasaw territory. . . . Given the documentation of this episode that exists, it appears safe to say that Andrew Jackson is the only U.S. president that we know of who personally drove a slave coffle. But then, Jackson was also the first president to have been a merchant.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Adding to his ignominious legacy, Jackson also ordered the "Indian Removal Act," one of the most infamous actions in American history. People of the Cherokee Nation were forced from their lands east of the Mississippi and forcibly marched on the "Trail of Tears" hundreds of miles away to reservations in Oklahoma. At least 4,000 indigenous people died as a result of this forced march.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">So it is altogether too perfect that President Andrew Jackson's portrait now looks down at Donald Trump in the Oval Office. He is a perfect spirit guide for the 45th president of the United States.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">trend? bith trump melania and miller family are immigrants</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.alternet.org/trump-aide-stephen-millers-uncle-compares-his-nephew-nazis-scathing-essay</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.alternet.org/laura-ingrahams-demographic-changes-rant-not-matter-law-and-order-its-rallying-cry-trumps-base</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">digby</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The big earthquake of the 2018 primary season so far has been the unseating of powerful Democratic House leader Joe Crowley by 28-year-old democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Ortez in New York. This isn't a common occurrence, needless to say, but it does happen from time to time, most recently four years ago when an obscure economics professor named David Brat unseated GOP House leader and "young gun" Eric Cantor in Virginia. At that time, much of the chattering class chalked the defeat up to "all politics is local," saying that Cantor had neglected his district. That analysis was wrong. Brat won because of one very hot issue that was boiling over in the right-wing media: immigration.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The right-wing star most responsible for pushing that issue into the GOP mainstream was talk radio host Laura Ingraham.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Before her promotion to Fox News primetime host, Ingraham used her talk radio show to stump for Brat and rail against Cantor. She even went to the district to campaign for Brat, solely on the basis of his hardcore stance against the unaccompanied minors from Central America who were in the news at the time gathering at the border seeking asylum.&nbsp; Ingraham was on a tear during that crisis, ranting daily about the ungrateful little wretches coming to our sacred borders asking for an undeserved handout. When she heard that some of these refugees weren't taking to the food in their detention centers she described them as spoiled whiners and mocked them by playing an old TV commercial with the slogan "yo qiero Taco Bell?".&nbsp; She made this declaration to the kids themselves:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Oh no you won't. This is our country... Our borders matter to us. Our way of life and our culture matter to us. Our jobs and our wages matter to us. No you won't.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">During this period Donald Trump was seriously considering jumping into the presidential election and he had his friend Roger Stone's hired hand, Sam Nunberg, listen to thousands of hours of talk radio and report back to him about what they were talking about. He didn't have any strong feelings about immigration at the time but when he got a strong response at the conservative CPAC gathering that year for saying “we either have borders or we don’t,” he was all in. He rode that anti-immigration wave all the way to the White House.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Meanwhile, the Republican establishment had been trying to tamp down this growing xenophobia because their 2012 presidential campaign "autopsy" made it very clear that the GOP was in grave danger of becoming an all-white party in a country that was becoming less and less white. The lesson that the activists like Ingraham took from that was to try to reverse the trend and rid the country of as many people of color as possible. And they were joined by a faction in the US Congress led by the man who would become one of Trump's earliest supporters, Senator Jeff Sessions.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In 2015, he and his aide, now Senior White House adviser, Stephen Miller, drafted a document that laid out a plan to end not only illegal immigration but put a stop to all legal immigration as well, arguing that the country could not "absorb" any more people from other cultures. It pointed to the 1924 Immigration Act, which curbed immigration of most non-whites, Catholics, Jews, Arabs, southern Italians for several decades, as its model.&nbsp; From the moment Sessions signed on with Trump (and subsequently submitted to Trump's ongoing ritual humiliation of him for recusing himself from the Russia investigation), it has been clear that he did so because he saw the best opportunity he's ever had to advance this nativist and racist agenda.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Attorney General has no greater supporter in that effort than Laura Ingraham who caused some big ripples again this week with a xenophobic rant on her Fox News show in which she attacked both legal and illegal immigration as "The left's effort to remake America":</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">She went on to describe lurid details of crimes committed by undocumented immigrants in much the same language President Trump commonly uses to paint them as deviant and subhuman. And then she asked the president to give an address to the nation from the Oval Office:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The president can be so persuasive, so give us the whole truth, Mr. President, the good, the bad, and yes, the uncomfortable. This is a national emergency and he must demand that Congress act now. There is something slipping away in this country and it's not about race or ethnicity. It's what was once a common understanding by both parties that American citizenship is a privilege, and one that at a minimum requires respect for the rule of law and loyalty to our constitution.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">After another round of widespread backlash in reaction to her rant, Ingraham returned to Fox News on Thursday to insist that "despite what some may be contending – I made explicitly clear that my commentary had nothing to do with race or ethnicity, but rather a shared goal of keeping America safe, and her citizens safe and prosperous.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">First, it is not a national emergency. Border crossings are far below what they were a decade ago. And this president is the last person on earth to make a case for the rule of law and loyalty to the constitution since he demonstrates on a daily basis that he has no respect for the first or even a rudimentary understanding of the second.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Nonetheless, this policy is being implemented. The Muslim ban, ICE deportations and the horrifying separation of families at the border are just the beginning.&nbsp; NBC News reported this week that Trump's unctuous factotum Stephen Miller has written a proposal to "make it harder for legal immigrants to become citizens or get green cards if they have ever used a range of popular public welfare programs, including Obamacare." The purpose is to reduce the number of immigrants who obtain citizenship and, therefore, the right to vote. That's what's known as a "win-win" in the Trump administration.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Yesterday it was announced that Melania Trump's parents got in just under the wire. Sponsored by their daughter and her husband under the much-maligned "family migration" system they became US citizens. It's unknown just what "merit" the president believes they have that qualifies them under his new proposals but one can't help but notice that they are Caucasian. So Laura Ingraham no doubt has little concern that they will be polluting our precious American culture like those little children at the border.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/05/stephen-miller-duke-donald-trump</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">HOW STEPHEN MILLER RODE WHITE RAGE FROM DUKE’S CAMPUS TO TRUMP’S WEST WING</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">At the young age of 31, Stephen Miller has his own office in the West Wing and the President’s ear. He also has held a shocking worldview since he was a teenager. From his writings on the 2006 Duke lacrosse-team rape scandal, which gave the then–college junior national media exposure, to an alleged association with a white-nationalist advocate, William D. Cohan dives deep into Miller’s tumultuous past.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">BY WILLIAM D. COHAN</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">SUMMER 2017</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Around midnight on the evening of March 13, 2006, something untoward happened in the nondescript rental house at 610 North Buchanan Boulevard, right off Duke’s East Campus, where three of the university’s lacrosse team’s senior co-captains lived. It was spring break, and Duke’s bucolic campus, in the heart of North Carolina’s Piedmont region, was quiet, maybe too quiet. The lacrosse team had practiced that morning and afterward had met with coach Mike Pressler. Since Duke’s cafeterias were closed for the week, Pressler doled out around $10,000 in cash to the 46 players to pay for their meals and other sundries. Afterward, most of them retired to the North Buchanan Boulevard house for an afternoon and evening of drinking and drinking games, such as beer pong and washers.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Also on the agenda, at 11 P.M. to be exact, were performances by two “exotic dancers.” That afternoon, co-captain Dan Flannery called the Allure Agency, in Durham, and hired the women for two hours. He specified that he wanted white women. They would be paid $400 each—money that the co-captains collected from some of their teammates, who put in $20 each.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Kim Roberts, then 31, who is half black and half Korean, arrived at the appointed hour. Crystal Gail Mangum, then 27, who is black, showed up about 30 minutes later. A friend had driven her there in his car and then left. There were some signs that she had been drinking and was already unsteady on her feet. Both women were single mothers and both had had previous run-ins with the law—Roberts for embezzling from an employer, Mangum for a variety of incidents, including a bizarre drunk-driving episode after stealing a taxi. (There was a warrant still out for Roberts’s arrest; after the taxi incident, Mangum had pleaded guilty to four misdemeanors, served a short time in jail, and was placed on two years’ probation.) The two women had never met before. For some reason, Roberts referred to Mangum as “Precious.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">After Roberts and Mangum arrived at the house, the players debated whether to proceed, because the dancers were not white, as Flannery had requested. But they decided to go ahead anyway. Just before midnight, it was showtime. “There were about 20 to 25 young guys there who were all sitting down,” Roberts recalled. “[Mangum] and I began our show, which, in my opinion, seemed to be going well.” Observed Flannery, “Guys were cheering and yelling.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Things quickly got out of hand. David Evans, another of the senior co-captains who lived at the house, noted that Mangum “couldn’t talk or stand up straight, she was so high.” The girls were sloppily dancing and began to kiss. Evans said Mangum “went down” on Roberts, although later neither Roberts nor Mangum recalled having had oral sex. Roberts was increasingly nervous. “Things were said that made me concerned for my safety,” she recalled.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">After the women got up off the floor, according to Flannery, Roberts asked the guys “who was going to step up and take their pants off. No one would.” Peter Lamade, then 21, from Chevy Chase, Maryland, asked Roberts “if she put objects up her vagina.” Her response, according to Flannery, was “something along the lines of ‘I would put your dick in me, but you’re not big enough.’ ”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Lamade then grabbed a broomstick, showed it to Roberts, and said, “Would this do?” (In another version of this incident, according to Matt Zash, the third co-captain who lived at the house, Roberts allegedly said, “What’s wrong, white boy, is your dick too small?” Lamade then grabbed a broomstick and told Roberts, “I’m going to shove this up you.”)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“That statement made me uncomfortable, and I felt like I wanted to leave,” Roberts later explained. “I raised my voice to the boys and said the show was over.” To decide what to do next, Roberts then grabbed Mangum, and together they headed into David Evans’s room, and then back into his bathroom. Some of the lacrosse players felt shortchanged. “Guys on the team were upset and wanted their money back,” Flannery recalled.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Meanwhile, Roberts went to her car and changed clothes. She wanted to drive away but didn’t want to leave Mangum by herself in the house. Flannery told Roberts he thought Mangum was still in Evans’s bathroom. “However, she was passed out on the back stoop of the house, half naked,” Flannery said. (How she ended up there is not known.) “At this time I went to the back of the house with Kevin Coleman”—another teammate—“who photographed her passed out there and picked her up. I put her arms around my shoulder and walked her to the other girl’s car.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">WHERE THE TRUTH LIES</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As the women were getting ready to leave in Roberts’s blue Honda, and then as they were driving off, racial epithets started flying. A next-door neighbor later said he heard one of the players yell, “Hey, bitch, thank your grandpa for your nice cotton shirt!” Roberts said the verbal assaults were even more offensive: “They just hollered it out, ‘Nigger,’ ‘Nigger,’ ‘Nigger.’ They were hollering it for all to hear. They didn’t care who heard it.” Flannery remembered that some of his teammates were on top of the stone wall surrounding East Campus, yelling at the Honda as it pulled away. He saw that Roberts had stopped the car, gotten out, and yelled something back, along the lines of “You limp-dick white boys, you’re not real men. You had to pay for us.” At that point, Flannery said, the guys on the wall screamed, “Go home and feed your kids.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">For his part, co-captain Zash remembered overhearing one of his teammates say, “Well, we asked for whites, not niggers,” to which Roberts replied, “That’s a hate crime—I’m calling the police.” As she drove away, Roberts kept thinking, “It was almost unbelievable. All I kept going back to was ‘I can’t believe these are Duke students.’ ”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">And then things got much worse. Within hours, Mangum claimed she had been kidnapped, and raped and sexually assaulted in Evans’s bathroom by an ever changing number of white Duke lacrosse players at the party. She told that story in the early hours of March 14 to a counselor at Durham Access, a social-services center, and then again to a nurse at the Duke University Hospital. The nurse examined her and concluded she had been sexually assaulted. Mangum also told several Durham police detectives that three white Duke lacrosse players had raped her in the bathroom at 610 North Buchanan Boulevard. They believed her, setting in motion a series of extraordinary events that would shock the nation as law-enforcement officials in North Carolina tried to figure out what, if anything, the lacrosse players had done to Mangum in David Evans’s bathroom after the dancing had stopped so abruptly.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">On March 23, at the detectives’ request, a local judge issued a non-testimonial order, or NTO, requiring the white lacrosse players to submit DNA samples to the Durham police. (The players’ attorneys had previously blocked the police’s request to provide the DNA voluntarily.)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">That’s when Michael Nifong, the acting Durham district attorney, caught a glimpse of the NTO, a copy of which had been left on a copier machine outside his office, and first learned about what had allegedly occurred at the rental house 10 days earlier. After Nifong read the NTO, in all its gory detail, he knew all hell would break loose at Duke and in Durham. He figured, correctly, that the accusation of rape and sexual assault by a poor black stripper against three white, presumably well-to-do Duke lacrosse players would attract national media attention. Based on Mangum’s allegations and her subsequent absolute identification of her alleged assailants after reviewing their photographs on a computer, a Durham County grand jury indicted the three—David Evans, one of the senior co-captains, and two sophomores, Reade Seligmann and Collin Finnerty—on criminal charges of first-degree rape, sexual assault, and kidnapping. The scandal would engulf Duke’s campus for the next 13 months.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">stephen miller</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Miller and President Trump meet with county sheriffs at the White House, in February.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Into this conflagration of economic, racial, and sexual politics came Stephen Miller, a 20-year-old Duke junior from Santa Monica, California, who wouldn’t have known a lacrosse stick if he were hit over the head with one. A columnist for The Chronicle, the Duke student newspaper, Miller defended the lacrosse players in print, despite nearly universal condemnation of them by others on campus and in the media. His outspoken support for the players—even before the indictments were handed up—got him plenty of national media attention, which he enthusiastically embraced. As he expounded nightly on CNN and on The O’Reilly Factor, among other television shows, it became apparent that the sordid allegations surrounding the case gave Miller the perfect opportunity to hone the right-wing political views he had espoused since adolescence.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;His passion for American exceptionalism and racial superiority eventually led him to jobs in Washington, D.C., first as a spokesperson for two right-wing members of Congress, Michele Bachmann and John Shadegg, and then as a policy adviser and communications director for conservative Alabama senator Jeff Sessions, now the U.S. attorney general. Sessions, with Miller at his side, almost single-handedly killed the 2013 bipartisan immigration-reform bill that would have created a path to citizenship for 11 million undocumented immigrants.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Now, at 31, the still-single Miller is President Trump’s youngest senior policy adviser, with his own office in the West Wing and a seat at the table during crucial decisions. His most visible act in that job so far was helping his friend Steve Bannon, for the moment Trump’s chief strategist, to craft and roll out the Trump administration’s first try at instituting a travel ban on the citizens of seven predominantly Muslim countries. In the wake of a federal judge’s decision to strike down the ban, Miller was ubiquitous on television news shows. In one astonishing interview, dressed in his trademark dark suit and skinny tie, Miller told CBS’s John Dickerson, without irony, “Our opponents, the media and the whole world, will soon see, as we begin to take further actions, that the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It was a jaw-dropping statement, even by Trumpian standards. “Horrendous” and “embarrassing” was how Joe Scarborough, the co-host of MSNBC’s Morning Joe, described Miller’s claims, adding for good measure, “[The president’s decisions] will be questioned, my young, little Miller. They will be questioned by the court. It’s called judicial review. Alexander Hamilton and James Madison wrote about it in the Federalist Papers. It was enshrined in Madison’s Constitution.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Since then, despite winning Trump’s approval for his bravura performance—“Great job!” the president tweeted—Miller has been kept under wraps, more seen than heard, although he was in the Mar-a-Lago photo of Trump and his advisers authorizing the April missile strike on an air base in Syria.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">VIDEO: A Primer on Stephen Miller, Senior Policy Adviser to Donald Trump</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">REBEL YELL</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">People who know Miller personally are not surprised by his unflinching support for Trump or his recent exclusionary antics. Growing up in a wealthy, liberal Southern California enclave, he delighted in challenging political convention and social niceties, even as a high-school student. “I will say and I will do things that no one else in their right mind would do,” he admitted in a 2002 speech to his Santa Monica High School classmates. In the same speech, to a chorus of boos, he said, “Am I the only one 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?” Miller now claims his speech was “satire” and a “Colbert-style routine,” according to what his high-school friend Chris Moritz told The Washington Post. (Moritz did not respond to requests to be interviewed, and the White House declined to make Miller available to speak with V.F.)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Despite Miller’s penchant for outrageous provocation, his family was very much like others in Santa Monica. His mother, Miriam, from Johnstown, Pennsylvania, came from a well-known Jewish family that had made a fortune in retailing. His father, Michael, a Stanford graduate, was a lawyer and real-estate mini-mogul. These days, the Millers together own Cordary Inc., a real-estate investment company, of which Michael is the president and Miriam is executive vice president. (Miller himself was a vice president of the family business for a few years, according to disclosure forms.) The company owns and manages three multi-family residential “communities” in the Los Angeles area comprised of 471 rental units.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ironically, the family would not have made it to the United States had someone like Stephen Miller been in the White House a century ago. Facing religious persecution, Miriam’s family—the Glossers—fled Belarus, arriving in New York in 1903. “Imagine living in a place where armed Cossacks ride through the streets, looking to cripple or kill you,” wrote Robert Jeschonek, in Long Live Glosser’s, a 2014 book about the family.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“DO NOT TAKE THESE STORIES ABOUT STEPHEN LIGHTLY. THEY SOUND LIKE EXAGGERATIONS . . . . THEY ARE NOT. HE HAS BEEN RADICALIZED.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In America the Glossers turned a small tailoring business into a beloved Johnstown department store and a chain of 75 Gee Bee discount stores. In 1985, the family and Bear Stearns took the company private in a $45 million leveraged buyout; four years later, it filed for bankruptcy and was eventually liquidated, its stores sold off in pieces or shuttered.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As a youngster, Stephen was obsessed with Star Trek. He watched the show for hours. And he and his younger brother, Jacob, used to dress up in Captain Kirk uniforms. “He really liked this kind of macho alpha-male thing that was going on with Kirk,” remembers Jason Islas, a friend of Miller’s in middle school. “I think he was really attracted to that as a model for his own behavior.” Miller also was fixated on Las Vegas-style gangsters, “like the Bugsy Siegel types,” explains Islas. In one yearbook picture, Miller is dressed as a mobster, with a wad of cash in his hand.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Miller attended a variety of different synagogues in and around Santa Monica. A friend at Beth Shir Shalom, a progressive reform synagogue, remembered that Miller was “a budding provocateur” and “was not very concerned with being well liked,” according to an article about him in The Jewish Journal. Another Beth Shir friend, Sophie Goldstein, told the Journal about an incident in which a small group of students were deciding how to divide up a last piece of pizza in a fair way. “We’re all talking and talking about it,” she said. “In the middle of this discussion, Stephen slaps his open hand down on the middle of the slice of pizza. And of course nobody would touch this pizza slice after he put his greasy 13-year-old paw on it.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">When Miller celebrated his Bar Mitzvah at Beth Shir Shalom, Islas was a close enough friend to be invited. But Miller abruptly ended their friendship that summer, before they both went off to Santa Monica’s huge, 3,400-student public high school. According to Islas, one day Miller telephoned him and told him he didn’t want to be friends anymore. Not content to just let their interactions fade as they moved from one school to another, Miller wanted to make a point. “He gave me a whole list of reasons why we couldn’t be friends and almost all of them were personal, but the one that stuck out was because of my Latino heritage,” Islas recalls. “It was the one that wasn’t directly personal. It was very strange.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Soon enough, though, Miller was embracing a white-nationalist agenda. His high-school yearbook quotation came from Teddy Roosevelt: “There can be no fifty-fifty Americanism in this country. There is room here for only 100 percent Americanism, only for those who are American and nothing else.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Miller’s evolving political views could not have been more at odds with those of progressive, inclusive Santa Monica, a fact in which he delighted. When he was 16, he wrote an op-ed in a local newspaper about the “rampant political correctness” that had “consumed” the high school and the school district. From ninth grade on, he wrote, a number of his classmates “lacked basic English skills” and there were “very few, if any,” Latino students in his honors classes, “despite the large number of Hispanic students that attend our school.” He decried the school’s policy of making announcements in both English and Spanish. Miller seemed particularly peeved by liberal regrets over the killing of Native Americans. “We could have lived with the Indians, learning how to finger paint and make tepees, excusing their scalping of frontiersmen as part of their culture. Forget about being the nation that stopped Hitler, brought communism to its knees, and feeds more hungry people around the world than any other country—forget all of that, and let us just agree that we’re a horrible nation.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">He thought that the school’s policy of providing condoms to students promoted sexual promiscuity. And if his classmates happened to have figured out “at their tender age” that they were gay? “We have a club on campus that will gladly help foster their homosexuality,” Miller complained. “Do they notify parents if their teenagers have chosen an alternate lifestyle? Of course not.” His classmates have no recollection of Miller dating. “I would be shocked if he’s ever had a relationship,” says Nick Silverman, a former high-school classmate.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Miller played tennis in high school. One of the team’s matches against a rival school coincided with a track-and-field competition. During a girls’ track event, Miller decided to jump into the race toward the end, Rosie Ruiz-style, and then boasted, back at school, about how he had beaten the girls and “wasn’t even warmed up or anything,” recalls Silverman, now a writer in Los Angeles. “Everyone was pissed at him.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">By many accounts, Miller’s proudest achievement in high school was forcing the school to comply with the California Education Code’s requirement that a “patriotic exercise” be conducted daily, which Santa Monica High School had failed to do. Miller brought the violation to the attention of Mark Kelly, who was then a co-principal at the high school. Kelly says he did not find it particularly odd that Miller would call the school out for not following the state code. “Students at the time would come up with all kinds of stuff,” he says, “and actually I liked that. A lot of fun in my job was to interact with students when they had issues or things that they felt strongly about and wanted to interact with us about.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Miller wrote a letter about the school’s code violation to Larry Elder, then, as now, a California-based conservative radio talk-show host. Elder invited Miller to come on his radio show, and Miller quickly took a shine to the media spotlight. “He was incredibly bright, incredibly articulate, incredibly focused, and that started a friendship that continues to this day,” Elder says. He had Miller on his show more than 70 times. “The reason I know this is because he counted them,” Elder adds.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">stephen miller</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Stephen, right, and his brother, Jacob, in Star Trek costumes.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Miller came to the attention of Ari Rosmarin, the editor of the high-school newspaper, after Miller complained that a teacher had given him a low grade because of his conservative political views. “He was all about this victimhood idea, that he was this lonely soldier crusading,” says Rosmarin, who is a civil-rights attorney.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Elder says Miller’s confrontational approach shocked the community. “It is extremely left-wing,” he says about Santa Monica, “and for somebody like Stephen Miller to talk about how racism is no longer a major issue in America [or throwing] water on this issue of the glass ceiling [or] things like minimum wage, he was very, very unpopular.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The September 11 attacks exacerbated Miller’s penchant for nationalistic thinking. In a December 2001 column for the high-school newspaper, he wrote, “Blaming America for the problems of countries whose citizens would rather spend time sewing blankets to cover women’s faces than improving the quality of life is utterly ludicrous. And not to kill terrorists poses a serious threat to the security of the nation.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Miller wrote about how he decided to “challenge the campus indoctrination machine” of liberal thinking and cited as a catalyst an incident that, if true, is particularly disturbing. “One teacher even dragged the American flag across the floor—as we were sending off brave young men to risk their lives for it,” he wrote. Miller’s assertion, written in 2003, remains controversial, if only because no one I spoke to about it seems to recall its happening. Kelly, the co-principal, doesn’t remember the incident. “But that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen necessarily,” he says. “You’ve got to remember this for me is almost 20 years ago and thousands and thousands of students later.” Another high-school classmate, Kesha Ram, who recently ran an unsuccessful campaign to be lieutenant governor of Vermont, is skeptical. “I have a hard time believing it,” she says. “Rumors spread really fast on a high-school campus, and I don’t even remember hearing that as a rumor.” Islas has no recollection of the incident either and thinks it may be “overblown.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Silverman also has no recollection of the flag incident. But he does remember one time when Miller lost his temper. They had gone together to Sacramento for a week-long stay at Boys State, an immersive program designed to educate high-school students in the ways of state and local government (and to counter the socialism-inspired Young Pioneer camps). Miller was determined to win an election to a mock city council “any way he could,” even using dirty tricks, Silverman recalls. Boys State was on the conservative side of the political spectrum. “I imagine Stephen felt he would be right at home,” Silverman wrote on a recent Facebook post. “But even here, among his seemingly ideological allies, he was ostracized. After being voted out of the mock city council, Miller threw a tantrum, flipping over a table and shouting ‘You can’t do this to me!!!’ ” Silverman says it was the only time he saw Miller upset. According to Silverman, he was usually “eerily calm,” the persona he effects to this day.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But Silverman says there was no mistaking Miller’s agenda, even then. “He believes multiculturalism is a weakness, that when we celebrate our differences we are ignoring our ‘American culture,’ ” Silverman wrote on Facebook. “He didn’t like someone from El Salvador celebrating their homeland, or someone from Vietnam bringing in food from their country of origin. He wanted everyone to celebrate one culture. One country. At 16, Stephen was an extreme nationalist.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In their government class, Silverman recalled on Facebook, Miller bullied “the opposition with unverifiable statistics and figures, baseless claims launched with his articulate bravado. He would just bludgeon you with evidence he pulled from thin air, gun-death numbers or immigration statistics that were usually false or gross exaggerations. And in 2002 no one had a smartphone to quickly verify it. It was mostly met with eye-rolls or an unwillingness to continue to debate someone who had a casual relationship with truth . . . . I know this may come off as melodramatic, but Stephen’s views are very DANGEROUS. Do not take these anecdotes or stories about him lightly. They sound like exaggerations and embellishments. They are not. He is an extremist. He has been radicalized.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">OLD-SCHOOL TIE</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">One former Duke student remembers Miller’s behavior in class more than she does his political views. In a freshman history course about the American Revolution, she recalls, “Just right away, he’d just walk in, put his head down, and go to sleep.” After giving Miller a few good-natured warnings, the professor kicked him out. “He’s got that sleepy-eyed, sloe-eyed look, but he’s just saying ‘Fuck you’ to the world,” she says.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">On campus Miller joined the Duke Conservative Union and became head of the Duke chapter of Students for Academic Freedom. As he had done at Santa Monica High School, Miller invited David Horowitz, the 1960s radical turned conservative ideologue, to speak. Horowitz had just written a book identifying 101 “dangerous” professors on college campuses—two of whom were at Duke—that “made me Public Enemy Number One in the universities,” Horowitz recalls. The campus erupted in protest against Horowitz.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But it was the lacrosse-team scandal—which occurred two months after Miller started writing his biweekly Chronicle column—that gave him the perfect opportunity to launch himself onto the national stage. The 24-hour cable networks pined to interview a conservative Duke student about the scandal, and Miller happily obliged. After all, how many Duke students were eager to defend the lacrosse team’s behavior within a month of the off-campus party, especially after the coach had been fired and the lacrosse season canceled?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">With the campus in an uproar over the rape allegations, Miller happily took the contrarian view. “Protesters and community leaders have claimed the alleged rape speaks to the larger ingrained prejudice of Duke students and the University’s administration,” he wrote in one early column. “But in reality, the only widespread prejudice we have seen is the prejudice that has allowed a single unproven allegation to condemn and defame an entire community.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">By fall 2006, far more information was known about what had happened on the night of March 13—although not everything—and the case against the three indicted players collapsed for a variety of reasons, including that Mangum kept changing her story, and that DNA samples taken from her that night, with one exception, did not match that of any of the lacrosse players. Miller published his final Chronicle column on the subject in April 2007, two weeks after Roy Cooper, the North Carolina state attorney general (and now its new governor), had, after a secret four-month investigation, declared the three lacrosse players not guilty of the criminal charges that a grand jury had brought against them a year earlier. Miller took a victory lap: “For many at Duke, the last year offered a horrifying tutorial in the moral bankruptcy of the left’s politically correct orthodoxy and the corruption of our culture at its hands,” he wrote. “Three of our peers faced a devastating year-long persecution because they were white and their accuser black.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Miller then tried to imagine what would have happened had the scenario been flipped—if the three athletes had been black and their accuser white. He wondered what might have happened if the school president had fired the black coach. “You think that scenario would have lasted for a year?” he asked. “Try a week.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As the author of The Price of Silence, a 2014 book about the Duke lacrosse scandal, I have wondered about that scenario, too. My conclusion was exactly the opposite of Miller’s: in my estimation, there is no way, had the indicted boys been black and their accuser white, that they ever would have been exonerated without a trial. There is no way a secret investigation by the state attorney general would have declared them innocent and no way that Duke would have paid them $20 million each—which is what the three accused white players received—as part of a legal settlement with the university.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Robert Steel, the chairman of the Duke board of trustees during the ordeal and a former partner at Goldman Sachs, agreed to speak with me for The Price of Silence, against the wishes of the Duke administration and his fellow trustees. (He is now C.E.O. of Perella Weinberg, the investment-banking boutique.) He remains unsure of exactly what happened in that bathroom that night. But he’s confident it was something of which none of us would be proud. He told me, “There was zero chance that there was a group activity, that thirty guys saw something that was incredibly unattractive or whatever . . . . Someone would’ve told their parents that ‘I saw this’ or whatever . . . . [But] we have no idea what happened in a bathroom with one person or two persons. I have no clue, no idea . . . . Today, what do I think? I just don’t know . . . . You can imagine seven clicks [of the dial], some of which you can go, ‘That’s not so great,’ or other clicks you can imagine, ‘That’s pretty unattractive.’ ”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">stephen miller</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Steve Bannon and Miller talk about American trade policy in New Hampshire, in February 2016.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">At Duke, Miller was also the first national coordinator of the Terrorism Awareness Project, created in 2007, designed to make “students aware of the Islamic jihad and the terrorist threat, and to mobilize support for the defense of America and the civilization of the West,” according to the project’s Web site. The project, which originated with David Horowitz, sponsored “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week” on college campuses, including at Duke, and ran ads in college newspapers, including The Chronicle, with the headline WHAT AMERICANS NEED TO KNOW ABOUT JIHAD. The author of the jihad advertisement was Richard Spencer, then a Ph.D. candidate in Duke’s history department, who had arrived at the university in spring 2005. After graduating from the University of Virginia, Spencer had received a master’s in the humanities from the University of Chicago. He left Duke before completing his Ph.D. to become the founder of the National Policy Institute, a white-nationalist think tank and one of the intellectual leaders of the so-called alt-right movement, which gained potency during the 2016 presidential campaign.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Spencer says he “first became aware” of Miller at Duke after the start of the lacrosse scandal. “He certainly understood the media and how to get his message out there,” Spencer says. “I could only be impressed.” The two met at the Duke Conservative Union in 2006. Being a few years older and in graduate school, Spencer says, he mentored Miller. “But I do think that Stephen probably would’ve ended up exactly more or less where he is today whether he had met me or not,” he adds. “He is his own man . . . . He is a strong American nationalist, you could say. Certainly not a white nationalist, but he is an American nationalist and a civic nationalist or a public nationalist . . . . He was going on Fox News even as an undergraduate—really remarkable.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Spencer praises Miller for having had the guts to support the lacrosse players when it was unpopular to do so. “It was racial politics at its heart,” he says. “And so whenever you touch on that case you’re playing with fire; you are willing to go someplace that most people aren’t. It was a racialized morality play from the first second that it hit campus. Stephen is not me. He is not coming from my identitarian perspective, but he is willing to go there. He’s willing to take on those issues, which shows a lot of bravery . . . . I think Stephen’s ballsy.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Spencer’s public utterances about race and white nationalism are far less diplomatic than was our measured conversation. As he puts it, “The ideal I advocate is the creation of a White Ethno-State on the North American continent.” To accomplish that he supports “peaceful ethnic cleansing.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">At a 2016 alt-right conference, he elaborated on his dream:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">To be white is to be a striver, a crusader, an explorer and a conqueror. We build, we produce, we go upward. And we recognize a central lie of American race relations. We don’t exploit other groups—we don’t gain anything from their presence. They need us, and not the other way around . . . . America was, until this past generation, a white country, designed for ourselves and our posterity. It is our creation, it is our inheritance, and it belongs to us.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Spencer’s audience often responds to him with the Nazi salute, and, on a number of occasions, he has refused to denounce Hitler. For instance, on April 23, he tweeted, “Whatever your opinion on Nazis, they were extremely interested in . . . space travel, rockets, public health.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">When, during the presidential campaign, the relationship between Spencer and Miller from their days together at Duke became public, Miller quickly disavowed knowing Spencer. “I have absolutely no relationship with Mr. Spencer,” Miller e-mailed Mother Jones last October. “I completely repudiate his views, and his claims are 100 percent false.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Spencer says he was surprised by Miller’s renunciation of him. He could have spoken publicly about knowing Miller at Duke, he says, but chose not to because he did not want to “harm Stephen.” But, he adds, “the fact is I did know him, now 10 years previously, so I could’ve talked about this in 2015, I could’ve talked about this all through 2016, but I didn’t . . . . Stephen looked a little strange, kind of doing this outright denial. What he should’ve said is ‘Oh, yeah. I knew Richard Spencer 10 years ago. Who cares?’ ”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This past February, soon after Miller’s television appearances, nearly 3,500 Duke alumni signed an open letter to him, decrying his political views. “We . . . see nothing in your actions that furthers the values of intellectual honesty, tolerance, diversity, and respect that we seek to promote in the world,” the letter stated. Corey Sobel, a classmate of Miller’s at Duke and one of the co-authors of the letter, says, “You wouldn’t really believe the number of stories where he would offend—very suspiciously always a young woman—with whatever broad tirade against liberalism and free thought he had, and then, a couple of weeks later, ask that same woman who he had offended, usually publicly, out on a date.” The consensus seemed to be that Miller’s behavior was “really icky” and “very creepy.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In his position of power within the Trump White House, Miller has done nothing to diminish the controversy that swirls around him. His fans, such as Elder and Horowitz, view him as a charming crusader. He now seems to be in the process of skillfully pivoting his allegiance from the increasingly tarnished Bannon to the administration’s rising stars, Jared Kushner and Gary Cohn. “He doesn’t stick a stick in people’s eye just for the hell of it,” says Elder. “He’s trying to make the country work better, and trying to improve the lives of people and make them more productive.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But Miller’s numerous detractors see other motives. “He was obviously a very driven, hardworking guy, so I knew that he would probably find a place somewhere,” says Silverman, Miller’s high-school classmate. “I had no idea that it would be this, at the right hand of the president at 31 years old.” He says he recognizes Miller’s voice coming loud and clear out of Trump’s mouth. “I can hear that kind of nationalistic, America-First American culture,” he continues. “That’s that same Stephen from junior year. He hasn’t gone anywhere. That’s still him.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Does Silverman have any advice for people who are just learning about Stephen Miller for the first time? “Take him seriously and know that he is a dangerous person,” he says. “He has a dangerous mind and a dangerous way of thinking. He wants to shift what America is about . . . . You’ve got to stay vigilant. He’s not taking days off. If there’s one thing Miller is, and he’s a lot of things, he’s absolutely motivated. This is his entire life. This is everything for him. He’s not going to rest. He won’t rest. He won’t stop . . . . He’s not a Trump shill. He was this way before Trump, before Bannon. He was radicalized way before that.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.alternet.org/here-are-21-facts-explain-who-trump-aide-stephen-miller</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">baby jails</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">2x? update?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">ven among the right-wing ideologues doing the actual presidenting in this administration, Stephen Miller stands out for the copious amounts of Kool-Aid he mainlines. Speaking to the New York Times, a Trump team colleague described Miller as “fiercely loyal” to the president, “a true believer in every sense of the word.” Though he joined the campaign in its early days, penning many of the apocalyptic speeches that won fear-drunk Republican hearts and minds, Miller recently got a lot more visibility after a string of television appearances in defense of the Muslim ban. At each stop, Miller showed a flair for the dramatic: he lied, he dodged, he put on his best tyrant’s voice and proclaimed the executive branch above the law. It seemed contrived and forced, like a politically precocious, weasley teenager’s idea of how to command a crowd. According to those who know Miller’s history, that’s not so far off the mark.&nbsp;&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Dating back to junior high school, Miller has been the unwavering right-winger now before us. Though the internet, and some of his family members, were quick to compare him to Joseph Goebbels, this reporter saw a resemblance to Roy Cohn—a Trump mentor—down to the sartorial details. Miller wears retro skinny suits, only recently ditched a chain-smoking habit and has the kind of cockiness that reads as unexamined, unsympathetic self-hatred. His barked orders and put-on baritone are all part of the package, and can strike an observer as funny. At least until you remember this guy is trying to turn the country into an all-white gated community.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Trump administration is the natural place for Miller to end up. He’s been writing racist, anti-immigrant rants for half his life and he’s only 31. He’s worked for some of the most deplorable U.S. politicians out there, only to become the voice for the worst of all. By all accounts, he is as terrible—and dangerous—as he seems, which is why he’s no laughing matter. And in that way, he is exactly like his boss. As one of his high school classmates told the Daily Beast, “People laughed at [Miller] because he was a buffoon, he was a performer, he thrived on spectacle. I’m very conscious now, looking back, that he was treated the same way that Trump was—he wasn’t taken seriously.” Here are 21 facts that explain who Stephen Miller is.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">1. The National Rifle Association was his first right-wing love.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Miller grew up in Santa Monica, a coastal city long regarded as a progressive bastion in L.A. County. A Los Angeles Times profile states Miller, along with two siblings, was raised in a “Jewish family of longtime Franklin Roosevelt Democrats.” Somewhere around eighth grade, Miller’s politics took a hard right after reading Guns, Crime, and Freedom, penned by National Rifle Association head Wayne LaPierre.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">2. He dumped a childhood friend because he was Latino.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">According to Jason Islas, in the summer between middle and junior high, Miller told him, “I can't be your friend anymore because you are Latino.” According to Islas, the two never spoke again, though he hasn’t lost much sleep over the demise of their friendship. “[It] didn't bother me, because the fact that Miller rejected me because I am Latino showed me he was pretty much worthless,” he told Univision.&nbsp;&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Miller was in the racial and political minority at Santa Monica High, where 30 percent of students were Latino, 12 percent black and 5 percent Asian. Oscar de la Torre, a counselor at the school who remains active in the community, describes Miller as being “on a crusade against liberalism and liberals.”3. He was the ' best-known&nbsp; and least-liked conservative activist' in his liberal high school.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Student body president Justin Brownstone says Miller “enjoyed saying things that were perceived as racist. The more he offended, the happier he was.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“He had a lot of grudges,” de la Torre told Fusion. “He didn't go out of his way to go to dances or to have girlfriends. I don't remember ever seeing him smile.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">4. He started as a right-wing mouthpiece in high school.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Thus began a cycle that would repeat itself over and over in high school and college,” Ioffe writes, “Miller would clash with school administrators over a perceived leftist conspiracy...then escalate the conflict by taking it to a conservative talk show, infuriating the administrators but yielding a compromise in Miller’s favor.”Julia Ioffe writes that Miller reached out to conservative talk radio host Larry Elder while at Santa Monica High, mostly to complain about pervasive liberalism in his school. He also started writing articles for the Santa Monica Lookout. Miller leveraged his role as local conservative media maven to win unilateral wars against what he imagined were lefty enemies in his school.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In a column written just after graduation, Miller noted that just “since his Junior year in High School, he [had] been a guest on local and national radio over thirty times.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">5. He spent months fighting to reinstate the Pledge of Allegiance in his high school.&nbsp;&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In a letter to local media outlet the Lookout decrying “political correctness out of control,” 16-year-old Miller complained that “our school refused to say the Pledge of Allegiance in classrooms for years,” proof that “they only adhere to the liberal guidelines.” For months, Miller pestered school administrators to “bring back the pledge” even dragging the superintendent into the fight. The pledge was ultimately reinstated, though Miller moaned in his letter that “it is still only said twice a week, while policy dictates it should be said every day.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">6. Some things Miller’s classmates have said about his attitudes on race.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Charles Gould, whom the Daily News describes as Miller’s schoolmate from first to 12th grade, wrote, “[Miller] was an unabashed racist. No, I’m not being over sensitive and no, I’m not using the 'r' word where it doesn’t apply. In private conversations he was constantly making disparaging remarks about the African-American, Latino and Asian students at our school.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Classmate Natalie Flores, who wrote a Huffington Post piece about growing up with Miller, told Univision that Miller seemed to have “an intense hatred toward people of color, especially toward Latinos.” She added, “I think his big problem was the Latinos. He thought they lived off welfare.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“[It] was not just that he targeted minority students, and played a victim on a regular basis, but was an asshole,” Ari Rosmarin, the editor of the student newspaper who now works at the ACLU, told the Daily Beast. “Most people knew him because he made it his business to have everyone hear his vile rhetoric on a regular basis.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">7. His high school writings demonstrate his budding right-wing views.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In that same letter, Miller writes, “When I entered Santa Monica High School...I noticed a number of students lacked basic English skills. There are usually very few, if any, Hispanic students in my honors classes, despite the large number of Hispanic students that attend our school. Even so, pursuant to district policy, all announcements are written in both Spanish and English. By providing a crutch now, we are preventing Spanish speakers from standing on their own...”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">He goes on to gripe about condoms in his school (“Legally speaking, sex between minors is statutory rape”), the presence of a student LGBT group (“[W]e have a club on campus that will gladly help foster their homosexuality”), reverence for Native Americans (“excusing their scalping of frontiersmen as part of their culture”) and the lack of praise for the U.S. military (“Osama Bin Laden would feel very welcome at Santa Monica High School.”)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In another article he wrote, “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.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Here’s what he used for his senior yearbook quote, citing Teddy Roosevelt: “There can be no fifty-fifty Americanism in this country. There is room here for only 100 percent Americanism, only for those who are Americans and nothing else.”&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Stephen Miller is nationalist from way back! Check out his yearbook quote! WHEW! pic.twitter.com/hEdTtAkcoy</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">— SenateTracker (@DaveNYviii) February 13, 2017</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">8. He actively tried to undermine student groups focused on Latino and black issues.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Oscar de la Torre, his former high school counselor, says Miller frequently claimed that because he—a white male—didn’t experience racism or sexism, students of color were making it up. “He didn’t believe the oppression existed,” de la Torre told the Times. “This guy is 17 years old, and it’s like listening to someone who’s 70 years old—in the 1930s.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">During a summit to address African American and Latino issues, Miller showed up with the message that the room was delusional and he knew better. “He wanted to sabotage us,” de la Torre told the Times. “He confronted everyone, denying that racism existed. He said that was a thing of the past.” (In a column about the meeting, Miller would later indicate the real problem wasn't racism but “leftist victim mentality.”)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">9. He was once booed off the stage for making a racist joke about the school janitors.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">While running for student council, Miller made a speech complaining about having to pick up his garbage when there were janitors for that. The incident, which survives in the video below, was funny because the janitors were black and brown people who got paid almost nothing to pick up garbage. Get it? Haha, right?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“It was a racist remark because we all knew that our janitors were people of color,” Flores told Fusion.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“He was booed unanimously by the student body off the stage. People were disgusted,” Rosmarin, of the ACLU, told the Daily Beast. “That kind of incident with the janitorial staff—everyone, no matter what your background is, understands why that is an awful thing to say.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">(A bit of aughts trivia: the winner of that election was Mark Hunter, the guy behind the Cobrasnake party photo empire.)&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">10. He attended Duke University, where people remember him, though not fondly.&nbsp;&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Here is how Miller was recently described by John Burness, the former senior vice president of public affairs and government relations at Duke: “He’s the most sanctimonious student I think I ever encountered. He seemed to be absolutely sure of his own views and the correctness of them, and seemed to assume that if you were in disagreement with him, there was something malevolent or stupid about your thinking. Incredibly intolerant.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A college classmate told the New York Times that at a freshman orientation event, he introduced himself by announcing, “My name is Stephen Miller, I am from Los Angeles, and I like guns.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">11. In college, he greatly expanded his portfolio of right-wing&nbsp; hate pieces.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In a column lamenting “multiculturalism” at Duke and other colleges, Miller listed all the cool things that make America great:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“We are the nation of cinema and radio, crooning and jazz, convertibles and diners, the Old West and New York City. Our culture includes Jimmy Stewart, John Wayne, Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jackie Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, Douglas Macarthur, Milton Friedman, Edgar Allen Poe, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Edison and again, for emphasis, Elvis Presley.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Neat-o! He only forgot to include Pat Boone and racism.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In another article, Miller accused Maya Angelou of “racial paranoia” and said her “legendary wisdom” amounted to “tired, multicultural clichés.” Another piece finds Miller finally breaking the right wing’s longstanding silence on the liberal media, asking why there aren’t any movies “about the evils of the Islamic holy war, the merits of capitalism…[o]r, dare I say it, a movie with a positive take on the Bush administration?”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">For good measure, Miller also gives voice to the Angry Adult Virgin Lobby, noting that “shows like Queer As Folk, The ‘L’ Word, Will & Grace and Sex and the City, all do their part to promote alternative lifestyles and erode traditional values.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">12. He helped found and lead a campus group called the Terrorism Awareness Project.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">CNN reports Miller served as “national campus coordinator, president, and co-founder” of the group, launched by the David Horowitz Freedom Center. (Horowitz is a vocally anti-black, anti-Muslim xenophobe and Zionist.) The project claimed its mission was to end “the efforts of the radical left and its Islamist allies to destroy American values and disarm this country as it attempts to defend itself in a time of terror." Miller promoted events like "Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week”—which didn’t catch on, for some reason—and videos with gross titles like The Islamic Mein Kampf. He also tried to get other college newspapers to run ads, like this one, which was reportedly designed by Richard Spencer. When colleges turned them down, Miller took his case to the only show that would have him, “Fox & Friends.” You can watch that appearance; note that Miller was still using his real voice, not his now-famous King of the D&D Virgins voice.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">13. He palled around with white supremacist and recently punched neo-Nazi Richard Spencer.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">When Miller was an undergrad and Spencer was working on a Ph.D. he was too racist to finish (no really, he dropped out to found a racist “think tank”), the two became buddies as members of the Duke Conservative Union. Together, they worked on an event featuring Peter Brimelow, founder of the virulently xenophobic VDARE and a notable hate-scene fixture with his very own SPLC page. Spencer told the Daily Beast he was a “mentor” to Miller, saying he “spent a lot of time with him at Duke...I hope I expanded his thinking.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Spencer, who has lauded Miller as “very bold and strong,” said ahead of the election, “It's funny no one's picked up on the Stephen Miller connection. I knew him very well when I was at Duke. But I am kind of glad no one's talked about this because I don't want to harm Trump."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">For the record, Miller has said the two were merely members of the same club and that they fell out of touch after graduation.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">14. Another white nationalist is also a big fan, as is David Duke.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In a piece titled “Stephen Miller is David Duke’s Favorite Jew,” Forward picks up recent tweets from the former Klansman applauding Miller. “I can’t help it, I like this guy,” Duke states in one message.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Jared Taylor, whose anti-black output was a favorite of racist murderer Dylann Roof, reportedly also namechecked Miller. The Washington Post points to a post by Taylor which notes that Trump’s lack of white racial consciousness is helped by “men close to him — Steve Bannon, Jeff Sessions, Stephen Miller — who may have a clearer understanding of race, and their influence could grow.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">15. He worked for noted racist Jeff Sessions.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">After a stint working for Michelle Bachmann, Miller took a communications job with Senator Jeff Sessions in 2009. Sessions' office—where Miller could help the racist, xenophobic sausage get made—helped elevate his visibility among conservatives, though initially, he was known mostly for his emails (see #16).</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Politico notes the up-and-comer played a pivotal role in crushing the Gang of Eight’s 2013 bipartisan immigration bill. The outlet points out that “when the bill passed the Senate...Miller literally wrote the 23-page handbook that House members were given on how to fight the deal.” As you may already know, after being deemed too racist for the federal bench in the 1980s, Sessions was judged perfectly racist for the Trump administration and confirmed attorney general.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">16. As you might imagine, he is a super annoying emailer.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A recent New York Times article describes Miller as “a man whose emails were, until recently, considered spam by many of his Republican peers.” The Times goes on to say:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As a top aide to Mr. Sessions, the conservative Alabama senator, Mr. Miller dispatched dozens and dozens of bombastic emails to congressional staff members and reporters in early 2013 when the Senate was considering a big bipartisan immigration overhaul. Mr. Miller slammed the evils of “foreign labor” and pushed around nasty news articles on proponents of compromise, like Senator Marco Rubio of Florida. One exhausted Senate staff member, forwarding a Miller-gram to a reporter at the time, wrote: “His latest. And it’s only 11:45 a.m.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">17. On the campaign trail, he warmed up the crowds for Trump.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Miller’s job was to toss small bits of red meat for the audience to gnaw on while they waited for Trump to hit the stage and throw them the rest of the bloody carcass. In the video below, shot at a rally in Wisconsin, he rails against “foreign workers,” telling the audience they’re “competing against you, and your children, and your grandchildren, and your brothers, and sisters and neighbors for jobs. Low-wage foreign workers being brought in to take your place at less pay.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">He talks about “uncontrolled migration from the Middle East,” and “illegal immigrants being arrested...for the most heinous crimes imaginable,” and hails Trump as the candidate “who will protect our cities, who will protect our communities, who will save our families.”&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">18. He wrote Trump’s RNC and 'America First' inauguration speeches.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Miller is reportedly responsible for penning Trump’s ominous RNC speech, in which he declared, “Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">While there was the option of going lighter for the inauguration—some presidents do not use the minutes after being sworn in to share a vision of the country as a dystopian hellscape—Miller stuck with fearmongering:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation; an education system, flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of knowledge; and the crime and gangs and drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential. This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">19. He’s considered the brain behind the travel ban.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Though he denies it, Miller is believed to have written a significant portion of the travel ban, with some help from Steve Bannon and congressional aides sworn to contractual secrecy. Multiple sources have reported that the Steves have refused to consult with other agencies that might have necessary insights or legal expertise, leading to disastrous rollouts. In order to counter the negative press around the Muslim ban (we’re calling it what Trump calls it, because that’s what it is), Miller was sent on a Sunday morning press tour last weekend.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">20. Infamous quotes from&nbsp; Miller’s tour&nbsp; of the Sunday morning shows last weekend.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Our opponents, the media and the whole world will soon see as we begin to take further actions that the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“The president’s powers...represent the apex of executive authority.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“We will have unquestioned military strength beyond anything anybody can imagine.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“That’s the story we should be talking about and I’m prepared to go on any show anywhere anytime and repeat it and say the president of the United States is correct 100 percent.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">21. His family is mostly not proud of him.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Buzzfeed News rounded up posts from Miller’s extended family, who seem not particularly keen on his new role. His mother’s brother, David Glosser, posted on the wall of a local media outlet, “With all familial affection I wish Stephen career success and personal happiness; however I cannot endorse his political preferences. I am not a Trump supporter.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Glosser's letter, which is fairly long, goes on from there:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Mr. Trump is trying to sell you something...He sells fear of immigrants, contempt of our daughters, sisters, and wives, and sows discord and anger. He knows the dictator’s disgraceful sales tricks of challenging the integrity of democratic elections, he finds an unpopular outside group to blame our troubles on, cooks up false electoral fraud theories if he doesn’t get his way, threatens and bullies his opponents, and tells us that he is the only one that can lead the nation ahead. He’s trying to sell you something, and it’s not a good product. For the first time in my memory a major American political party’s presidential candidate has proposed that laws and regulations be established solely on the basis of a person’s religion and ethnic background. The legitimization of this as a basis of serious political discussion is a terrible step into darkness. Remember, what goes around comes around. If today it’s “them,” then tomorrow it may be you.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Finally, my nephew and I must both reflect long and hard on one awful truth. If in the early 20th century the USA had built a wall against poor desperate ignorant immigrants of a different religion, like the Glossers, all of us would have gone up the crematoria chimneys with the other six million kinsmen whom we can never know.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Another family member, commenting on the post, wrote, “At least he [Miller] doesn’t share our last name.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">518</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/stephen-miller-tried-publicize-lie-so-obvious-anti-immigrant-dhs-secretary-had</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.alternet.org/right-wing/stephen-miller-captain-odious-last-major-alt-right-figure-trumps-white-house</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">After torch-bearing white nationalists marched in Charlottesville last month and a peaceful counter-protester, Heather Heyer, was murdered by a neo-Nazi, the leaders of the black, Hispanic, Asian and progressive caucuses in Congress sent a letter to President Trump. They asked that he fire White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, deputy assistant to the president Sebastian Gorka and senior policy adviser Stephen Miller.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">They wrote:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Americans deserve to know that white nationalists, white supremacists, and neo-Nazis are not in a position to influence U.S. policy.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It's hard to believe it somehow became necessary to write such a thing to the president of the United States about his high-level White House advisers, but it did. All three of those men have affiliations with or connections to white supremacists, "alt-right" groups and neofascist organizations. In the wake of those horrifying events in Charlottesville, and the president's insistence that the neo-Nazi marchers included "very fine people" and that anti-fascist protesters had created many of the problems, it seemed important to go on the record with this request.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As it happens, Bannon was exiled from the White House shortly afterward and Gorka followed a couple of weeks later. The press reported that they were both let go as part of a staff reorganization by John Kelly, the retired general who had come in to replace the hapless Reince Priebus as White House chief of staff and put an end to the chaos that had characterized the Trump administration from the beginning. For their part, Bannon and Gorka insisted that they had made the decision to leave because they believed they could better serve Trump from the outside. Let's just say that didn't sound convincing.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Most political observers, even many conservatives, were relieved. Gorka was an embarrassment, a man who literally wore medals associated with Nazi collaborators to the inauguration. The Daily Beast reported this week that he had landed a new job working for a pro-Trump super PAC called the MAGA Coalition, which is best known for its promotion of conspiracy theories, notably "Pizzagate," the imaginary child-rape ring allegedly run by Hillary Clinton out of a Washington pizza parlor. Gorka told Laura Ingraham on her radio show on Tuesday that the group plans to run primaries against "fake conservatives."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">We know where Steve Bannon went. He's back at Breitbart making Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell miserable and plotting the apocalypse. Most observers saw Bannon as the most sinister presence in the White House, a white nationalist Rasputin with special access to Donald Trump's id. It was assumed that getting rid of Bannon meant that Kelly had removed the main influence that stoked Trump's darker impulses.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It turns out that Stephen Miller, the remaining member of the "alt-right" trio those House members demanded be fired, was the savviest political player among them. Rather than jockey for power with the president's powerful son-in-law, Jared Kushner, as Bannon did, Miller was smart enough to see that family would be the last people Trump would abandon. So he moved into Kushner's orbit.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">After all the palace intrigue of the first eight months of Trump's administration, Miller is the one left standing. Judging from the president's "global carnage" speech this week to the United Nations -- an obvious sequel to the "American carnage" inaugural address -- Miller remains a highly influential adviser and a pernicious influence on our government.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Miller is a true white nationalist, going all the way back to his teenage years at Santa Monica High School, where he was known for his anti-Latino views. In college at Duke University he befriended Richard Spencer, future co-founder of the "alt-right" and the man who led a meeting of fellow fascists in a "Heil Trump" chant shortly after the election. Miller worked for the most anti-immigrant senator of the modern era, current Attorney General Jeff Sessions, before joining the Trump campaign and the administration, where his first assignment was to put together the new president's first botched Muslim ban.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Miller hasn't had his face on the cover of Time and nobody is parodying him (yet) on "Saturday Night Live," so Trump hasn't had reason to be jealous. His rare public performances have been the kind that the boss appreciates: combative, rude and extremely loyal to the president. Back in February he was dispatched to defend the president's assertion that fraudulent voters had stolen the popular vote, and he delivered an epic performance on "This Week" with George Stephanopoulos:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">George, it is a fact, and you will not deny it, that there are massive numbers of non-citizens in this country who are registered to vote. That is a scandal, we should stop the presses and as a country we should be aghast about the fact that you have people that have no right to vote in this country registered to vote canceling out the franchise of lawful citizens of this country. That’s the story we should be talking about and I am prepared to go on any show, anywhere, anytime and repeat it and say the president of the United States is correct 100 percent.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Trump tweeted later that day:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Congratulations Stephen Miller- on representing me this morning on the various Sunday morning shows. Great job!</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">More recently, Miller took over the podium in the White House briefing room to defend the president's immigration policy. Most people thought his performance was creepy, but it likely made the president happy because Miller got into a spat with CNN's Jim Acosta, the reporter Trump just calls "fake news"</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">iller's even caught up in the Russia investigation now, having been revealed to have helped Trump draft a scorching version of his letter firing FBI Director James Comey, which was rejected by White House counsel Don McGahn as inappropriate. Considering Miller's temperament, combined with Trump's, one can only imagine what it must have said.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Miller isn't just giving Trump the words to express his dystopian vision, he is exerting a toxic influence on policy. The New York Times reported that the White House rejected a study prepared by the Department of Health and Human Services that found that refugees brought in $63 billion more in revenue than they cost the government over the past decade. According to the Times, Miller “personally intervened in the discussions on the refugee cap to ensure that only the costs — not any fiscal benefit — of the program were considered.” Evidently, taxes paid by refugees don't count.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Stephen Miller is proving much more adept at seeing into Trump's psyche and stroking his racist id than Steve Bannon ever was. He's a smarter political player, he takes on the press, he's more focused on the details. He's getting the job done.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Heather Digby Parton,&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.alternet.org/trumps-maniacal-un-address-has-set-america-course-cataclysm</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">miller, new axis of evil 5 incl venezula; Bebe</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.alternet.org/trumps-maniacal-un-address-has-set-america-course-cataclysm</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">miller, new axis of evil 5 incl venezula; Bebe</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">bannon feeds history to djt eg a jackson, pal of Miller who plugged trump into hard right eg&nbsp; immigration, fawning, so not bounced like bannon and gorka</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://kpfa.org/episode/rising-up-with-sonali-august-29-2017/</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.democracynow.org/2017/8/3/headlines/trump_aide_stephen_miller_spars_with_cnn_journalist_over_immigration</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">statue of liberty altered later?!</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">bs mirror racist ju jitsu</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">see steven miller</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">When TV news viewers saw Trump adviser Stephen Miller accuse Jim Acosta of harboring a “cosmopolitan bias” during Wednesday’s news conference, they might have wondered whether he was accusing the CNN White House reporter of an excessive fondness for the cocktail made famous on “Sex and the City.” It’s a term that’s seldom been heard in American political discourse. But to supporters of the Miller-Bannon worldview, it was a cause for celebration. Breitbart, where Steve Bannon reigned before becoming Trump’s chief political strategist, trumpeted Miller’s “evisceration” of Acosta and put the term in its headline. So did white nationalist Richard Spencer, who hailed Miller’s dust-up with Acosta as “a triumph.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Why does it matter? Because it reflects a central premise of one key element of President Donald Trump’s constituency—a premise with a dark past and an unsettling present.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">So what is a “cosmopolitan”? It’s a cousin to “elitist,” but with a more sinister undertone. It’s a way of branding people or movements that are unmoored to the traditions and beliefs of a nation, and identify more with like-minded people regardless of their nationality. (In this sense, the revolutionary pamphleteer Thomas Paine might have been an early American cosmopolitan, when he declared: “The world is my country; all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion.”). In the eyes of their foes, “cosmopolitans” tend to cluster in the universities, the arts and in urban centers, where familiarity with diversity makes for a high comfort level with “untraditional” ideas and lives.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">For a nationalist, these are fighting words. Your country is your country; your fellow citizens are your brethren; and your country’s traditions—religious and otherwise— should be yours. A nation whose people—especially influential people—develop other ties undermine national strength, and must be repudiated.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">One reason why “cosmopolitan” is an unnerving term is that it was the key to an attempt by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin to purge the culture of dissident voices. In a 1946 speech, he deplored works in which “the positive Soviet hero is derided and inferior before all things foreign and cosmopolitanism that we all fought against from the time of Lenin, characteristic of the political leftovers, is many times applauded.” It was part of a yearslong campaigned aimed at writers, theater critics, scientists and others who were connected with “bourgeois Western influences.” Not so incidentally, many of these “cosmopolitans” were Jewish, and official Soviet propaganda for a time devoted significant energy into “unmasking” the Jewish identities of writers who published under pseudonyms.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">What makes this history relevant is that, all across Europe, nationalist political figures are still making the same kinds of arguments—usually but not always stripped of blatant anti-Semitism—to constrict the flow of ideas and the boundaries of free political expression. Russian President Vladimir Putin, for example, has more and more embraced this idea that unpatriotic forces threaten the nation. As Foreign Policy put it in 2014:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“The new theme of Russian politics [is] the conflation of loyalty to the Kremlin with patriotism. It says much that dissidents at home, from journalists failing to toe the official line to protesters on the streets, are castigated either as outright ‘foreign agents’ (every movement, charity, or organization accepting foreign money must register itself as such) or else as unknowing victims and vectors of external contamination — contamination, that is, from the West, whose cosmopolitanism and immorality Putin has come to see as an increasing threat to Russia’s identity.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">That same notion has characterized the politics of the former Soviet bloc. In Hungary, the president of its Parliament has repeatedly denounced his political opponents as “people without a country,” loyal only to values like freedom, contemptuous of tradition and religion. Its prime minister, Viktor Orban, has openly advocated for “illiberal democracy” and launched a campaign against the Jewish financier and philanthropist George Soros. In Poland, the reigning Law and Justice Party sees the nation besieged by dangerous influences. An article last year in World Press succinctly summarized the situation:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“In the party’s propaganda the country is in ruins, its economy robbed blind by international capital, while the foreign ownership of some newspapers and other types of mass media outlets made Poland into a colony, infecting Poles’ minds with rootless cosmopolitanism. … What is at stake is Polish Christian national values that must be protected at all cost, namely the linguistic and religious homogeneity of the country. Only Poles should reside in Poland, and a proper Pole must be a Polish-speaking Catholic.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In one form or another, such sentiments have been at play in the politics of the Netherlands, Germany, France, and (in less blatant form) in the Brexit vote in Great Britain last year.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">And they undergirded much of Trump’s campaign. One of its central premises was that “globalists,” regardless of ideology or party, were undermining American interests—by bringing low-skilled workers to our shores, by building factories in other lands, by letting international financial institutions grow rich while hollowing out American cities and towns.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“We’ve made other countries rich while the wealth, strength and confidence of our country has disappeared over the horizon,” Trump said in his inaugural address. “From this day forward, a new vision will govern our land. From this day forward, it’s going to be—always—America First.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">To be clear: Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller would angrily wave away any suggestion that they are echoing the sentiments of anti-democratic political movements, much less anti-Semitic dog whistles. But there is no evading the unhappy reality that to label someone a “cosmopolitan” carries with it a clear implication that there is something less patriotic, less loyal … someone who is not a “real American.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">So maybe the next time Miller wants to duel with an obstreperous reporter, he might consider going back to “elitist”—that’s a real homegrown insult.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/08/03/the-ugly-history-of-stephen-millers-cosmopolitan-epithet-215454</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">girls face slash?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The president vowed to destroy the "vile" cartel MS-13, which he called "particularly violent." He said that these gang members don't like shooting people because "it's too quick and too fast."&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"I was reading, one of these animals was caught, and explaining, they like to knife 'em and cut 'em and let them die slowly because that way it's more painful. And they enjoy watching that much more," the president said. "These are animals." And he also pointed out that the gang was responsible for 17 murders in Suffolk County since January.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/31/politics/stephen-miller-immigration-trump-administration/index.html</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">no link</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Miller, President Donald Trump's speechwriter, confidante and the author of his controversial immigration ban, has operated on the fringes of his own political party since he was a teenager.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But after what appears to have been a momentous White House policy coming out week, featuring Miller at its center, that's no longer the case. The California native has brought his views on immigration, multiculturalism and political correctness to the President's desk.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">He's also helped Trump in his mission to disrupt Washington, ruffling feathers with the secretive way in which he helped lead the White House release of its temporary immigration ban from seven Muslim-majority countries late on Friday with little to no input from the government agencies tasked with implementing the vision.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But rather than a slap-dash effort, which is how the executive action seemed to unfold, Miller actually spent months crafting the order, a White House official said.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Would people in Ferguson embrace Trump's speech? 01:00</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The real estate mogul's architect: Bannon's influence swells</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The 31-year-old White House policy director has worked as the key voice in Trump's ear on immigration, along with Steve Bannon, the former Breitbart CEO who is another top adviser. The pair at one point overruled the Department of Homeland Security's more narrow reading of Trump's executive order by directing federal officials to also bar green card holders from one of those seven countries from entering the US. Those legal US permanent residents will now need to apply for a waiver to leave and return to the US, for at least the next 90 days.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The decision to work on the order largely in secret, however, left many Capitol Hill Republicans "pretty pissed about how this went down," one aide who blamed Miller told CNN Sunday.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The secrecy also led to mass confusion over the weekend, as Department of Homeland Security and other officials struggled to parse how to carry out the order.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Defending the policy Monday, Miller told CBS the move would "make sure that people entering our country truly love and support the United States of America."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Protesters swarm airports nationwide 01:33</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But thousands of Americans hold a different view about the temporary immigration ban on seven Muslim-majority countries, evidenced by widespread protests.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The order, however, is perfectly in line with what Miller has been writing, pushing and talking about since he was 16 years old.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Trump fires acting AG after she declines to defend travel ban</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Unlike some in the President's orbit who arrived later to the campaign, Miller has been with Trump since January 2016 and served as his hype man for much of the primary and general election.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The sharply dressed aide would often take the stage before Trump, firing up thousands of people with a consistent message: Those in power want to keep you down, but Donald Trump is here to raise you up.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"Everybody who stands against Donald Trump are the people who've been running this country into the ground," Miller said at one campaign rally in Texas. "Everything that is wrong with this country today, the people opposing Donald J. Trump are responsible for."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">That rhetoric was familiar for Miller.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">According to people who went to Santa Monica High School with Miller, the Trump aide made a name for himself touting his conservative views with the predominantly left-leaning student body.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"Stephen's whole view of immigration stems from high school," said Adrian Karima, a 31-year-old lawyer who sat two desks away from Miller in AP Government. "His negative views of immigration started in high school and just grew over time."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Karima, an Iranian immigrant who voted for Hillary Clinton, said Miller was outspoken in the government class, regularly challenging the teacher and arguing that the entire school -- which he said had sizeable African-American and Hispanic populations -- was trying to indoctrinate students.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"He saw it as being outnumbered in Santa Monica," Karima said, and viewed his role as "trying to preserve any idea of Americanism that he felt, particularly by pushing English-speaking first."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Trump Adviser Stephen Miller Clashes with ex-RNC Official 08:42</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In March 2002, Miller -- age 16 -- wrote a lengthy opinion editorial for the Santa Monica Lookout that argued "very few, if any, Hispanic students" make it to honors classes because the school provides a "crutch" to those who don't speak English by ensuring "all announcements are written in both Spanish and English."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">He also wrote that his high school wasn't patriotic enough.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"Osama Bin Laden would feel very welcome at Santa Monica High School," Miller wrote, knocking the school newspaper for condemning the military response to the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, and faulting school administration for being "quick to preach non-violence."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Miller and other White House officials declined to be interviewed for this piece.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">After high school, Miller attended Duke University, where he again became an outspoken conservative voice.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Writing for the Duke Chronicle, Miller, who is Jewish, wrote about the war on Christmas ("Christmas is being banned"), on immigration ("We oppose common-sense security measures. We give driver's licenses to illegal aliens") and on multiculturalism ("As we obsess over, adulate and extol the non-American cultures we ignore the culture we all hold in common").</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">After college, Miller moved north to Washington, where he began to put the political views he espoused for years into practice. His first job was with then-Rep. Michele Bachmann, the outsider Minnesota congresswoman who told CNN she took a "gamble" on Miller, who had no experience before he was hired to be her press secretary.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"I decided I would take a chance on him because he struck me as a very serious individual," Bachmann said, calling Miller "intelligent, hard working and highly competent."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Trump adviser, pundit spar over wife tweet 02:43</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">One thing Miller wasn't, Bachmann said, was a free-lancer. The former congresswoman said Miller was "very circumspect not to overstep any boundaries" even though the Bachmann felt he had "insight beyond his years."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Miller would later work as Rep. John Shadegg's communications director and then tied his success to Sen. Jeff Sessions, the Alabama immigration hard-liner who is now Trump's pick to lead the Justice Department. Miller first worked with Sessions at the Senate Judiciary Committee and later moved to his personal office to serve as his communications director.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It was with Sessions where Miller came to be known as a skilled operator and true believer in conservative immigration policy. Miller helped his boss become the most outspoken critic of the 2013 bipartisan Gang of Eight immigration reform bill, penning a handbook filled with talking points on the issue and helping him lead the charge behind the scene to kill the measure.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Mnuchin arrives for his confirmation hearing in January. Mnuchin, a former Goldman Sachs banker, faced policy questions about taxes, the debt ceiling and banking regulation.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Photos: Trump's nominees and their confirmation hearings</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Secretary of the Treasury – Mnuchin arrives for his confirmation hearing in January. Mnuchin, a former Goldman Sachs banker, faced policy questions about taxes, the debt ceiling and banking regulation.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hide Caption</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">20 of 38</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Pence shakes hands with Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price -- who was accompanied by his wife, Betty -- after a swearing-in ceremony on Friday, February 10. Price, a former congressman from Georgia, was confirmed 52-47 in a middle-of-the-night vote along party lines.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Photos: Trump's nominees and their confirmation hearings</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Secretary of Health and Human Services – Pence shakes hands with Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price -- who was accompanied by his wife, Betty -- after a swearing-in ceremony on Friday, February 10. Price, a former congressman from Georgia, was confirmed 52-47 in a middle-of-the-night vote along party lines.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hide Caption</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">21 of 38</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Price testifies at his confirmation hearing in January. Price confronted accusations of investing in companies related to his legislative work in Congress -- and in some cases, repealing financial benefits from those investments. Price firmly denied any wrongdoing and insisted that he has taken steps to avoid any conflicts of interests.&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Photos: Trump's nominees and their confirmation hearings</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Secretary of Health and Human Services – Price testifies at his confirmation hearing in January. Price confronted accusations of investing in companies related to his legislative work in Congress -- and in some cases, repealing financial benefits from those investments. Price firmly denied any wrongdoing and insisted that he has taken steps to avoid any conflicts of interests.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hide Caption</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">22 of 38</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Trump watches as Pence administers the oath of office to Attorney General Jeff Sessions in the White House Oval Office on Thursday, February 9. Sessions, one of Trump's closest advisers and his earliest supporter in the Senate, was confirmed by a 52-47 vote that was mostly along party lines. He was accompanied to the swearing-in by his wife, Mary.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Photos: Trump's nominees and their confirmation hearings</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Attorney General – Trump watches as Pence administers the oath of office to Attorney General Jeff Sessions in the White House Oval Office on Thursday, February 9. Sessions, one of Trump's closest advisers and his earliest supporter in the Senate, was confirmed by a 52-47 vote that was mostly along party lines. He was accompanied to the swearing-in by his wife, Mary.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hide Caption</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">23 of 38</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In his wide-ranging confirmation hearing, Sessions pledged to recuse himself from all investigations involving Hillary Clinton based on inflammatory comments he made during a "contentious" campaign season. He also defended his views of the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade ruling on abortion, saying he doesn't agree with it but would respect it.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Photos: Trump's nominees and their confirmation hearings</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Attorney General – In his wide-ranging confirmation hearing, Sessions pledged to recuse himself from all investigations involving Hillary Clinton based on inflammatory comments he made during a "contentious" campaign season. He also defended his views of the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade ruling on abortion, saying he doesn't agree with it but would respect it.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hide Caption</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">24 of 38</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Pence swears in Education Secretary Betsy DeVos next to her husband, Dick, on Tuesday, February 7. Pence cast a historic tie-breaking vote to confirm DeVos after the Senate was divided 50-50.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Photos: Trump's nominees and their confirmation hearings</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Secretary of Education – Pence swears in Education Secretary Betsy DeVos next to her husband, Dick, on Tuesday, February 7. Pence cast a historic tie-breaking vote to confirm DeVos after the Senate was divided 50-50.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hide Caption</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">25 of 38</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">DeVos, a top Republican donor and school-choice activist, prepares to testify at her confirmation hearing in January. DeVos stood firm in her long-held beliefs that parents -- not the government -- should be able to choose where to send children to school, pledging to push voucher programs if she was confirmed.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Photos: Trump's nominees and their confirmation hearings</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Secretary of Education – DeVos, a top Republican donor and school-choice activist, prepares to testify at her confirmation hearing in January. DeVos stood firm in her long-held beliefs that parents -- not the government -- should be able to choose where to send children to school, pledging to push voucher programs if she was confirmed.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hide Caption</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">26 of 38</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Trump watches as Pence swears in Rex Tillerson as secretary of state on Wednesday, February 1. Tillerson's wife, Renda St. Clair, holds the Bible. Tillerson, a former CEO of ExxonMobil, was confirmed in the Senate by a vote of 56 to 43.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Photos: Trump's nominees and their confirmation hearings</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Secretary of State – Trump watches as Pence swears in Rex Tillerson as secretary of state on Wednesday, February 1. Tillerson's wife, Renda St. Clair, holds the Bible. Tillerson, a former CEO of ExxonMobil, was confirmed in the Senate by a vote of 56 to 43.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hide Caption</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">27 of 38</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Tillerson testifies during his confirmation hearing in Washington. He drew a sharp line between his views and those of his future boss, denouncing Russian aggression in cyberspace and in Ukraine.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Photos: Trump's nominees and their confirmation hearings</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Secretary of State – Tillerson testifies during his confirmation hearing in Washington. He drew a sharp line between his views and those of his future boss, denouncing Russian aggression in cyberspace and in Ukraine.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hide Caption</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">28 of 38</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Elaine Chao, Trump's pick for transportation secretary, signs the affidavit of appointment during her swearing-in ceremony in Washington on Tuesday, January 31. Chao is joined, from left, by Pence; her father, James Chao; and her husband, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Photos: Trump's nominees and their confirmation hearings</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Secretary of Transportation – Elaine Chao, Trump's pick for transportation secretary, signs the affidavit of appointment during her swearing-in ceremony in Washington on Tuesday, January 31. Chao is joined, from left, by Pence; her father, James Chao; and her husband, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hide Caption</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">29 of 38</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Chao testifies at her confirmation hearing in January. Chao, who was approved by a 93-6 vote, was deputy secretary of transportation under George H.W. Bush and labor secretary under George W. Bush.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Photos: Trump's nominees and their confirmation hearings</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Secretary of Transportation – Chao testifies at her confirmation hearing in January. Chao, who was approved by a 93-6 vote, was deputy secretary of transportation under George H.W. Bush and labor secretary under George W. Bush.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hide Caption</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">30 of 38</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley takes the oath of office as she becomes the US Ambassador to the United Nations on Wednesday, January 25. She is joined by US Sen. Marco Rubio and staffer Rebecca Schimsa as she is sworn in by the vice president.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Photos: Trump's nominees and their confirmation hearings</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">UN Ambassador – South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley takes the oath of office as she becomes the US Ambassador to the United Nations on Wednesday, January 25. She is joined by US Sen. Marco Rubio and staffer Rebecca Schimsa as she is sworn in by the vice president.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hide Caption</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">31 of 38</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">During her confirmation hearing, Haley rapped the UN for its treatment of Israel and indicated that she thinks the US should reconsider its contribution of 22% of the annual budget. "The UN and its specialized agencies have had numerous successes," Haley said. "However, any honest assessment also finds an institution that is often at odds with American national interests and American taxpayers. ... I will take an outsider's look at the institution."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Photos: Trump's nominees and their confirmation hearings</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">UN Ambassador – During her confirmation hearing, Haley rapped the UN for its treatment of Israel and indicated that she thinks the US should reconsider its contribution of 22% of the annual budget. "The UN and its specialized agencies have had numerous successes," Haley said. "However, any honest assessment also finds an institution that is often at odds with American national interests and American taxpayers. ... I will take an outsider's look at the institution."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hide Caption</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">32 of 38</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Mike Pompeo is joined by his wife, Susan, as he is sworn in as CIA director on Monday, January 23. Pompeo, who is vacating his seat in the US House, was confirmed by the Senate in a 66-32 vote.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Photos: Trump's nominees and their confirmation hearings</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">CIA Director – Mike Pompeo is joined by his wife, Susan, as he is sworn in as CIA director on Monday, January 23. Pompeo, who is vacating his seat in the US House, was confirmed by the Senate in a 66-32 vote.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hide Caption</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">33 of 38</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Pompeo is sworn in at his confirmation hearing. Along with Russia, Pompeo said other global threats include Iran's growing influence in the Middle East, ISIS' grip over major urban areas, and the conflict in Syria.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Photos: Trump's nominees and their confirmation hearings</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">CIA Director – Pompeo is sworn in at his confirmation hearing. Along with Russia, Pompeo said other global threats include Iran's growing influence in the Middle East, ISIS' grip over major urban areas, and the conflict in Syria.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hide Caption</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">34 of 38</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Retired Marine Gen. James Mattis, President Trump's pick for defense secretary, is sworn in after being confirmed by a 98-1 vote on Friday, January 20.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Photos: Trump's nominees and their confirmation hearings</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Secretary of Defense – Retired Marine Gen. James Mattis, President Trump's pick for defense secretary, is sworn in after being confirmed by a 98-1 vote on Friday, January 20.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hide Caption</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">35 of 38</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Mattis testifies before the Senate Armed Services Committee. He emerged from his confirmation hearing with broad support after he took a strong posture against Russian President Vladimir Putin and answered tough questions on women and gays in combat.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Photos: Trump's nominees and their confirmation hearings</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Secretary of Defense – Mattis testifies before the Senate Armed Services Committee. He emerged from his confirmation hearing with broad support after he took a strong posture against Russian President Vladimir Putin and answered tough questions on women and gays in combat.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hide Caption</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">36 of 38</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Retired Marine Gen. John Kelly signs his confirmation letter on January 20. He is joined by his wife, Karen.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Photos: Trump's nominees and their confirmation hearings</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Secretary of Homeland Security – Retired Marine Gen. John Kelly signs his confirmation letter on January 20. He is joined by his wife, Karen.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hide Caption</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">37 of 38</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Kelly testifies at his hearing. He was previously the head of US Southern Command, which is responsible for all military activities in South America and Central America.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Photos: Trump's nominees and their confirmation hearings</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Secretary of Homeland Security – Kelly testifies at his hearing. He was previously the head of US Southern Command, which is responsible for all military activities in South America and Central America.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hide Caption</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">38 of 38</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Vice President Mike Pence, right, administers the oath of office to Dan Coats, the new director of national intelligence, on Thursday, March 16. Coats was accompanied by his wife, Marsha. He was confirmed by the Senate the day before.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Photos: Trump's nominees and their confirmation hearings</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Director of National Intelligence – Vice President Mike Pence, right, administers the oath of office to Dan Coats, the new director of national intelligence, on Thursday, March 16. Coats was accompanied by his wife, Marsha. He was confirmed by the Senate the day before.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hide Caption</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">1 of 38</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Coats speaks on Capitol Hill before his confirmation hearing in February. The former US senator from Indiana was the US ambassador to Germany in the first term of George W. Bush's administration.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Photos: Trump's nominees and their confirmation hearings</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Director of National Intelligence – Coats speaks on Capitol Hill before his confirmation hearing in February. The former US senator from Indiana was the US ambassador to Germany in the first term of George W. Bush's administration.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hide Caption</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">2 of 38</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">New Energy Secretary Rick Perry speaks at his swearing-in ceremony in Washington on Thursday, March 2. The former Texas governor was confirmed by a Senate vote of 62-37.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Photos: Trump's nominees and their confirmation hearings</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Secretary of Energy – New Energy Secretary Rick Perry speaks at his swearing-in ceremony in Washington on Thursday, March 2. The former Texas governor was confirmed by a Senate vote of 62-37.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hide Caption</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">3 of 38</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Perry is sworn in before his confirmation hearing in January. During his testimony, Perry cast himself as an advocate for a range of energy sources, noting that he presided over the nation's leading energy-producing state. He also said he regrets once calling for the Energy Department's elimination.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Photos: Trump's nominees and their confirmation hearings</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Secretary of Energy – Perry is sworn in before his confirmation hearing in January. During his testimony, Perry cast himself as an advocate for a range of energy sources, noting that he presided over the nation's leading energy-producing state. He also said he regrets once calling for the Energy Department's elimination.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hide Caption</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">4 of 38</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ben Carson is joined by his wife, Candy, and his granddaughter Tesora as he is sworn in as the secretary of housing and urban development on March 2. The renowned neurosurgeon and former presidential candidate was confirmed by a vote of 58-41.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Photos: Trump's nominees and their confirmation hearings</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Secretary of Housing and Urban Development – Ben Carson is joined by his wife, Candy, and his granddaughter Tesora as he is sworn in as the secretary of housing and urban development on March 2. The renowned neurosurgeon and former presidential candidate was confirmed by a vote of 58-41.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hide Caption</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">5 of 38</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Carson greets Tesora prior to testifying before the Senate Committee of Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs in January. In his opening statement, he noted that he was raised by a single mother who had a "third-grade education" and made the case that he understands the issues facing the millions of people who rely on HUD programs.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Photos: Trump's nominees and their confirmation hearings</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Secretary of Housing and Urban Development – Carson greets Tesora prior to testifying before the Senate Committee of Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs in January. In his opening statement, he noted that he was raised by a single mother who had a "third-grade education" and made the case that he understands the issues facing the millions of people who rely on HUD programs.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hide Caption</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">6 of 38</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">New Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke signs an official document after he was confirmed by the Senate on Wednesday, March 1. The former congressman from Montana was joined by his wife, Lolita, as well as Vice President Mike Pence, US Sen. Steve Daines and Montana Attorney General Tim Fox.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Photos: Trump's nominees and their confirmation hearings</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Secretary of the Interior – New Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke signs an official document after he was confirmed by the Senate on Wednesday, March 1. The former congressman from Montana was joined by his wife, Lolita, as well as Vice President Mike Pence, US Sen. Steve Daines and Montana Attorney General Tim Fox.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hide Caption</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">7 of 38</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Zinke, a former Navy SEAL, is sworn in before his confirmation hearing in January. He pledged to review Obama administration actions that limit oil and gas drilling in Alaska, and he said he does not believe climate change is a hoax.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Photos: Trump's nominees and their confirmation hearings</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Secretary of the Interior – Zinke, a former Navy SEAL, is sworn in before his confirmation hearing in January. He pledged to review Obama administration actions that limit oil and gas drilling in Alaska, and he said he does not believe climate change is a hoax.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hide Caption</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">8 of 38</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Pence swears in new Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross as Ross' wife, Hilary, stands by on Tuesday, February 28. The billionaire was confirmed by the Senate by a vote of 72-27.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Photos: Trump's nominees and their confirmation hearings</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Secretary of Commerce – Pence swears in new Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross as Ross' wife, Hilary, stands by on Tuesday, February 28. The billionaire was confirmed by the Senate by a vote of 72-27.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hide Caption</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">9 of 38</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ross, center, waits to be introduced by US Sen. Marco Rubio, right, at his confirmation hearing in January. At the hearing, Ross said he wants countries that resort to "malicious" trading tactics to be "severely" punished. He pointed the finger at China, which he called "the most protectionist country of very large countries."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Photos: Trump's nominees and their confirmation hearings</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Secretary of Commerce – Ross, center, waits to be introduced by US Sen. Marco Rubio, right, at his confirmation hearing in January. At the hearing, Ross said he wants countries that resort to "malicious" trading tactics to be "severely" punished. He pointed the finger at China, which he called "the most protectionist country of very large countries."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hide Caption</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">10 of 38</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito swears in Scott Pruitt as the new administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency on Friday, February 17. Holding the Bible is Pruitt's wife, Marlyn, and they were joined by their son, Cade. Pruitt, the former attorney general of Oklahoma, was confirmed by the Senate 52-46.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Photos: Trump's nominees and their confirmation hearings</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Administrator, Environmental Protection Agency – Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito swears in Scott Pruitt as the new administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency on Friday, February 17. Holding the Bible is Pruitt's wife, Marlyn, and they were joined by their son, Cade. Pruitt, the former attorney general of Oklahoma, was confirmed by the Senate 52-46.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hide Caption</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">11 of 38</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Pruitt testifies at his confirmation hearing in January. Pruitt said he doesn't believe climate change is a hoax, but he didn't indicate he would take swift action to address environmental issues that may contribute to climate change. He said there is still debate over how to respond.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Photos: Trump's nominees and their confirmation hearings</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Administrator, Environmental Protection Agency – Pruitt testifies at his confirmation hearing in January. Pruitt said he doesn't believe climate change is a hoax, but he didn't indicate he would take swift action to address environmental issues that may contribute to climate change. He said there is still debate over how to respond.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hide Caption</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">12 of 38</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Pence shakes hands with Mick Mulvaney after swearing him in as the new director of the Office of Management and Budget on Thursday, February 16. Mulvaney's wife, Pam, looks on. Mulvaney had been a congressman since 2011.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Photos: Trump's nominees and their confirmation hearings</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Director, Office of Management and Budget – Pence shakes hands with Mick Mulvaney after swearing him in as the new director of the Office of Management and Budget on Thursday, February 16. Mulvaney's wife, Pam, looks on. Mulvaney had been a congressman since 2011.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hide Caption</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">13 of 38</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Mulvaney testifies before the Senate Budget Committee in January. He didn't back off his views that entitlement programs need revamping to survive -- and he didn't back away from some of his past statements on the matter. President Donald Trump, during his campaign, pledged not to touch Social Security or Medicare.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Photos: Trump's nominees and their confirmation hearings</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Director, Office of Management and Budget – Mulvaney testifies before the Senate Budget Committee in January. He didn't back off his views that entitlement programs need revamping to survive -- and he didn't back away from some of his past statements on the matter. President Donald Trump, during his campaign, pledged not to touch Social Security or Medicare.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hide Caption</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">14 of 38</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Linda McMahon is joined by her six grandchildren as she is sworn in as chief of the Small Business Administration on Tuesday, February 14. McMahon, the former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment, was confirmed by a vote of 81-19.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Photos: Trump's nominees and their confirmation hearings</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Administrator, Small Business Administration – Linda McMahon is joined by her six grandchildren as she is sworn in as chief of the Small Business Administration on Tuesday, February 14. McMahon, the former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment, was confirmed by a vote of 81-19.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hide Caption</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">15 of 38</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">McMahon speaks during her confirmation hearing. She stepped down from her WWE duties in 2009 and ran for the Senate in 2010 and 2012.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Photos: Trump's nominees and their confirmation hearings</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Administrator, Small Business Administration – McMahon speaks during her confirmation hearing. She stepped down from her WWE duties in 2009 and ran for the Senate in 2010 and 2012.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hide Caption</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">16 of 38</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Pence watches David Shulkin, the new secretary of the Veterans Affairs Department, speak at his swearing-in ceremony on February 14. Shulkin was confirmed by a unanimous vote in the Senate.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Photos: Trump's nominees and their confirmation hearings</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Secretary of Veterans Affairs – Pence watches David Shulkin, the new secretary of the Veterans Affairs Department, speak at his swearing-in ceremony on February 14. Shulkin was confirmed by a unanimous vote in the Senate.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hide Caption</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">17 of 38</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Shulkin speaks at his confirmation hearing. He was the VA's undersecretary for health, a position in which he oversaw more than 1,700 health care sites across the United States.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Photos: Trump's nominees and their confirmation hearings</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Secretary of Veterans Affairs – Shulkin speaks at his confirmation hearing. He was the VA's undersecretary for health, a position in which he oversaw more than 1,700 health care sites across the United States.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hide Caption</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">18 of 38</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Trump watches as Steven Mnuchin is sworn in as treasury secretary on Monday, February 13. The Senate vote was 53-47, mostly along party lines.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Photos: Trump's nominees and their confirmation hearings</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Secretary of the Treasury – Trump watches as Steven Mnuchin is sworn in as treasury secretary on Monday, February 13. The Senate vote was 53-47, mostly along party lines.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hide Caption</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">19 of 38</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Mnuchin arrives for his confirmation hearing in January. Mnuchin, a former Goldman Sachs banker, faced policy questions about taxes, the debt ceiling and banking regulation.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Photos: Trump's nominees and their confirmation hearings</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Secretary of the Treasury – Mnuchin arrives for his confirmation hearing in January. Mnuchin, a former Goldman Sachs banker, faced policy questions about taxes, the debt ceiling and banking regulation.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hide Caption</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">20 of 38</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Pence shakes hands with Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price -- who was accompanied by his wife, Betty -- after a swearing-in ceremony on Friday, February 10. Price, a former congressman from Georgia, was confirmed 52-47 in a middle-of-the-night vote along party lines.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Photos: Trump's nominees and their confirmation hearings</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Secretary of Health and Human Services – Pence shakes hands with Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price -- who was accompanied by his wife, Betty -- after a swearing-in ceremony on Friday, February 10. Price, a former congressman from Georgia, was confirmed 52-47 in a middle-of-the-night vote along party lines.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hide Caption</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">21 of 38</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Price testifies at his confirmation hearing in January. Price confronted accusations of investing in companies related to his legislative work in Congress -- and in some cases, repealing financial benefits from those investments. Price firmly denied any wrongdoing and insisted that he has taken steps to avoid any conflicts of interests.&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Photos: Trump's nominees and their confirmation hearings</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Secretary of Health and Human Services – Price testifies at his confirmation hearing in January. Price confronted accusations of investing in companies related to his legislative work in Congress -- and in some cases, repealing financial benefits from those investments. Price firmly denied any wrongdoing and insisted that he has taken steps to avoid any conflicts of interests.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hide Caption</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">22 of 38</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Trump watches as Pence administers the oath of office to Attorney General Jeff Sessions in the White House Oval Office on Thursday, February 9. Sessions, one of Trump's closest advisers and his earliest supporter in the Senate, was confirmed by a 52-47 vote that was mostly along party lines. He was accompanied to the swearing-in by his wife, Mary.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Photos: Trump's nominees and their confirmation hearings</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Attorney General – Trump watches as Pence administers the oath of office to Attorney General Jeff Sessions in the White House Oval Office on Thursday, February 9. Sessions, one of Trump's closest advisers and his earliest supporter in the Senate, was confirmed by a 52-47 vote that was mostly along party lines. He was accompanied to the swearing-in by his wife, Mary.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hide Caption</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">23 of 38</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In his wide-ranging confirmation hearing, Sessions pledged to recuse himself from all investigations involving Hillary Clinton based on inflammatory comments he made during a "contentious" campaign season. He also defended his views of the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade ruling on abortion, saying he doesn't agree with it but would respect it.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Photos: Trump's nominees and their confirmation hearings</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Attorney General – In his wide-ranging confirmation hearing, Sessions pledged to recuse himself from all investigations involving Hillary Clinton based on inflammatory comments he made during a "contentious" campaign season. He also defended his views of the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade ruling on abortion, saying he doesn't agree with it but would respect it.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hide Caption</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">24 of 38</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Pence swears in Education Secretary Betsy DeVos next to her husband, Dick, on Tuesday, February 7. Pence cast a historic tie-breaking vote to confirm DeVos after the Senate was divided 50-50.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Photos: Trump's nominees and their confirmation hearings</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Secretary of Education – Pence swears in Education Secretary Betsy DeVos next to her husband, Dick, on Tuesday, February 7. Pence cast a historic tie-breaking vote to confirm DeVos after the Senate was divided 50-50.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hide Caption</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">25 of 38</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">DeVos, a top Republican donor and school-choice activist, prepares to testify at her confirmation hearing in January. DeVos stood firm in her long-held beliefs that parents -- not the government -- should be able to choose where to send children to school, pledging to push voucher programs if she was confirmed.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Photos: Trump's nominees and their confirmation hearings</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Secretary of Education – DeVos, a top Republican donor and school-choice activist, prepares to testify at her confirmation hearing in January. DeVos stood firm in her long-held beliefs that parents -- not the government -- should be able to choose where to send children to school, pledging to push voucher programs if she was confirmed.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hide Caption</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">26 of 38</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Trump watches as Pence swears in Rex Tillerson as secretary of state on Wednesday, February 1. Tillerson's wife, Renda St. Clair, holds the Bible. Tillerson, a former CEO of ExxonMobil, was confirmed in the Senate by a vote of 56 to 43.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Photos: Trump's nominees and their confirmation hearings</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Secretary of State – Trump watches as Pence swears in Rex Tillerson as secretary of state on Wednesday, February 1. Tillerson's wife, Renda St. Clair, holds the Bible. Tillerson, a former CEO of ExxonMobil, was confirmed in the Senate by a vote of 56 to 43.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hide Caption</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">27 of 38</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Tillerson testifies during his confirmation hearing in Washington. He drew a sharp line between his views and those of his future boss, denouncing Russian aggression in cyberspace and in Ukraine.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Photos: Trump's nominees and their confirmation hearings</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Secretary of State – Tillerson testifies during his confirmation hearing in Washington. He drew a sharp line between his views and those of his future boss, denouncing Russian aggression in cyberspace and in Ukraine.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hide Caption</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">28 of 38</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Elaine Chao, Trump's pick for transportation secretary, signs the affidavit of appointment during her swearing-in ceremony in Washington on Tuesday, January 31. Chao is joined, from left, by Pence; her father, James Chao; and her husband, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Photos: Trump's nominees and their confirmation hearings</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Secretary of Transportation – Elaine Chao, Trump's pick for transportation secretary, signs the affidavit of appointment during her swearing-in ceremony in Washington on Tuesday, January 31. Chao is joined, from left, by Pence; her father, James Chao; and her husband, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hide Caption</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">29 of 38</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Chao testifies at her confirmation hearing in January. Chao, who was approved by a 93-6 vote, was deputy secretary of transportation under George H.W. Bush and labor secretary under George W. Bush.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Photos: Trump's nominees and their confirmation hearings</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Secretary of Transportation – Chao testifies at her confirmation hearing in January. Chao, who was approved by a 93-6 vote, was deputy secretary of transportation under George H.W. Bush and labor secretary under George W. Bush.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hide Caption</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">30 of 38</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley takes the oath of office as she becomes the US Ambassador to the United Nations on Wednesday, January 25. She is joined by US Sen. Marco Rubio and staffer Rebecca Schimsa as she is sworn in by the vice president.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Photos: Trump's nominees and their confirmation hearings</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">UN Ambassador – South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley takes the oath of office as she becomes the US Ambassador to the United Nations on Wednesday, January 25. She is joined by US Sen. Marco Rubio and staffer Rebecca Schimsa as she is sworn in by the vice president.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hide Caption</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">31 of 38</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">During her confirmation hearing, Haley rapped the UN for its treatment of Israel and indicated that she thinks the US should reconsider its contribution of 22% of the annual budget. "The UN and its specialized agencies have had numerous successes," Haley said. "However, any honest assessment also finds an institution that is often at odds with American national interests and American taxpayers. ... I will take an outsider's look at the institution."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Photos: Trump's nominees and their confirmation hearings</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">UN Ambassador – During her confirmation hearing, Haley rapped the UN for its treatment of Israel and indicated that she thinks the US should reconsider its contribution of 22% of the annual budget. "The UN and its specialized agencies have had numerous successes," Haley said. "However, any honest assessment also finds an institution that is often at odds with American national interests and American taxpayers. ... I will take an outsider's look at the institution."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hide Caption</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">32 of 38</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Mike Pompeo is joined by his wife, Susan, as he is sworn in as CIA director on Monday, January 23. Pompeo, who is vacating his seat in the US House, was confirmed by the Senate in a 66-32 vote.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Photos: Trump's nominees and their confirmation hearings</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">CIA Director – Mike Pompeo is joined by his wife, Susan, as he is sworn in as CIA director on Monday, January 23. Pompeo, who is vacating his seat in the US House, was confirmed by the Senate in a 66-32 vote.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hide Caption</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">33 of 38</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Pompeo is sworn in at his confirmation hearing. Along with Russia, Pompeo said other global threats include Iran's growing influence in the Middle East, ISIS' grip over major urban areas, and the conflict in Syria.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Photos: Trump's nominees and their confirmation hearings</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">CIA Director – Pompeo is sworn in at his confirmation hearing. Along with Russia, Pompeo said other global threats include Iran's growing influence in the Middle East, ISIS' grip over major urban areas, and the conflict in Syria.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hide Caption</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">34 of 38</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Retired Marine Gen. James Mattis, President Trump's pick for defense secretary, is sworn in after being confirmed by a 98-1 vote on Friday, January 20.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Photos: Trump's nominees and their confirmation hearings</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Secretary of Defense – Retired Marine Gen. James Mattis, President Trump's pick for defense secretary, is sworn in after being confirmed by a 98-1 vote on Friday, January 20.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hide Caption</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">35 of 38</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Mattis testifies before the Senate Armed Services Committee. He emerged from his confirmation hearing with broad support after he took a strong posture against Russian President Vladimir Putin and answered tough questions on women and gays in combat.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Photos: Trump's nominees and their confirmation hearings</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Secretary of Defense – Mattis testifies before the Senate Armed Services Committee. He emerged from his confirmation hearing with broad support after he took a strong posture against Russian President Vladimir Putin and answered tough questions on women and gays in combat.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hide Caption</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">36 of 38</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Retired Marine Gen. John Kelly signs his confirmation letter on January 20. He is joined by his wife, Karen.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Photos: Trump's nominees and their confirmation hearings</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Secretary of Homeland Security – Retired Marine Gen. John Kelly signs his confirmation letter on January 20. He is joined by his wife, Karen.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hide Caption</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">37 of 38</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Kelly testifies at his hearing. He was previously the head of US Southern Command, which is responsible for all military activities in South America and Central America.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Photos: Trump's nominees and their confirmation hearings</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Secretary of Homeland Security – Kelly testifies at his hearing. He was previously the head of US Southern Command, which is responsible for all military activities in South America and Central America.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hide Caption</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">38 of 38</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Vice President Mike Pence, right, administers the oath of office to Dan Coats, the new director of national intelligence, on Thursday, March 16. Coats was accompanied by his wife, Marsha. He was confirmed by the Senate the day before.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Photos: Trump's nominees and their confirmation hearings</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Director of National Intelligence – Vice President Mike Pence, right, administers the oath of office to Dan Coats, the new director of national intelligence, on Thursday, March 16. Coats was accompanied by his wife, Marsha. He was confirmed by the Senate the day before.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hide Caption</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">1 of 38</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Coats speaks on Capitol Hill before his confirmation hearing in February. The former US senator from Indiana was the US ambassador to Germany in the first term of George W. Bush's administration.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Photos: Trump's nominees and their confirmation hearings</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Director of National Intelligence – Coats speaks on Capitol Hill before his confirmation hearing in February. The former US senator from Indiana was the US ambassador to Germany in the first term of George W. Bush's administration.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hide Caption</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">2 of 38</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">New Energy Secretary Rick Perry speaks at his swearing-in ceremony in Washington on Thursday, March 2. The former Texas governor was confirmed by a Senate vote of 62-37.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Photos: Trump's nominees and their confirmation hearings</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Secretary of Energy – New Energy Secretary Rick Perry speaks at his swearing-in ceremony in Washington on Thursday, March 2. The former Texas governor was confirmed by a Senate vote of 62-37.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hide Caption</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">3 of 38</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Perry is sworn in before his confirmation hearing in January. During his testimony, Perry cast himself as an advocate for a range of energy sources, noting that he presided over the nation's leading energy-producing state. He also said he regrets once calling for the Energy Department's elimination.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Photos: Trump's nominees and their confirmation hearings</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Secretary of Energy – Perry is sworn in before his confirmation hearing in January. During his testimony, Perry cast himself as an advocate for a range of energy sources, noting that he presided over the nation's leading energy-producing state. He also said he regrets once calling for the Energy Department's elimination.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hide Caption</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">4 of 38</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ben Carson is joined by his wife, Candy, and his granddaughter Tesora as he is sworn in as the secretary of housing and urban development on March 2. The renowned neurosurgeon and former presidential candidate was confirmed by a vote of 58-41.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Photos: Trump's nominees and their confirmation hearings</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Secretary of Housing and Urban Development – Ben Carson is joined by his wife, Candy, and his granddaughter Tesora as he is sworn in as the secretary of housing and urban development on March 2. The renowned neurosurgeon and former presidential candidate was confirmed by a vote of 58-41.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hide Caption</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">5 of 38</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Carson greets Tesora prior to testifying before the Senate Committee of Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs in January. In his opening statement, he noted that he was raised by a single mother who had a "third-grade education" and made the case that he understands the issues facing the millions of people who rely on HUD programs.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Photos: Trump's nominees and their confirmation hearings</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Secretary of Housing and Urban Development – Carson greets Tesora prior to testifying before the Senate Committee of Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs in January. In his opening statement, he noted that he was raised by a single mother who had a "third-grade education" and made the case that he understands the issues facing the millions of people who rely on HUD programs.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hide Caption</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">6 of 38</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">New Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke signs an official document after he was confirmed by the Senate on Wednesday, March 1. The former congressman from Montana was joined by his wife, Lolita, as well as Vice President Mike Pence, US Sen. Steve Daines and Montana Attorney General Tim Fox.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Photos: Trump's nominees and their confirmation hearings</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Secretary of the Interior – New Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke signs an official document after he was confirmed by the Senate on Wednesday, March 1. The former congressman from Montana was joined by his wife, Lolita, as well as Vice President Mike Pence, US Sen. Steve Daines and Montana Attorney General Tim Fox.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hide Caption</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">7 of 38</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Zinke, a former Navy SEAL, is sworn in before his confirmation hearing in January. He pledged to review Obama administration actions that limit oil and gas drilling in Alaska, and he said he does not believe climate change is a hoax.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Photos: Trump's nominees and their confirmation hearings</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Secretary of the Interior – Zinke, a former Navy SEAL, is sworn in before his confirmation hearing in January. He pledged to review Obama administration actions that limit oil and gas drilling in Alaska, and he said he does not believe climate change is a hoax.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hide Caption</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">8 of 38</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Pence swears in new Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross as Ross' wife, Hilary, stands by on Tuesday, February 28. The billionaire was confirmed by the Senate by a vote of 72-27.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Photos: Trump's nominees and their confirmation hearings</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Secretary of Commerce – Pence swears in new Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross as Ross' wife, Hilary, stands by on Tuesday, February 28. The billionaire was confirmed by the Senate by a vote of 72-27.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hide Caption</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">9 of 38</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ross, center, waits to be introduced by US Sen. Marco Rubio, right, at his confirmation hearing in January. At the hearing, Ross said he wants countries that resort to "malicious" trading tactics to be "severely" punished. He pointed the finger at China, which he called "the most protectionist country of very large countries."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Photos: Trump's nominees and their confirmation hearings</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Secretary of Commerce – Ross, center, waits to be introduced by US Sen. Marco Rubio, right, at his confirmation hearing in January. At the hearing, Ross said he wants countries that resort to "malicious" trading tactics to be "severely" punished. He pointed the finger at China, which he called "the most protectionist country of very large countries."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hide Caption</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">10 of 38</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito swears in Scott Pruitt as the new administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency on Friday, February 17. Holding the Bible is Pruitt's wife, Marlyn, and they were joined by their son, Cade. Pruitt, the former attorney general of Oklahoma, was confirmed by the Senate 52-46.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Photos: Trump's nominees and their confirmation hearings</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Administrator, Environmental Protection Agency – Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito swears in Scott Pruitt as the new administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency on Friday, February 17. Holding the Bible is Pruitt's wife, Marlyn, and they were joined by their son, Cade. Pruitt, the former attorney general of Oklahoma, was confirmed by the Senate 52-46.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hide Caption</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">11 of 38</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Pruitt testifies at his confirmation hearing in January. Pruitt said he doesn't believe climate change is a hoax, but he didn't indicate he would take swift action to address environmental issues that may contribute to climate change. He said there is still debate over how to respond.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Photos: Trump's nominees and their confirmation hearings</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Administrator, Environmental Protection Agency – Pruitt testifies at his confirmation hearing in January. Pruitt said he doesn't believe climate change is a hoax, but he didn't indicate he would take swift action to address environmental issues that may contribute to climate change. He said there is still debate over how to respond.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hide Caption</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">12 of 38</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Pence shakes hands with Mick Mulvaney after swearing him in as the new director of the Office of Management and Budget on Thursday, February 16. Mulvaney's wife, Pam, looks on. Mulvaney had been a congressman since 2011.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Photos: Trump's nominees and their confirmation hearings</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Director, Office of Management and Budget – Pence shakes hands with Mick Mulvaney after swearing him in as the new director of the Office of Management and Budget on Thursday, February 16. Mulvaney's wife, Pam, looks on. Mulvaney had been a congressman since 2011.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hide Caption</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">13 of 38</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Mulvaney testifies before the Senate Budget Committee in January. He didn't back off his views that entitlement programs need revamping to survive -- and he didn't back away from some of his past statements on the matter. President Donald Trump, during his campaign, pledged not to touch Social Security or Medicare.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Photos: Trump's nominees and their confirmation hearings</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Director, Office of Management and Budget – Mulvaney testifies before the Senate Budget Committee in January. He didn't back off his views that entitlement programs need revamping to survive -- and he didn't back away from some of his past statements on the matter. President Donald Trump, during his campaign, pledged not to touch Social Security or Medicare.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hide Caption</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">14 of 38</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Linda McMahon is joined by her six grandchildren as she is sworn in as chief of the Small Business Administration on Tuesday, February 14. McMahon, the former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment, was confirmed by a vote of 81-19.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Photos: Trump's nominees and their confirmation hearings</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Administrator, Small Business Administration – Linda McMahon is joined by her six grandchildren as she is sworn in as chief of the Small Business Administration on Tuesday, February 14. McMahon, the former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment, was confirmed by a vote of 81-19.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hide Caption</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">15 of 38</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">McMahon speaks during her confirmation hearing. She stepped down from her WWE duties in 2009 and ran for the Senate in 2010 and 2012.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Photos: Trump's nominees and their confirmation hearings</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Administrator, Small Business Administration – McMahon speaks during her confirmation hearing. She stepped down from her WWE duties in 2009 and ran for the Senate in 2010 and 2012.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Shulkin speaks at his confirmation hearing. He was the VA's undersecretary for health, a position in which he oversaw more than 1,700 health care sites across the United States.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Photos: Trump's nominees and their confirmation hearings</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Secretary of Veterans Affairs – Shulkin speaks at his confirmation hearing. He was the VA's undersecretary for health, a position in which he oversaw more than 1,700 health care sites across the United States.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Dan Coats confirmation 031601 Dan Coats confirmation hearing03 Rick Perry oath of office06 Rick Perry committee hearing 011901 Ben Carson oath of office 030204 Carson testifies 011201 Ryan Zinke oath of office02 zinke confirmation hearingWilbur Ross Confirmation03 Wilbur Ross confirmation hearing 0118Scott Pruitt swearing in 021702 Scott Pruitt confirmation hearing 0118Mick Mulvaney swearing in 021602 Mulvaney confirmation hearing 0124Linda McMahon swearing in02 Linda McMahon confirmation hearingDavid Shulkin 0214David Shulkin 020101 steve mnuchin swearing in 021303 Steven Mnuchin confirmation hearing 011903 Tom Price oath of office 021002 Tom Price confirmation hearing 0118Jeff Sessions oath of office03 trump confirmations - sessionsBetsy devos sworn in sec education02 betsy devos confirmation hearing 0117tillerson sworn in 020105 tillerson confirmation 0111chao confirmed02 Elaine Chao testifies01 Nikki Haley sworn-in 012501 Nikki Haley confirmation hearing 0118pompeo swearing in04 Pompeo testifies 011201 Mattis 012006 Mattis testifies 011201 John Kelly conformation letter09 trump confirmations - kelly</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Though the Senate passed the bill 68-32 in 2013, it died in the House and became a political albatross for the Republicans who worked to usher it through.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"He was relentless, he was constantly putting out new information and that kind of energy and determination when you are David and the other side is not just Goliath, but 100 Goliaths," Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, said Monday.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Krikorian, whose conservative organization advocates for more efforts to restrict legal immigration into the United States, said Miller's role was "essential" to the Alabama senator.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Sessions eventually became the first sitting senator to endorse Trump, sporting a Make America Great Again hat at a February 2015 rally in Madison, Alabama.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The joining of Trump and Sessions -- two immigration hardliners -- cemented Miller's career, and set him on a path to the West Wing and a key position at the arm of Trump.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But in the eyes of some Republicans, Miller isn't ready for this role.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"Why did Stephen Miller fight so hard to put out this order on Friday without talking to any of the other agencies?" Joe Scarborough, former Republican congressman and MSNBC host, said on Monday. "You've got 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."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">For those who knew him years ago, Miller is who he always was.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"I see him on TV today and hear about him," Karimi said, "and think he was exactly the same back then."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/06/stephen-miller-donald-trump-2016-policy-adviser-jeff-sessions-213992 see below</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">bannon miller</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/daily-202/2017/03/01/daily-202-trump-s-speech-to-congress-highlights-influence-of-ivanka-bannon/58b627c1e9b69b1406c75d06/?utm_term=.c9f2150544f6</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">== =</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.democracynow.org/2017/7/26/joshua_green_on_the_devils_bargain</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Steve Bannon, the former head of Breitbart News. During the early days of the Trump presidency, many suggested Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist, was pulling many of the strings in the Oval Office. We speak to journalist Joshua Green about how Bannon took his hard-right nationalist politics from the fringes of the Republican Party all the way to the White House. Green has been closely following Bannon’s career for years. In October 2015—before Bannon joined Trump’s campaign—Green dubbed Bannon the "Most Dangerous Political Operative in America." His new book is "Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">miller dark speech writer: hype girl face slash by immigr b/c main press not cover thus alt fact?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">dylann storm roof</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">STEPHEN MILLER<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>CAROLINE MAY<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>Miller sent tips to May, a Breitbart reporter<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/06/stephen-miller-donald-trump-2016-policy-adviser-jeff-sessions-213992</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">STEPHEN MILLER<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>DAVID HOROWITZ<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>"Miller considers Horowitz a mentor," per Politico<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/06/stephen-miller-donald-trump-2016-policy-adviser-jeff-sessions-213992</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">STEPHEN MILLER<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>JEFF SESSIONS<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>Former chief of communications<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/06/stephen-miller-donald-trump-2016-policy-adviser-jeff-sessions-213992</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">STEPHEN MILLER<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>JULIA HAHN<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>Miller sent tips to Hahn, a Breitbart reporter<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/06/stephen-miller-donald-trump-2016-policy-adviser-jeff-sessions-213992</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">STEPHEN MILLER<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>SAM NUNBERG<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>Friends<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/06/stephen-miller-donald-trump-2016-policy-adviser-jeff-sessions-213992</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">STEPHEN MILLER<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>TUCKER CARLSON<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>Miller set up meeting between Carlson and Sessions</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.alternet.org/right-wing/21-facts-explain-exactly-who-stephen-miller</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">no link</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">21 Facts That Explain Exactly Who Stephen Miller Is</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The new Trump mouthpiece has been like this for a long time.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">By Kali Holloway / AlterNet February 17, 2017</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Even among the right-wing ideologues doing the actual presidenting in this administration, Stephen Miller stands out for the copious amounts of Kool-Aid he mainlines. Speaking to the New York Times, a Trump team colleague described Miller as “fiercely loyal” to the president, “a true believer in every sense of the word.” Though he joined the campaign in its early days, penning many of the apocalyptic speeches that won fear-drunk Republican hearts and minds, Miller recently got a lot more visibility after a string of television appearances in defense of the Muslim ban. At each stop, Miller showed a flair for the dramatic: he lied, he dodged, he put on his best tyrant’s voice and proclaimed the executive branch above the law. It seemed contrived and forced, like a politically precocious, weasley teenager’s idea of how to command a crowd. According to those who know Miller’s history, that’s not so far off the mark.&nbsp;&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Dating back to junior high school, Miller has been the unwavering right-winger now before us. Though the internet, and some of his family members, were quick to compare him to Joseph Goebbels, this reporter saw a resemblance to Roy Cohn—a Trump mentor—down to the sartorial details. Miller wears retro skinny suits, only recently ditched a chain-smoking habit and has the kind of cockiness that reads as unexamined, unsympathetic self-hatred. His barked orders and put-on baritone are all part of the package, and can strike an observer as funny. At least until you remember this guy is trying to turn the country into an all-white gated community.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Trump administration is the natural place for Miller to end up. He’s been writing racist, anti-immigrant rants for half his life and he’s only 31. He’s worked for some of the most deplorable U.S. politicians out there, only to become the voice for the worst of all. By all accounts, he is as terrible—and dangerous—as he seems, which is why he’s no laughing matter. And in that way, he is exactly like his boss. As one of his high school classmates told the Daily Beast, “People laughed at [Miller] because he was a buffoon, he was a performer, he thrived on spectacle. I’m very conscious now, looking back, that he was treated the same way that Trump was—he wasn’t taken seriously.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Here are 21 facts that explain who Stephen Miller is.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">1. The National Rifle Association was his first right-wing love.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Miller grew up in Santa Monica, a coastal city long regarded as a progressive bastion in L.A. County. A Los Angeles Times profile states Miller, along with two siblings, was raised in a “Jewish family of longtime Franklin Roosevelt Democrats.” Somewhere around eighth grade, Miller’s politics took a hard right after reading Guns, Crime, and Freedom, penned by National Rifle Association head Wayne LaPierre.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">2. He dumped a childhood friend because he was Latino.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">According to Jason Islas, in the summer between middle and junior high, Miller told him, “I can't be your friend anymore because you are Latino.” According to Islas, the two never spoke again, though he hasn’t lost much sleep over the demise of their friendship. “[It] didn't bother me, because the fact that Miller rejected me because I am Latino showed me he was pretty much worthless,” he told Univision.&nbsp;&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">3. He was the ' best-known&nbsp; and least-liked conservative activist' in his liberal high school.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Miller was in the racial and political minority at Santa Monica High, where 30 percent of students were Latino, 12 percent black and 5 percent Asian. Oscar de la Torre, a counselor at the school who remains active in the community, describes Miller as being “on a crusade against liberalism and liberals.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Student body president Justin Brownstone says Miller “enjoyed saying things that were perceived as racist. The more he offended, the happier he was.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“He had a lot of grudges,” de la Torre told Fusion. “He didn't go out of his way to go to dances or to have girlfriends. I don't remember ever seeing him smile.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">4. He started as a right-wing mouthpiece in high school.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Julia Ioffe writes that Miller reached out to conservative talk radio host Larry Elder while at Santa Monica High, mostly to complain about pervasive liberalism in his school. He also started writing articles for the Santa Monica Lookout. Miller leveraged his role as local conservative media maven to win unilateral wars against what he imagined were lefty enemies in his school.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Thus began a cycle that would repeat itself over and over in high school and college,” Ioffe writes, “Miller would clash with school administrators over a perceived leftist conspiracy...then escalate the conflict by taking it to a conservative talk show, infuriating the administrators but yielding a compromise in Miller’s favor.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In a column written just after graduation, Miller noted that just “since his Junior year in High School, he [had] been a guest on local and national radio over thirty times.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">5. He spent months fighting to reinstate the Pledge of Allegiance in his high school.&nbsp;&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In a letter to local media outlet the Lookout decrying “political correctness out of control,” 16-year-old Miller complained that “our school refused to say the Pledge of Allegiance in classrooms for years,” proof that “they only adhere to the liberal guidelines.” For months, Miller pestered school administrators to “bring back the pledge” even dragging the superintendent into the fight. The pledge was ultimately reinstated, though Miller moaned in his letter that “it is still only said twice a week, while policy dictates it should be said every day.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">6. Some things Miller’s classmates have said about his attitudes on race.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Charles Gould, whom the Daily News describes as Miller’s schoolmate from first to 12th grade, wrote, “[Miller] was an unabashed racist. No, I’m not being over sensitive and no, I’m not using the 'r' word where it doesn’t apply. In private conversations he was constantly making disparaging remarks about the African-American, Latino and Asian students at our school.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Classmate Natalie Flores, who wrote a Huffington Post piece about growing up with Miller, told Univision that Miller seemed to have “an intense hatred toward people of color, especially toward Latinos.” She added, “I think his big problem was the Latinos. He thought they lived off welfare.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“[It] was not just that he targeted minority students, and played a victim on a regular basis, but was an asshole,” Ari Rosmarin, the editor of the student newspaper who now works at the ACLU, told the Daily Beast. “Most people knew him because he made it his business to have everyone hear his vile rhetoric on a regular basis.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">7. His high school writings demonstrate his budding right-wing views.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In that same letter, Miller writes, “When I entered Santa Monica High School...I noticed a number of students lacked basic English skills. There are usually very few, if any, Hispanic students in my honors classes, despite the large number of Hispanic students that attend our school. Even so, pursuant to district policy, all announcements are written in both Spanish and English. By providing a crutch now, we are preventing Spanish speakers from standing on their own...”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">He goes on to gripe about condoms in his school (“Legally speaking, sex between minors is statutory rape”), the presence of a student LGBT group (“[W]e have a club on campus that will gladly help foster their homosexuality”), reverence for Native Americans (“excusing their scalping of frontiersmen as part of their culture”) and the lack of praise for the U.S. military (“Osama Bin Laden would feel very welcome at Santa Monica High School.”)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In another article he wrote, “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.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Here’s what he used for his senior yearbook quote, citing Teddy Roosevelt: “There can be no fifty-fifty Americanism in this country. There is room here for only 100 percent Americanism, only for those who are Americans and nothing else.”&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">8. He actively tried to undermine student groups focused on Latino and black issues.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Oscar de la Torre, his former high school counselor, says Miller frequently claimed that because he—a white male—didn’t experience racism or sexism, students of color were making it up. “He didn’t believe the oppression existed,” de la Torre told the Times. “This guy is 17 years old, and it’s like listening to someone who’s 70 years old—in the 1930s.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">During a summit to address African American and Latino issues, Miller showed up with the message that the room was delusional and he knew better. “He wanted to sabotage us,” de la Torre told the Times. “He confronted everyone, denying that racism existed. He said that was a thing of the past.” (In a column about the meeting, Miller would later indicate the real problem wasn't racism but “leftist victim mentality.”)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">9. He was once booed off the stage for making a racist joke about the school janitors.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">While running for student council, Miller made a speech complaining about having to pick up his garbage when there were janitors for that. The incident, which survives in the video below, was funny because the janitors were black and brown people who got paid almost nothing to pick up garbage. Get it? Haha, right?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“It was a racist remark because we all knew that our janitors were people of color,” Flores told Fusion.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“He was booed unanimously by the student body off the stage. People were disgusted,” Rosmarin, of the ACLU, told the Daily Beast. “That kind of incident with the janitorial staff—everyone, no matter what your background is, understands why that is an awful thing to say.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">(A bit of aughts trivia: the winner of that election was Mark Hunter, the guy behind the Cobrasnake party photo empire.)&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">10. He attended Duke University, where people remember him, though not fondly.&nbsp;&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Here is how Miller was recently described by John Burness, the former senior vice president of public affairs and government relations at Duke: “He’s the most sanctimonious student I think I ever encountered. He seemed to be absolutely sure of his own views and the correctness of them, and seemed to assume that if you were in disagreement with him, there was something malevolent or stupid about your thinking. Incredibly intolerant.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A college classmate told the New York Times that at a freshman orientation event, he introduced himself by announcing, “My name is Stephen Miller, I am from Los Angeles, and I like guns.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">11. In college, he greatly expanded his portfolio of right-wing&nbsp; hate pieces .</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In a column lamenting “multiculturalism” at Duke and other colleges, Miller listed all the cool things that make America great:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“We are the nation of cinema and radio, crooning and jazz, convertibles and diners, the Old West and New York City. Our culture includes Jimmy Stewart, John Wayne, Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jackie Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, Douglas Macarthur, Milton Friedman, Edgar Allen Poe, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Edison and again, for emphasis, Elvis Presley.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Neat-o! He only forgot to include Pat Boone and racism.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In another article, Miller accused Maya Angelou of “racial paranoia” and said her “legendary wisdom” amounted to “tired, multicultural clichés.” Another piece finds Miller finally breaking the right wing’s longstanding silence on the liberal media, asking why there aren’t any movies “about the evils of the Islamic holy war, the merits of capitalism…[o]r, dare I say it, a movie with a positive take on the Bush administration?”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">For good measure, Miller also gives voice to the Angry Adult Virgin Lobby, noting that “shows like Queer As Folk, The ‘L’ Word, Will & Grace and Sex and the City, all do their part to promote alternative lifestyles and erode traditional values.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">12. He helped found and lead a campus group called the Terrorism Awareness Project.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">CNN reports Miller served as “national campus coordinator, president, and co-founder” of the group, launched by the David Horowitz Freedom Center. (Horowitz is a vocally anti-black, anti-Muslim xenophobe and Zionist.) The project claimed its mission was to end “the efforts of the radical left and its Islamist allies to destroy American values and disarm this country as it attempts to defend itself in a time of terror." Miller promoted events like "Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week”—which didn’t catch on, for some reason—and videos with gross titles like The Islamic Mein Kampf. He also tried to get other college newspapers to run ads, like this one, which was reportedly designed by Richard Spencer. When colleges turned them down, Miller took his case to the only show that would have him, “Fox & Friends.” You can watch that appearance; note that Miller was still using his real voice, not his now-famous King of the D&D Virgins voice.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">13. He palled around with white supremacist and recently punched neo-Nazi Richard Spencer.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">When Miller was an undergrad and Spencer was working on a Ph.D. he was too racist too finish (no really, he dropped out to found a racist “think tank”), the two became buddies as members of the Duke Conservative Union. Together, they worked on an event featuring Peter Brimelow, founder of the virulently xenophobic VDARE and a notable hate-scene fixture with his very own SPLC page. Spencer told the Daily Beast he was a “mentor” to Miller, saying he “spent a lot of time with him at Duke...I hope I expanded his thinking.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Spencer, who has lauded Miller as “very bold and strong,” said ahead of the election, “It's funny no one's picked up on the Stephen Miller connection. I knew him very well when I was at Duke. But I am kind of glad no one's talked about this because I don't want to harm Trump."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">For the record, Miller has said the two were merely members of the same club and that they fell out of touch after graduation.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">14. Another white nationalist is also a big fan, as is David Duke.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In a piece titled “Stephen Miller is David Duke’s Favorite Jew,” Forward picks up recent tweets from the former Klansman applauding Miller. “I can’t help it, I like this guy,” Duke states in one message.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Jared Taylor, whose anti-black output was a favorite of racist murderer Dylann Roof, reportedly also namechecked Miller. The Washington Post points to a post by Taylor which notes that Trump’s lack of white racial consciousness is helped by “men close to him — Steve Bannon, Jeff Sessions, Stephen Miller — who may have a clearer understanding of race, and their influence could grow.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">15. He worked for noted racist Jeff Sessions.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">After a stint working for Michelle Bachmann, Miller took a communications job with Senator Jeff Sessions in 2009. Sessions' office—where Miller could could help the racist, xenophobic sausage get made—helped elevate his visibility among conservatives, though initially, he was known mostly for his emails (see #16).</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Politico notes the up-and-comer played a pivotal role in crushing the Gang of Eight’s 2013 bipartisan immigration bill. The outlet points out that “when the bill passed the Senate...Miller literally wrote the 23-page handbook that House members were given on how to fight the deal.” As you may already know, after being deemed too racist for the federal bench in the 1980s, Sessions was judged perfectly racist for the Trump administration and confirmed attorney general.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">16. As you might imagine, he is a super annoying emailer.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A recent New York Times article describes Miller as “a man whose emails were, until recently, considered spam by many of his Republican peers.” The Times goes on to say:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As a top aide to Mr. Sessions, the conservative Alabama senator, Mr. Miller dispatched dozens and dozens of bombastic emails to congressional staff members and reporters in early 2013 when the Senate was considering a big bipartisan immigration overhaul. Mr. Miller slammed the evils of “foreign labor” and pushed around nasty news articles on proponents of compromise, like Senator Marco Rubio of Florida. One exhausted Senate staff member, forwarding a Miller-gram to a reporter at the time, wrote: “His latest. And it’s only 11:45 a.m.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">17. On the campaign trail, he warmed up the crowds for Trump.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Miller’s job was to toss small bits of red meat for the audience to gnaw on while they waited for Trump to hit the stage and throw them the rest of the bloody carcass. In the video below, shot at a rally in Wisconsin, he rails against “foreign workers,” telling the audience they’re “competing against you, and your children, and your grandchildren, and your brothers, and sisters and neighbors for jobs. Low-wage foreign workers being brought in to take your place at less pay.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">He talks about “uncontrolled migration from the Middle East,” and “illegal immigrants being arrested...for the most heinous crimes imaginable,” and hails Trump as the candidate “who will protect our cities, who will protect our communities, who will save our families.”&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">18. He wrote Trump’s RNC and 'America First' inauguration speeches.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Miller is reportedly responsible for penning Trump’s ominous RNC speech, in which he declared, “Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">While there was the option of going lighter for the inauguration—some presidents do not use the minutes after being sworn in to share a vision of the country as a dystopian hellscape—Miller stuck with fearmongering:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation; an education system, flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of knowledge; and the crime and gangs and drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential. This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">19. He’s considered the brain behind the travel ban.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Though he denies it, Miller is believed to have written a significant portion of the travel ban, with some help from Steve Bannon and congressional aides sworn to contractual secrecy. Multiple sources have reported that the Steves have refused to consult with other agencies that might have necessary insights or legal expertise, leading to disastrous rollouts. In order to counter the negative press around the Muslim ban (we’re calling it what Trump calls it, because that’s what it is), Miller was sent on a Sunday morning press tour last weekend.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">20. Infamous quotes from&nbsp; Miller’s tour&nbsp; of the Sunday morning shows last weekend.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Our opponents, the media and the whole world will soon see as we begin to take further actions that the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“The president’s powers...represent the apex of executive authority.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“We will have unquestioned military strength beyond anything anybody can imagine.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“That’s the story we should be talking about and I’m prepared to go on any show anywhere anytime and repeat it and say the president of the United States is correct 100 percent.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">21. His family is mostly not proud of him.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Buzzfeed News rounded up posts from Miller’s extended family, who seem not particularly keen on his new role. His mother’s brother, David Glosser, posted on the wall of a local media outlet, “With all familial affection I wish Stephen career success and personal happiness; however I cannot endorse his political preferences. I am not a Trump supporter.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Glosser's letter, which is fairly long, goes on from there:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Mr. Trump is trying to sell you something...He sells fear of immigrants, contempt of our daughters, sisters, and wives, and sows discord and anger. He knows the dictator’s disgraceful sales tricks of challenging the integrity of democratic elections, he finds an unpopular outside group to blame our troubles on, cooks up false electoral fraud theories if he doesn’t get his way, threatens and bullies his opponents, and tells us that he is the only one that can lead the nation ahead. He’s trying to sell you something, and it’s not a good product. For the first time in my memory a major American political party’s presidential candidate has proposed that laws and regulations be established solely on the basis of a person’s religion and ethnic background. The legitimization of this as a basis of serious political discussion is a terrible step into darkness. Remember, what goes around comes around. If today it’s “them,” then tomorrow it may be you.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Finally, my nephew and I must both reflect long and hard on one awful truth. If in the early 20th century the USA had built a wall against poor desperate ignorant immigrants of a different religion, like the Glossers, all of us would have gone up the crematoria chimneys with the other six million kinsmen whom we can never know.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Another family member, commenting on the post, wrote, “At least he [Miller] doesn’t share our last name.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">intercept</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">FACING A NATION gripped by fear and bigotry and unwilling to welcome large numbers of Jewish refugees fleeing violence in Europe, the late William Rosenwald, heir to the founder of Sears, Roebuck & Company department store fortune, poured his money and energy into welcoming them, founding the National Refugee Service in 1939.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Today his daughter Nina is a driving force behind another campaign: keeping Muslims fleeing violence in the Middle East from entering the Western world.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Rosenwald is the founder, president, and primary benefactor of the Gatestone Institute, one of the loudest groups agitating against Muslim migration. Her foundation has also generously funded far-right voices that have opposed accepting refugees, including Robert Spencer of the blog Jihad Watch; Frank Gaffney, an anti-Muslim activist known for spreading anti-Muslim conspiracies so far-fetched he was banned from CPAC, the popular conservative convention; and Zuhdi Jasser, a controversial Muslim pundit who argued that President Donald Trump has not done enough in vetting Muslim migrants.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Among the longtime grantees of Rosenwald’s foundations is David Horowitz, the conservative activist who mentored Stephen Miller, the White House aide behind President Donald Trump’s executive order that aimed to temporarily ban refugees and individuals from several majority-Muslim countries.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Rosenwald did not respond to a request for comment.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Gatestone Institute produces a regular drumbeat of articles and punditry. The institute claimed that the Obama administration refugee policy “exposes Americans to the jihad.” Muslim refugees in Western countries are depicted in Gatestone Institute posts as rapists and hosts of “highly infectious diseases” that threaten the health of the German people.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Rosenwald’s organization has gone so far as to call for a ban on all Muslim immigration. In a blog post published last year, Salim Mansur, a distinguished senior fellow with the Gatestone Institute, lashed out at Obama for “coddling Muslims” and praised Trump for promising on the campaign trail to ban Muslim immigrants. “Unless many Muslims can change demonstrably to accept and abide by the social and political norms of American democracy,” Mansur wrote, “they may be excluded from entering the United States as immigrants.” A more recent post from this year, from a writer named Nonie Darwish, argues that “citizens from Islamic nations” should be allowed into the U.S. “only when the war on Islamic terrorism is won and when Islamic governments prove to the world that they have fundamentally changed.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Many Trump allies have tried to deflect accusations of racism by arguing that the executive order temporarily banning individuals from the seven majority-Muslim countries was a decision made solely because the previous administration targeted these countries for additional security vetting.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But Gatestone Institute has no illusions about the religious motivations behind the ban. “Muslims need to know that the world does indeed have a justifiable and legitimate concern about Islam and actions done in the name of Islam by Muslims,” wrote Nonie Darwish, explaining her support of the executive order, in a piece for the Gatestone Institute.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Journalist Max Blumenthal, writing in The Nation, has called Rosenwald the “Sugar Mama of Anti-Muslim Hate.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Foundation disclosures show that Rosenwald, through a foundation called the Abstraction Fund, has donated more than $10.8 million from 2010 through 2015 to groups identified by the Council on American-Islamic Relations as “Islamophobic.” Through two other foundations controlled by Rosenwald and her family — including one named after her father — she has donated an additional $2.8 million to anti-Muslim activists since 2001.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/12/trumps-newest-senior-adviser-seen-ally-white-nationalists</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">mj jh</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Donald Trump's newest pick to be a senior adviser in the White House has long ties to a prominent white nationalist, who sees him as an ally of the movement.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Stephen Miller, a top aide to Trump's presidential campaign, will serve as a senior White House adviser for policy, Trump's transition team announced Tuesday. Miller is a former staffer for the nativist Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), now Trump's nominee for attorney general. The announcement of Miller's new role drew praise from white nationalist leader Richard Spencer. "Stephen is a highly competent and tough individual," Spencer, who famously coined the term "alt-right" to describe the insurgent right-wing movement that has attracted white nationalists and supremacists, told Mother Jones on Wednesday. "So I have no doubt that he will do a great job."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Spencer and Miller first came to know each other in the late 2000s as students at Duke University, where they both belonged to the Duke Conservative Union. Miller earned notice for standing up for white lacrosse players falsely accused in 2006 of gang raping a black woman. Spencer also defended the Duke lacrosse players, writing about the case for Pat Buchanan's American Conservative, which later hired him as an editor.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Spencer told me that at Duke, Miller helped him with fundraising and promotion for an on-campus debate on immigration policy that Spencer organized in 2007, featuring influential white nationalist Peter Brimelow. Another former member of the Duke Conservative Union confirms that Miller and Spencer worked together on the event. At DCU meetings, according to a past president of the group, Miller denounced multiculturalism and expressed concerns that immigrants from non-European countries were not assimilating.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"I knew [Miller] very well when I was at Duke," Spencer told me when I visited himat his home in Whitefish, Montana, a few weeks before the election. "But I am kind of glad no one's talked about this, because I don't want to harm Trump."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Miller wrote about two dozen columns for the Duke Chronicle, and his articles assailed multiculturalism (which he called "segregation") and paid family leave (which he said results in men getting laid off). He also denied there was systematic racism (which he dubbed "racial paranoia").</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">When contacted by Mother Jones in October, Miller did not respond on the record to specific questions about his activities with the DCU or his views on race and immigration, but he denied ever being close to Spencer. "I have absolutely no relationship with Mr. Spencer," he said in an email that month. "I completely repudiate his views, and his claims are 100 percent false."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Before joining the Trump campaign last year, Miller, who is 30, served as Sessions' chief of communications. "Those who worked with them say that Sessions and Miller had a 'mind meld,'" Julia Ioffe wrote in a June Politico profile of Miller. Sessions and Miller worked closely in opposing the Supreme Court confirmation of Sonia Sotomayor, who Sessions implied might not be impartial due to her Hispanic heritage. In 2014, after the Senate had passed a bipartisan deal on comprehensive immigration reform, Sessions helped kill it in the House by distributing anti-immigration figures and talking points that were written by Miller.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">During the campaign, Miller, as a senior adviser to Trump, warmed up crowds at Trump rallies with fiery, populist speeches drawing from a nativist playbook. "We're going to build that wall high and we're going to build it tall," he proclaimed at a Trump event in Dallas in June. "We're going to build that wall, and we're going to build it out of love. We're going to build it out of love for every family who wants to raise their kids in safety and peace…We're building it out of love for America and Americans of all backgrounds."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Spencer told me on Wednesday that Miller "is much tougher than any cuck"—the alt-right smear used for mainstream conservatives. He expressed hope that Miller and Trump would build a border wall, crack down on illegal immigration, and further restrict legal immigration as well. Miller "is not alt-right or a white nationalist or an identitarian," Spencer said. But he added, "Could Miller and Trump do good things for white Americans? The answer is yes."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">mentor?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">bs</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.vdare.com/posts/trump-wordsmith-stephen-miller-richard-spencer-and-me-and-peter-laufer</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Daily Beast has a piece recycling various smears of the reported speechwriter for Donald Trump’s January 20 Inauguration Address: The Troublemaker Behind Donald Trump’s Words–Over the past year, Stephen Miller has risen from campaign hypeman to a critical policy aide inside the nascent Trump administration, by Tim Mak, January 19, 2017.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Some of it turns on the amazing coincidence that Miller was at Duke University at the same time as Alt Right superstar Richard Spencer–and</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">the two of them had worked to bring white-nationalist writer Peter Brimelow to campus together, something first reported by Mother Jones</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This is obviously going to become one of those echo-chambered factoids that constitute Leftist political journalism. I used to ignore this sort of thing, but I’ve found that mud sticks, so I suppose I should try to insert into the record that (1) I’m not a “white nationalist,” as painfully explained for example here; (2) the meeting at Duke was actually not a Klan rally but a debate, that’s a D-E-B-A-T-E, between me and and irreproachably liberal journalist Peter Laufer (who I see is now a professor of journalism at the University of Oregon).</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Why did Mak and the other Leftist hacks he ripped off eliminate poor Laufer from this world-historic occasion? Why do we call them “The Lying Press”?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/06/stephen-miller-donald-trump-2016-policy-adviser-jeff-sessions-213992</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Before Donald Trump took the stage in Dallas on a June evening, a string of warm-up acts—mostly local politicians and conservative personalities—took their turns addressing the crowd. A local talk-radio host growled that if any of the other 16 Republican contenders would have been fine soldiers in the fight to advance the evangelical agenda, “then Donald Trump is an M1 Abrams tank in that fight.” The crowd whooped and cheered. Then came the last salvo before the Trump tank rolled onstage: a svelte young man dressed in a thin-lapelled suit with a pocket square, and a hairline receding to reveal a strong, luminous forehead. Please give a big Texas welcome, announced a voice in the darkness, to senior policy adviser to Donald Trump, Steve Miller!</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“How’s everybody in Texas doing today?” Miller said, grinning and flashing a peace sign as men in the crowd bellowed “Steeeeeve!” Miller has been warming up the crowd at pretty much every Trump rally since March, with fiery speeches full of conspiratorial populism delivered with a nearly immobile face. This time, he began with Hillary Clinton. “In recent days, I’m sure you’ve seen Hillary Clinton step up her attacks on Donald Trump,” he intoned, and then closed his eyes and nodded, savoring the crowd’s boos. “And you’ve seen all the usual special interests, all the special interests step up their attacks on Donald Trump, too. And the one thing, the one thing that aaalllll these groups have in common is that they run the show now, and they want to make sure they run the show forever.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The point, as Miller would lay it out in Dallas and has laid out countless times before, is that there is a vast conspiracy that blurs together all wings of the American political spectrum in its quest to keep the American masses down. “That’s what this all comes down to,” Miller said, picking up steam and poking the air with his index finger. “Everybody who stands against Donald Trump are the people who have been running the country into the ground, who have been controlling the levers of power. They’re the people who are responsible for our open borders, for our shrinking middle class, for our terrible trade deals.” His voice stiffly added decibels. “Everything that is wrong with this country today, the people who are opposed to Donald Trump are responsible for!”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Trump had been coming under fire for his response to the Orlando shooting, and that night in Dallas Miller pivoted from whipping up fear and loathing to whipping up fear and loathing and then calling it love. As the crowd began to chant “Build the wall!” a grinning Miller explained. “We’re going to build that wall high and we’re going to build it tall,” he said. “We’re going to build that wall, and we’re going to build it out of love. We’re going to build it out of love for every family who wants to raise their kids in safety and peace … We’re building it out of love for America and Americans of all backgrounds.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Who is Stephen Miller?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Donald Trump’s policy adviser and resident ideologue warms up the crowd at Trump’s rallies.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Miller is 30 years old, and in some ways a quintessential member of the Trump 2016 menagerie: an obscure character suddenly elevated to a national role by dint of hard work, loyalty and the boss’s favor. He’s often overshadowed by the campaign’s more flamboyant figures, even as he’s begun appearing on CNN and Fox to defend Trump and explain his policies in strikingly complete and adamant sentences. But among this roster of political outsiders, Miller stands out, especially for people who understand the new forces afoot in Republican politics. He's deeply connected to some of the most powerful insurgent threads in the Washington GOP, most notably Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions and the Breitbart media machine. As an aide on Capitol Hill, he was a behind-the-scenes architect of the successful effort to kill comprehensive immigration reform in 2014. And while it’s hard to gauge how much Trump is amenable to influence by anyone—at least, by anyone that he didn’t beget—there is no question that Miller is deep, and serious, on the one question that most drives Trump's unlikely campaign.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Miller’s talent for combining operational zeal with the ability to effectively frame an idea into one devastating laser beam made him a prized Sessions lieutenant in Washington. “When it comes to issues and messaging and policy, there isn’t anybody else that I’ve known that would be as valuable to a presidential campaign as he,” Sessions told me. “Maybe other than Karl Rove.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“When it comes to issues and messaging and policy, there isn’t anybody else that I’ve known that would be as valuable to a presidential campaign as he,” Sessions told me. “Maybe other than Karl Rove.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But Miller also cuts a deeply unsettling figure, even to many in his own party. His nine-year career working for some of the most politically fringe figures on the Hill—he also worked for Michele Bachmann and helped David Brat in his primary defeat of Eric Cantor—was preceded by a trail of writings and provocations that go all the way back to high school, one that has raised the eyebrows of even conservative Republicans.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">There is something eerily vintage about Miller’s stump speeches. The combination of their substance—vilifying immigrants as killers, the promise of nativist glory days ahead—and their delivery with a calm face around a loud, droning mouth, slicked-back hair and sharp suit, floridly invoking powerful cabals against the people: All of it harks back to an earlier time. It’s as if the video should be in black and white, and the microphone in front of Miller an antique, metallic affair. This is an image Miller assiduously cultivates, smoking like a chimney and dressing in suits that earned him the nickname “Mad Men” on the Hill. “You almost want to put him in a previous era,” says Marcus Peacock, who worked with Miller on the Senate Budget Committee.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">From left to right: Wayne Barrett, Michael D’Antonio, Harry Hurt III, Gwenda Blair and Timothy L. O’Brien. | Jesse Dittmar for Politico Magazine</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Trumpology: A Master Class</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">By SUSAN B. GLASSER and MICHAEL KRUSE</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Miller had always existed at the political margins, but Trump’s rise has allowed him to advance to the vanguard, and he clearly enjoys it. He grins at the podium, he savors the crowd’s reactions, even if they periodically boo him for not turning the stage over to Trump fast enough. “All the anger right underneath the surface just waiting to come through, about what I don’t know,” says a former staffer with the Republican leadership on the Hill. “I’ve seen the videos of him getting the crowd fired up. People that knew him when he was on the Hill, I don’t know how to describe the reactions people had to the videos of him. Maybe creeped out a little bit? Like, what’s going to happen when this guy gets the power?” He pauses as a thought dawns on him. “Oh my God,” he says. “He’s going to find out that I spoke with you and I’m going to end up in a camp somewhere.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">When I spoke to Miller, he was in New York, helping coordinate policy for the Republican convention and had just gotten off a call with Trump as he took off from Scotland. On the phone, he speaks with only slightly less bombast than on the stump. “I’m really, really cognizant of how blessed I am to even have the opportunity, and the burden of that never ceases to weigh on me,” he said when I asked him about his warm-up speeches. “I take the responsibility of it with the utmost seriousness. It is an extraordinary privilege. Getting a chance to see good, decent, patriotic people who just want to have self-determination is something for which I will be grateful for the rest of my life.” (He also made sure to stipulate, unprompted, that, “If anybody said anything really, really heinous about me, it’s not true.” When I laughed, he explained that he was serious. “I like to think of myself as a genuinely good person,” he explained.)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Like a lot of things on the Trump campaign, it’s not really clear how this happened. One day ahead of the Florida primary, Miller was telling Trump all about his experience fighting Marco Rubio on immigration reform, Trump told him to take it to the media and the stage, and that was that. Miller was now the warm-up act, and spokeswoman Hope Hicks and erstwhile campaign manager Corey Lewandowski just had to deal with it.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Paul Manafort, right, and Stephen Miller appear on stage ahead of Trump's speech on June 22 in New York.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Paul Manafort, right, and Stephen Miller appear on stage ahead of Trump's speech on June 22 in New York. | AP Photo</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Before that, Miller was a senior policy adviser, an indeterminate title that sat him somewhere in the background with Sam Clovis, the walrus of a man who came up with the Trump economic program that the conservative Tax Foundation said would add $10 trillion to the U.S. deficit. Clovis and Miller churn out white papers for a boss that doesn’t seem to ever read them. Clovis occasionally goes on TV—“Either they want to get behind the presumptive nominee,” Clovis said of the GOP establishment on CNN, “if they can't do that, then just shut the hell up”—but most of the time he’s back in his home state of Iowa.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As senior policy adviser, Miller’s role is a series of paradoxes. But he shrewdly never made it clear where his loyalties lay, making sure to curry favor with both Lewandowski and campaign chair Paul Manafort, meaning neither knew what to do with him. He is often the face of the Trump campaign, warming up the crowds and throwing bombs in his name on television. He recently accused Neera Tanden, an outside adviser for the Clinton campaign, of being a fake feminist for not opposing Muslim immigration into the U.S. even though Muslims, according to Miller, bring with them female genital mutilation. “You want to talk about women’s issues?” he hectored. “Here’s something we should be talking about!”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“What’s the news?” he asked. I told him Lewandowski had just been let go. There was silence on the other end of the line.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But Miller is not always on the Trump jet, and for a while Trump didn’t seem to know who he was. Sometimes he attends key policy meetings, like a recent meeting of top Trump lieutenants and a representative of the Koch brothers, and sometimes he is missing, like he was from a rare June meeting with Speaker Paul Ryan’s staff. And sometimes he is simply tasked with making sure the Uber gets where it needs to go. At first, the Trump campaign declined to make Miller available for the story, but when news broke that Lewandowski was fired, I texted Miller to ask if this would change the campaign’s calculus of not letting me talk to him. Within a minute my phone rang. It was Miller.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“What’s the news?” he asked.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">I told him Lewandowski had just been let go. There was silence on the other end of the line.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">lede_worthy_160620_lewandowski_2_gty_1160.jpg</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Is Lewandowski’s Firing the Start of Trump’s Rebranding?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">By JEFF GREENFIELD</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Interesting that you would be the one to tell me that,” he finally said, recovering the gravitas of his Serious Adult Voice. “Let me call you back. I have a lot to learn and discover in the next couple hours.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Miller was hired by Lewandowski from the office of Jeff Sessions, one of the most conservative and nativist members of the U.S. Senate. Sessions, who famously donned a Make America Great Again hat at Trump rally in Mobile back in August 2015, is still the only sitting senator to endorse Trump—which he did in February, a couple weeks after Miller jumped ship.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In the Senate, Sessions was often Trump before Trump was Trump. He was an early advocate of a bigger, better, taller border fence. He has spoken for years about “Islamic extremism.” In 2009, as the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, he went after Sonia Sotomayor during her Supreme Court nomination hearings with a line of attack that now sounds familiar. “You have evidenced, I think it's quite clear, a philosophy of the law that suggests that the judge's background and experiences can and should—even should and naturally will impact their decision,” Sessions said, adding that it was antithetical “to the American ideal.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In 2014, in Sessions’ single-most influential act, he helped kill the bipartisan Senate deal on comprehensive immigration reform in the House. His office distributed a handbook full of figures, suggested responses to dissenters and the press, and roof-raising rhetoric. (“Donors don’t win elections; voters win elections. And the voters need our help.”) The handbook was written by Stephen Miller.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“We had been working on the ideas in it for months, and Stephen put it in the handbook in a very quick time in a very cogent fashion,” Sessions told me. “It was very timely and it impacted the outcome of the vote.” Miller was also at Sessions’ side as his communications guru through some of his most notable battles, including the Sotomayor hearing. “I just routinely never went to the microphone outside the hearing before talking to him about what the issue was,” Sessions says.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Miller made a reputation for himself outside of the Sessions office, too. He spammed reporters’ inboxes with what they called “stream-of-consciousness press releases” at all hours.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Miller quickly rose through the ranks of the Senate office to become the senator’s chief of communications. Those who worked with them say Sessions and Miller had a “mind meld.” Within a short period of time, Miller mastered Sessions’ voice. “It’s very rare that you’ll find a Senate staffer that can capture their member’s voice,” says Rick Dearborn, who is still Sessions’ chief of staff. “But Stephen listened and was able to capture his voice. He was able to anticipate what he needed for an interview or a speech.” The senator and Miller were often in different buildings, but Peacock, who worked in Sessions’ office with Miller, says that being around Miller was “like having the senator right there.” “The two of them just really connect, in their worldview especially,” says Garrett Murch, who still works for Sessions.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Miller made a reputation for himself outside of Sessions' office, too. He spammed reporters’ inboxes with what they called “stream-of-consciousness press releases” at all hours. He called them up to deliver long and winding rants, though he was obsequiously gracious with the female reporters. “He was notorious for late Friday night diatribes,” says the former Senate leadership staffer. After Miller would send one out to his entire press list, the former staffer says, “I would get like half a dozen forwards with ‘FYI’ written on them. Like, just in case you wanted to read 10,000 words about the budget at six o’clock on a Friday.” Miller also seemed to come with a strange paper trail. “There were rumors that spread around that he wrote these columns at Duke that really walked a fine line on racial issues, to put it mildly,” the former staffer says. “I’ve stood in a lot of hallway huddles where the talk was, ‘My God, if you look at what he wrote in college … ’”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">When Miller became communications chief in Sessions’ office at 28, he had a staff of three working for him and he was known as a nurturing but exacting boss. “He was a tough person to work for, but fair,” says Peacock. “He expected a lot out of his staff.” There was yelling and the occasional expletive when he deemed the “work product” not up to snuff, and others have noted a paranoid volatility about Miller. “He goes from 0 to 100 with a snap of the fingers,” says the former leadership staffer. “He’s constantly seeing these conspiracies against him when someone’s probably just asking him a question.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan meets with Republican committee members, Representatives Frank Guinta, Bill Flores, Stephen Miller, and Sen. Jeff Sessions, before unveiling the 2013 budget plan on Capitol Hill on March 20, 2012.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan meets with Republican committee members, Representatives Frank Guinta, Bill Flores, Stephen Miller, and Sen. Jeff Sessions, before unveiling the 2013 budget plan on Capitol Hill on March 20, 2012. | Getty</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“He’s tenacious,” says Dearborn. “He’s like a dog with a bone.” Quickly correcting himself, Dearborn adds, “But not crazed, there’s always purpose to it ... His manner is a little different.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As soon as Miller left for the Trump campaign, the Sessions office mysteriously stopped sending out stream-of-consciousness press alerts. “I left the office so quickly,” Miller laments. “I wanted to put together a little book of the best emails I ever sent. I spent hours and hours of research on those.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Miller was crucial to Sessions on many controversial issues—the debt ceiling, the budget—but the thing he was most passionate about was immigration. “Stephen was very instrumental in helping [Sessions] articulate his beliefs on immigration,” says Peacock. “He’s not a hired gun. He has a good amount of this in his bones.” Miller was a true believer. “You don’t stay with someone for a long period of time on the Hill if you don’t share your worldview,” says Dearborn. And Miller stayed on for nearly seven years.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">141110_sessions_border_gty.jpg</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Sessions in 2014: “No Surrender on Immigration”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">By SEN. JEFF SESSIONS</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The resonance among Sessions, Miller, and Trump on immigration began in the senator’s office. “I see some of the things he’s saying now are very similar to the proposals that members like Sessions, Vitter, and others made,” says Luke Bolar, who was communications director for Louisiana Senator David Vitter and worked with Miller on scuttling comprehensive immigration reform. “For instance, sanctuary cities, remittances.” Miller made contact with the family of Kate Steinle, the young woman who was gunned down in 2015 by an illegal immigrant in San Francisco, a sanctuary city. He brought her father, Jim, to testify in the Senate as it considered a bill on ending the sanctuary city designation. Miller constantly invokes Steinle in his stump speeches and his television appearances as evidence of the clear and present danger posed by unchecked immigration. (Steinle’s brother, however, recently slammed the Trump campaign for using Kate’s death to score political points.) Miller was also instrumental in forming relationships with the National Border Patrol Council and Leo Perrero, a laid-off Disney worker who was forced to train his foreign replacement and who has since become an advocate against corporate H-1B visa abuse. Both the council and Perrero were invited by Sessions' office to testify in the Senate. And after Miller joined the campaign, both of them endorsed Trump.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“I’M IN HEAVEN!” Ann Coulter tweeted when it was announced in late January that Trump had hired Miller, whom Coulter called “Sessions’ brain trust.” The hire, Coulter felt, offered a sign that Trump was “not backing down on immigration.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">How did Stephen Miller come to occupy such an extreme position on immigration? Strangely, it was his experience coming of age in a liberal Jewish family in liberal Santa Monica, the Berkeley of Southern California. “I think it was growing up in California, he saw the role that mass migration played turning a red state blue,” says one former Senate colleague. “He was fearful that that would happen to the rest of the country.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Miller was born into a family of lawyers and salesmen, two professions he never pursued but clearly has in him. His parents were Democrats, but Miller was pulled in a different direction early, converted to the conservative cause by a copy of National Rifle Association CEO Wayne LaPierre’s 1994 book, Guns, Crime, and Freedom, a blistering takedown of the arguments for gun control.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Miller was an ardent, dewy-eyed patriot, which often led him to surprising conclusions. Shortly after graduating high school, Miller penned a column for a Christian publication called “My Dream for the End of Racism.” “The U.S. abolished slavery in 90 years, a time span far shorter than that of other nations, and indeed we acquired emancipation through our bloodiest, most gruesome war,” he wrote. “This no doubt due to the unique status of our beloved nation as being one founded on the principle of equality.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The 9/11 attacks hit when Miller was a junior at Santa Monica High School. The event shocked him to his core and left him feeling isolated in his patriotism, lost in a sea of peacenik liberalism. “During that dreadful time of national tragedy, anti-Americanism had spread all over the school like a rash,” he reminisced in a column called “How I Changed My Left-Wing High School.” “The co-principal broadcasted his doubts about the morality of the air strikes against the Taliban to the entire school via the PA system. One teacher even dragged the American flag across the floor as we were sending off brave young men to risk their lives for it." Miller describes contacting conservative talk radio personality Larry Elder, and going on his show to complain about this school. Thus began a cycle that would repeat itself over and over in high school and college: Miller would clash with school administrators over a perceived leftist conspiracy—the school not saying the Pledge of Allegiance, say—then escalate the conflict by taking it to a conservative talk show, infuriating the administrators but yielding a compromise in Miller’s favor. After his appeal to Elder, for instance, the Pledge of Allegiance would now be said twice a week, though that was still not enough for Miller. “Policy dictates it should be said every day,” he wrote in a local paper.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The pattern repeated itself often enough that Miller wore it as a badge of honor. “Stephen Miller, 17 years old, just graduated from Santa Monica High School,” the bio under his column read. “Since his Junior year in High School, he has been a guest on local and national radio over thirty times, primarily as an advocate for freedom in education.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">These columns and complaints to conservative talk radio were his first foray into political activism, voicing and defending opinions that strongly resemble those he advocates today. In a column called “Political Correctness Out of Control,” he laid out a litany of complaints against his high school’s “liberal indoctrination.” “I noticed a number of students lacked basic English skills,” he wrote, and complained that the school making announcements in Spanish and English holds the Hispanic students back. He took issue with the school making condoms available—“Legally speaking, sex between minors is statutory rape. Not to mention 14-year-olds are a little young to be having sex regardless of the law.” Worse, the school encouraged students to embrace their homosexuality. “And just in case your son or daughter decides at their tender age that they are gay, we have a club on campus that will gladly help foster their homosexuality,” he wrote. “Do they notify parents if their teenagers have chosen an alternate lifestyle? Of course not.” The way the school taught American history, focusing too much on the bad and not enough on the heroic, also insulted Miller’s patriotism. Should American soldiers have not killed Indians or anyone else? Miller asked, rhetorically. “Or, better yet, we could have lived with the Indians, learning how to finger paint and make tepees, excusing their scalping of frontiersmen as part of their culture,” Miller griped.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Combine that with the pacifist response of the school to 9/11 and teachers’ critiques of the war in Afghanistan, and, Miller concluded, “Osama Bin Laden would feel very welcome at Santa Monica High School.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">At Duke, Miller's provocations found a new and bigger audience. He got so involved in planning an elaborate 9/11 memorial—a sea of 2,997 flags, one for each victim, lit up by a lamp and guarded by a hired police officer; a choir singing the anthem; a screening of “Flight 93”; a speech from the Veterans of Foreign Wars—that he skipped his LSAT exam. He wrote a column for a conservative outlet in which he detailed his fight with the university for funding, which he admits he later received. He also invited David Horowitz, the Southern Californian arch-conservative and founder of Students for Academic Freedom, to speak on campus. Miller considers Horowitz a mentor; the older man veered from a radically leftist upbringing into radical conservatism, and over the years has used campus newspapers as a forum for his button-pushing crusades on racial issues and Islamic terrorism. Miller first met Horowitz as a teenager. He invited him to speak at Santa Monica High School, then claimed the school did not want to authorize the event, then documented the injustice in Horowitz's publication, FrontPage Magazine. When Miller felt Duke was not providing enough support for a Horowitz speaking engagement on campus, Miller told people Horowitz had been banned from speaking at Duke. The ban appalled conservatives, many of whom complained to university administrators—even though Horowitz had not been banned: Horowitz did speak and the event was carried live on C-SPAN. Miller warmed up the crowd for him, wryly announcing the name of each department that didn’t contribute funds to the event.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“I’ve stood in a lot of hallway huddles where the talk was, ‘My God, if you look at what he wrote in college…’”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“The reality was that I was attending college on a campus where many professors had radical beliefs and engaged in outrageous behavior,” Miller says of his college years. His goal then was to be “a voice of justice and reason.” His microphone was a biweekly column in the Duke newspaper called “Miller Time,” one that would be whispered about in Senate hallways years later. He used the column and his position as the president of the Duke chapter of Horowitz’s Students for Academic Freedom to endorse students running for student government. He railed against Duke’s smoking ban and the "unrelenting health fascists” behind it. (Smoking, he concluded, has not been proven to be unhealthy. “Indeed, it is safer for college kids to smoke than to drive.”)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But mostly he used the column as a lightning rod, a way to court angry reaction and put himself at the center of major campus controversies. He wrote that interacting with the population outside the campus was overrated. “Durham isn't a petting zoo,” he chided. “The residents won't get lonely or irritable if we don't play with them.” He was a strong supporter of the war in Iraq and called Ted Kennedy a “traitor” for criticizing American use of torture. He went after professors for being registered Democrats. He blamed 9/11 on “politically correct domestic security” and unenforced immigration laws. He wrote about black students’ racial “paranoia” and their mistaken understanding of where true racism resides. The problem is not rich, conservative white people, he wrote. It’s “Democrats [who] continue to fuel the destructive vision of a powerful, racist white oppressor from which they need to protect black voters in order to keep their lock on that vote.” He wrote that “worshipping at the altar of multiculturalism” undermines American culture and ignores the fact “we have shared with the world the cultural value of individualism and liberty, a value rooted in our unique and glorious history of settlers, pioneers and frontiersman [sic].” Although he identified himself as “a practicing Jew,” he lamented the “War on Christmas,” saying “you'd probably find more Christmas decorations at your local mosque.” Maya Angelou, in Miller’s mind, was “a leftist” full of “racial paranoia” who shouldn’t be allowed to give the opening address at the start of the school year. In a column called “Sorry, Feminists,” he wrote that the gender pay gap was actually because of women working fewer hours and choosing lower-paying professions. “Women already have equal rights in this country,” he wrote. “Sorry, feminists. Hate to break this good news to you.” (“It’s not chauvinism,” he signed off. “It’s chivalry.”)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It wasn’t just controversy for controversy’s sake; Miller was building his personal brand. “He very much knew the impact of his work, and he planned and plotted,” says an alum of the Duke Chronicle who worked with Miller. “He was very businesslike about it.” The paper was constantly running angry rebuttals to Miller’s column, like after he defended former Bush Education Secretary William Bennett, who said that the crime rate would go down if more black babies were aborted. (“The [Black Student Alliance] should be ashamed of its public evisceration of William Bennett,” wrote Miller.) “People read him, everyone knew who he was,” the alum says. “When he broke china, he went to the so-and-so alliance and apologized. He was always in a scrape like that. It smacked of architecture, like he intentionally provoked people, and it worked for him because he was making a name for himself.” Added the alum, “He very much felt like he was contributing to the Collected Writings of Stephen Miller. I think in his own mind, this would be anthologized one day.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Breitbart News Daily Stephen K. Bannon interviews Stephen Miller for SiriusXM Broadcasts' New Hampshire Primary Coverage Live From Iconic Red Arrow Diner on Feb. 8 in Manchester, New Hampshire.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Breitbart News Daily Stephen K. Bannon interviews Stephen Miller for SiriusXM Broadcasts' New Hampshire Primary Coverage Live From Iconic Red Arrow Diner on Feb. 8 in Manchester, New Hampshire. | Getty</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Miller told me the point of his columns was to “defend the idea of America,” but John Burness, who handled Duke’s public relations and frequently clashed with Miller when he was a student there, put it another way. “Part of his standing out was he put a moral tone on every issue he touched on,” he told me. “If you did not agree with him, there was something immoral about you. He defined the term sanctimonious.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Miller studied political science, but the apogee of his college career was not academic. It was a PR coup: his public defense, in the pages of the Duke Chronicle and on national television, of the Duke lacrosse players accused of rape by a black stripper. He penned several columns in their defense under titles like “Prejudice,” “Persecution,” and “Crawl to Justice.” He alleged there was indeed a racial motivation for the case: that of the radical left in going after white lacrosse players. “Being a white, male lacrosse player was all it took,” he wrote in one column. In another, titled “Racial Hypocrisy,” he wrote, “But when a black man was recently accused of raping a white Duke student at a party hosted by members of a black Duke fraternity, suddenly these great defenders of virtue fell silent.” He went on the O’Reilly Factor and the Nancy Grace Show to defend the lacrosse players, wearing a suit, a smirk, and a gold pinky ring. Even then, he was already a polished, florid speaker.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Duke lacrosse players were vindicated, and to this day Miller is still bursting with pride. “The thing that I’m proudest of is that I spoke out early and often on behalf of American legal principles in the Duke lacrosse case when it was not popular,” he told me. “I take great pride that, under enormous social and political pressure, I remained steadfast in my support for due process.” He showed his early television appearances to his Senate colleagues, and believes that he did as much as the lacrosse players’ lawyers in exonerating them.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The name he made for himself in fighting the university establishment, through his column and in inviting Horowitz to speak, would later reap benefits. It was Horowitz who, in 2009, would recommend Miller to his old friend, Jeff Sessions.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In 2014, during the height of the immigration debate, Tucker Carlson was having some bad thoughts. “I was having all kinds of heretical thoughts,” Carlson, who founded the conservative news site the Daily Caller, recalls. “I was upset about the war in Iraq and income inequality. I don’t know how Miller knew I had those thoughts, they were just thoughts I had in the shower.” And yet, Miller sensed an ally and reached out to Carlson. “He called me up and said, ‘Why don’t you have breakfast with Sessions? I think you’d like him,’” Carlson says.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">He did, and Miller sat in on the meeting. But unlike most young staffers, Carlson recalls, “Miller felt totally free to pipe up and add his thoughts, in a notably self-confident way. I was impressed.” He came away liking both the men and convinced by their ideology, which Carlson described as “nationalist.” (When I asked him if today he too identifies as a nationalist, Carlson said, “of course.”) The Daily Caller quickly became one of Miller’s favorite outlets. He constantly called in tips and made himself available, and the Daily Caller ran stories on immigration and trade that showed Sessions and his agenda in a positive light.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Miller was also spreading Sessions’ gospel on immigration and trade by courting other influential conservative voices—Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham, Lou Dobbs, and Andrew Breitbart before his sudden death in 2012. When Breitbart launched his website, Miller organized a meeting for him with congressional staffers. (Breitbart told Miller he’d first heard of him during the Duke lacrosse scandal.)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Miller is providing the intellectual architecture for an insurgency against the Republican party.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">To the people who worked with him then, it’s no surprise that Miller ended up on the Trump campaign. “Whether the issue was trade or immigration or radical Islam, for many years before Donald Trump came on the scene, Senator Sessions was the leader of the movement and Stephen was his right-hand man,” says Steve Bannon, who is now CEO of Breitbart. To Bannon and advocates of slowing down both legal and illegal immigration, Sessions’ work to kill immigration reform in 2014 was akin “to the civil rights movement in the 1960s,” Bannon told me. “It’s only happened a few times in American politics, and Sessions did it with a cadre of talented staff.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Sessions and Miller were the radical vanguard of a cause that, in the year of Trump, has grown into something bigger. “When I was in Sessions’ office, this movement for nation-state populism, the intellectual framework for that was being formed,” Miller told me. "A big part of my day was being in touch with the people who were the key players in that." He would send information blasts to a list of a couple hundred Hill staffers with data on the negative impact on immigration on wages, national security, and on what Miller refers to as “criminal aliens.” “We saw ourselves as a kind of think tank for immigration issues and linking that to the larger questions of globalism and populism,” Miller says of that time.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“You could not get where we are today with this movement if it didn’t have a center of gravity that was intellectually coherent,” says Bannon. “And I think a ton of that was done by Senator Sessions’ staff, and Stephen Miller was at the cutting edge of that.” Says Carlson: “Miller is providing the intellectual architecture for an insurgency against the Republican Party.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Even before Miller left Sessions’ office to work for Trump, and before Sessions endorsed him, there was a lot of overlap between the office and the campaign. “In my own personal time, I first got involved in forming relationships in June after they announced,” Miller says. “I was in touch with people inside the campaign as early as then. Publicly, this played out as Senator Sessions’ early support for the campaign.” Miller talked a lot to his friend, conservative political operative Sam Nunberg, who was then an adviser to Trump. “On his free time, not in any official capacity,” Nunberg clarifies. “They were a resource for us.” Though Miller and Sessions helped the Trump campaign formulate its immigration and trade policies, and despite Sessions’ now-frequent phone calls with Trump, Nunberg took pains to explain that it wasn’t a question of one influencing the other. “This is where Mr. Trump’s head was at,” Nunberg says. “The premise that you can influence him, good luck with that.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But the synergy is unmistakable. Sessions first reached out to Trump more than a decade ago, in 2005, when he heard him criticize the $1.2 billion renovation of the United Nations headquarters. Trump said he could have done it more cheaply, and Sessions had him come down to Washington to testify on the Hill. Since he became the first senator to endorse Trump, there have been rumors that he is a contender to be Trump’s vice president. He has become the chairman of Trump’s national security advisory committee, and helped craft Trump’s foreign policy speech—with Miller’s aid. When, in the wake of the Orlando shooting, Trump was roundly criticized for his proposal to ban immigration “from areas of the world when there is a proven history of terrorism against the United States,” Sessions did the rounds of the Sunday morning talk shows to explain. “The public data that we have indicate there are quite a number of countries in that region that have sent a large number of people that have become terrorists,” Sessions told Jake Tapper. He said Trump simply wanted to “slow down” the flow from places with “a toxic ideology.” (“I have tremendous respect for Senator Sessions. He is a terrific person, a great leader, and I am so grateful for his support,” Trump told Newsweek.)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Miller is also in frequent touch with Sessions, and Rick Dearborn, Sessions’ chief of staff, moonlights as an adviser to the Trump campaign, helping it smooth out relationships with K Street and the Washington establishment. Dearborn is one of a couple point men whom Speaker Ryan’s staff contacts when they have questions about Trump policy. “I do a lot of interesting things when I’m on vacation,” Dearborn explains. “When I’m on vacation, I do help when I can. But I don’t want that to be in the paper.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Marco Rubio is, like, his biggest enemy,” says one Republican operative. “He just has this really vehement opposition to him.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Miller is no different. While he was still in Sessions’ office, he wasn’t just talking to Nunberg regularly; he was pursuing other Trump-related goals. He hectored people in the campaign to not only go after Jeb Bush, but to attack Rubio as well. “Marco Rubio is, like, his biggest enemy,” says one Republican operative. “He just has this really vehement opposition to him. Marco encompassed everything that’s wrong with Washington. It came from dealing with him in the Gang of Eight [immigration proposal].” (His first warm-up speech, ahead of the Florida primary, was all about the evils of Rubio.) Miller also used his Senate email to go after reporters who he felt were going easy on Rubio at Trump’s expense. He would then leak those stories of purported journalistic malfeasance to Breitbart.com, which would reliably launch them into the conservative mediasphere. Miller does not dispute this, saying, “It’s for facts against falsity.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">AP-RUBIO.jpg</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">What we got wrong about Marco Rubio</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">By MICHAEL GRUNWALD</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Breitbart is Miller’s preferred media ally. “Every movement needs a dialogue,” Miller says. “Breitbart was a big part of that.” Miller worked tirelessly to make sure the dialogue kept going, and in the right direction. “When I first joined the staff, the first email I got was from him,” says one former Breitbart reporter. “It said something like, ‘Congratulations from everyone at Sessions’ office, we look forward to working with you.’” From that day on, the day’s first email would come from Miller, highlighting inaccuracies in other media outlets’ work or suggesting avenues for investigation. He worked primarily with two reporters at Breitbart, Caroline May and Julia Hahn, constantly feeding them scoops about the Disney workers’ plight, immigration numbers and welfare fraud. He used to organize a weekly Friday happy hour for Sessions and Breitbart staffers at Union Pub, across the street from the Heritage Foundation. “They’re all really good friends,” says the former Breitbart reporter.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Breitbart was also Sessions country long before it was Trump country. “Anything that Sessions sends out, Breitbart writes up immediately,” says the former Breitbart reporter. “There was no question whatsoever. They’d send out an email saying, ‘Anyone who has five minutes, can you write this up?’ I would do it sometimes because people were overloaded and it was just regurgitating a press release into a blog post.” The reporter added, “It was their way of repaying them” for the scoops. Now that Breitbart has also thrown in for Trump, the same happens for his news releases. “They’re all in the same boat together, Sessions, Trump and Breitbart,” the reporter said. “There’s no other politician that Breitbart does that for. They go above and beyond.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">They’re all in the same boat together, Sessions, Trump, and Breitbart,” the reporter said. “There’s no other politician that Breitbart does that for. They go above and beyond.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The outlet also faithfully reports nearly everything Miller says on television. Each appearance merits a separate article, with headlines like “Stephen Miller Exposes Faux-Feminism of CNN Panel with Facts About Muslim Migration and Open Borders.” “We track this very, very closely,” Bannon explained when I asked why Miller’s television appearances get written up. “Stephen Miller is a jewel. We try to get as many of his TV things as we can. Some of them have been epic.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The truth is, the influence goes both ways. As part of his warm-up act, Miller has taken to reading from Clinton Cash, the book on Clinton family corruption by Breitbart editor-at-large Peter Schweizer. He holds up the book and reads passages from it, like a teacher reading to his really rambunctious kindergarten class. Other times, he references it as proof that “Hillary Clinton is a career criminal, folks.” “All you have to do is read Clinton Cash,” he said at a recent rally. “Man, it’ll turn your hair white.” Sections of the book also found their way into Trump’s June speech attacking Clinton for her crookedness. “The book Clinton Cash, by Peter Schweizer, documents how Bill and Hillary used the State Department to enrich their family at America’s expense,” Trump said in his June 22 speech. “She gets rich making you poor.” He then proceeded to quote directly from the book, just like Miller.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“He talks to Bannon a lot,” the Republican operative says of Miller. “It’s no surprise that Stephen is reading from Clinton Cash. It’s no surprise that so many of Trump’s speeches are about Clinton Cash.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">160609_manafort_vogel_3_gty.jpg</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Paul Manafort’s Wild and Lucrative Philippine Adventure</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">By KENNETH P. VOGEL</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Horowitz, Miller’s old mentor, also continues to be a player in this universe. In a recent column for Breitbart, he called Bill Kristol a “renegade Jew.” He too has adamant views on immigration—because of new arrivals, “there are now epidemic diseases that we didn’t have before,” he told me—and he used to organize conservative retreats at which Sessions was a frequent attendee. One of Horowitz’s pet issues, inner-city poverty as an outgrowth of Democratic political control, made it into Sessions’ Senate agenda, and, more recently, into a Trump speech. “The Democrat Party has run the school boards and the police departments and the City Councils and the mayor's offices in most of our inner cities, almost all of our inner cities,” Trump said at the Faith and Freedom Conference in June. “They have horribly failed in almost every single community.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve talked to [RNC Chairman] Reince [Preibus] about this, to Republicans, till I’m blue in the face. It’s like banging my head against a wall,” Horowitz told me. “Trump is the first Republican politician that put it into his speeches.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">AP_203213068638.jpg</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">How Trump Rebranded the GOP</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">By MICHAEL HIRSH</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Trump has become the candidate of the nationalist right, the people who had previously orbited around Sessions and his hard-core views on immigration. “A lot of people are transposing their views onto Trump, hoping that he’ll be a vessel for those views,” says Carlson. But he is convinced that, deep down, Sessions “watches in horror as the themes are mangled and misarticulated. Trump is not an articulate spokesman for these ideas at all. His favorite topic is himself.” The better spokesman, in Carlson’s view, is Miller. “I’m convinced that if you found a candidate who could articulate those view half as eloquently as Stephen, he’d win. There’s a huge market for that.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Miller, though, avers that he's a true believer in the campaign. “I want it recorded for posterity,” he told me, “that I wake up in the morning certain in the knowledge that this is an opportunity that is not going to come again.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">160626-stephen-miller-mag-ap-1160.jpg</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Stephen Miller gets into a vehicle at the Republican National Committee Headquarters on Capitol Hill in Washington on May 12. | AP Photo</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A few days before Trump gave his Clinton Cash speech, Miller warmed up the crowd for him in Las Vegas. Standing at the lectern with a bottle of Fiji water, Miller explained to the audience that this was a historic time. “Very rarely in history do people get the opportunity to vote for true, real, profound change,” he began, spinning the same themes he had used in our conversation. “I would venture to say this is an opportunity is not just a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. This is the kind of opportunity that comes once in many hundreds of years. And it’s important, it’s crucially important, that every morning we wake up, we’re cognizant of just how historic and how rare this opportunity is. ‘Cause folks, it’s not gonna come again.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Unlike Trump’s stump speeches, Miller’s speeches are actually speeches. Though he too speaks extemporaneously, Miller gives his warm-up routine a recognizable rhetorical and thematic skeleton: he alliterates, he alludes, he uses parallel structure. His warm-ups have an arc, but it’s one that stops at its apogee, leaving the crowd just hungry enough for the denouement, for “the one man who can help us” to ride in and spitball.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">With time, Miller has grown more confident on the stump. His speeches have grown more elaborate. “We have been betrayed and let down by politicians year after year after year after year after year after year,” he went on, before launching into a call-and-response. “They say, 'Oh, well, we’re going to secure the border.' Do they ever get it secure, folks?”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">I want it recorded for posterity,” Miller told me, “that I wake up in the morning certain in the knowledge that this is an opportunity that is not going to come again.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“No!” shouts the crowd. Miller closes his eyes and shakes his head.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“They say, 'Oh, well, we’re going to bring back our manufacturing jobs'; but do those jobs ever come back?”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“No!”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“They say they’re going to clean up D.C. and kick out the special interests. Do the special interests ever go?”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“No!”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">151014_dantonio_ivanka_donald_1_gty.jpg</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">THE POLITICO MAG PROFILE</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Quiet Power Behind the Trump Throne</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">By MICHAEL D'ANTONIO</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Republican presidential candidate Donald J. Trump speaks in Manchester, New Hampshire, on June 13, 2016.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">2016</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Is Trump Losing the GOP?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">By JEFF GREENFIELD</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">160609_manafort_vogel_3_gty.jpg</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">INVESTIGATION</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Paul Manafort’s Wild and Lucrative Philippine Adventure</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">By KENNETH P. VOGEL</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Trump-Contradiction-Edel.jpg</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">2016</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Donald Trump’s Greatest Self-Contradictions</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">By MICHAEL KRUSE and NOAH WEILAND</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Miller’s speeches have also gathered quite a following. Videos of them get tens of thousands of views, and Tucker Carlson’s Daily Caller sometimes adds transcripts of them along with the video. Miller is loquacious, well-spoken, intelligent, say his friends and colleagues. He is convincing. He even has two converts under his belt: his parents are now conservative Republicans, active donors in California GOP circles. I asked Miller what it feels like to give one of these speeches, to feel the energy of the crowd. “Donald Trump has said that he’s leading a movement, and that’s what I feel, that movement, that incredible energy that comes from being part of that movement,” he said. “I’m feeling the same sense of excitement as the people in the audience are about this movement. And frankly, what makes a warm-up speech work is that my enthusiasm and their enthusiasm are equal. So all of us feel at this juncture in history the potential of a fundamental change. It’s a feeling of excitement that comes from knowing that you’re part of something really special.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In Las Vegas that June night, Miller ended the speech at a fever pitch. “And to the question I have for all of you,” he began his crescendo, “I want you to shout so loud, so that everyone who betrayed you, everyone who let you down, everybody who betrayed families like the Kate Steinle family … everybody who ignored your cries and pleas for help. I want you to shout so loud that it quivers the conference tables in Washington, D.C.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A dramatic pause. A wag of the finger.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Are you prepared, folks, to elect as president a man who will put America first, last, and always!” He too is shouting now, jabbing with his finger, bouncing in his knees, his face beatific with righteous anger. His eyes are finally smiling. “Are you prepared to elect Donald J. Trump as president of these United States! Are you prepared to take back your country!” The crowd is whistling, screaming. “Are you prepared for real change on behalf of America! God bless all of you, god bless this state, and God! Bless! The United! States! Of America! Thank you!”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">And with that, Miller spins around on his heels, turning his back to the ecstatic crowd. He flashes a peace sign, and disappears into the darkness</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The 30-year-old former Jeff Sessions stafferserved as a senior policy advisor to Donald Trump’s campaign. He is most known for revving up crowds before Trump spoke at rallies. Miller helped write Trump’s immigration policies, and has worked closelywith far right news organization Breitbart. Miller began writing political columns at age 17, writing on everything from his high school’s “rampant political correctness,” Duke University’s “unrelenting health fascists,” and Maya Angelou’s “racial paranoia.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">===</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">TWO STEPHEN</font></div></div>