Meet Stephen Miller — the Last Man Standing
He has been with Trump since day one. Oh, and he probably wants to kill you
If you work with Donald Trump, you’ll likely get fired. He even starred in a reality TV show about it. If you don’t get fired, you’ll probably quit because the man who brags about sexually assaulting women is insufferable.
This isn’t my usual hyperbole. It’s a well-documented fact. He churns through minions like a ghastly, overfed orange piranha in a fish bowl.
The one exception? Stephen Miller.
Meet Stephen Miller
If you don’t know who Stephen Miller is or have blissfully erased him from your busy mind, I’m here to give you the grisly details of a man who has been the hate cult’s trusted servant since it began its assault against America in 2016.
Oh, and he probably wants to kill you. More on that later.
Miller has been Donald Trump’s faithful attack dog on immigration and white replacement theory since he started working with Trump in 2016. He remains dedicated to creating an American Transylvania through Project 2025, the massive 900-page document created by Trumplestans that acts as a manifesto for transforming the American government into a Trump Republic of hate.
He’s also the one guy who never gets fired from the Trump Reich or never leaves in disgust.
Miller is a child of immigration
Stephen Miller was born in 1985 to Michael D. Miller, a real estate developer, and Miriam Glosser Miller, whose great-grandmother came from a classic immigration background.
Miriam’s great-grandparents came from a part of the world where anti-Jewish riots erupted after the Russian Empire expanded between 1772 and 1815. Jews from its newly conquered territories had begun to migrate into the Russian interior. This led the Russian government to do a bit of ethnic cleansing by designating specific territory close to Moscow and other interior cities off limits to Jews.
Anti-Jewish sentiment remained so strong during the next century in Russian territories that a new word was invented to reflect the violence that targeted Jews: pogrom. A pogrom is a system of institutionalized violence against a segment of a nation’s population, often through the manipulation of local populations.
Imagine Haitians in Springfield, Ohio during a second Trump presidency, and you’re pretty much there in understanding the definition of the word.
From 1903 to 1906, Imperial Russia embarked on a campaign of violence against Jews in its Eastern European territories. This ultimately led to hundreds of deaths in 64 cities and 626 small towns in Ukraine, Moldova (then known as Bessarabia), and other outlying regions.
Stephen Miller’s great grandparents, Wolf Lieb Glotzer and his wife, Bessie, fled the country in a near mirror image of modern Central Americans fleeing political and cartel violence.
The two Ashkenazi Jews, speaking little to no English, came to America in 1906 on the S.S. Moltke, a German ocean liner, so that they could take shelter from ethnic violence within their new nation’s framework of opportunity.
Sadly, from this humble beginning, the final result was a 16-year-old high school kid named Stephen Miller who wrote a troubling and rambling letter in 2002 to the editor of the smallish Santa Monica Outlook that described his high school thusly in reaction to 9–11:1
“Osama bin Laden would feel very welcome at Santa Monica High School.”
When I entered Santa Monica High School in ninth grade, 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.
He then pivots to sex:
And while we are on the subject of personal accomplishment, should any student accomplish the opportunity to have sex, our school is happy to help. As district policy says: “Condoms are available to students in grades 9–12 in a manner which promotes greatest accessibility.” Problem here?
This sounds like a kid who rarely accomplished the opportunity to have sex. Anyway, go on, young Stephen:
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.
Methinks that young Stephen spied a freshman he would have liked to have wooed into his dark lair, but since he was kryptonite in a progressive school district, he had no chance. So he lashed out instead. He continues:
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. Do they notify parents if their teenagers have chosen an alternate lifestyle? Of course not.
Yikes, Stephen. I bet you were fun at parties.
The letter rambles on:
At least, one would hope, that on Veterans Day or thanksgiving students are taught about our brave US soldiers or the courageous pilgrims. But no such explanations are given. And rightly so, many misguided people would say.
After some further blathering about the free and the brave, he says:
Sadly, my school has forgotten all of this. That is why we do nothing for American holidays but everything for Mexican holidays.
(Checks calendar): ????
You can read the whole mess here. Too often, young white boys who write letters like this end up in the newspapers, their faces cloaked in hoodies, leaving behind the thoughts and prayers of hapless politicians.
Miller took out his frustrations, not on his high school, but on an entire nation.
This was a kid who yelled at Spanish-speaking kids to speak only English in his high school.
Miller’s middle school friend, Jason Islas, recalls how his friendship with Miller ended when Miller said to him2:
“I can’t be your friend anymore because you are Latino.”
Miller was 14 years old at the time. Great Grandma Bessie must have barfed in her grave.
As the television network Univision describes it:
He quickly stood out as a contentious and provocative student whose conservative and ultra-nationalist politics put him continuously at odds with teachers, administrators and students.
Univision Noticias spoke with several classmates who said Miller had few friends, none of them non-white. They said he used to make fun of the children of Latino and Asian immigrants who did not speak English well.
Natalie Flores, another student who witnessed Miller’s evolution from middle to high school, said he displayed “an intense hatred toward people of color, especially toward Latinos.” She and other students interviewed for this report recalled that Miller became angry whenever he heard students speaking Spanish in the hallways.
Like Jesus, Miller disappears from history from the age of 14 until his thirties
Well, not quite. It just seems like it.
Seventeen years after rejecting his Latino friend, Miller seemingly came out of nowhere to co-author, with Steve Bannon (he of the non-bathing persuasion), the famous inaugural address where Trump spoke of an “American carnage.”
But it wasn’t quite out of nowhere. Miller had spent those seventeen years nurturing his hatred.
He has said that his first major conservative influence was the disgraced Wayne LaPierre, the corrupt leader of the NRA who stole $4,351,231 from the NRA and was forced by a lawsuit to pay it back.3
I sort of like LaPierre for stealing from the NRA, but whatever. People gotta judge.
Miller went on to David Duke University, where he graduated with high honors.
I kid. He attended Duke University, then worked for one of the first crazies in the far-right movement, Congress Critter Michelle Bachmann. He started hanging around with the likes of Richard Spencer, who you may remember as one of America’s favorite punching bags:
He also became pals with David Horowitz, a renowned anti-immigration blowhard, and white nationalist Jared Taylor, who may have first introduced Miller to the term “Mexican invasion” during a debate that Miller arranged with a Santa Monica school board member.
According to Univision:
In a recording of the show on YouTube , Taylor is heard complaining that the U.S. government is not doing enough to halt an “invasion” by Mexican migrants.
Miller later worked for Jeff Sessions, another notorious anti-immigrant politician, when Sessions was an Alabama Senator.
The Trump Years
When Miller was a close confidant and advisor to President Trump, Sessions was named attorney general in a move that can only be described as, “Name the most terrifying person you can as Attorney General.” Aside from Stephen Miller, of course.
Sessions, during his short tenure as Attorney General, threatened Sanctuary cities with a loss of federal funding, demanded that U.S. prosecutors seek maximum penalties in federal drug cases, steadfastly resisted criminal justice reform, and, of course, helped implement Miller’s family separation policy at the border.
Sessions, like most people who’ve worked with Trump, eventually did not pay sufficient homage to the Orange Ordure and was kicked out of the club.
Stephen Miller, on the other hand, has remained steadfast in his devotion to the Thief in Chief.
The Southern Poverty Law Center’s website dedicated a webpage to Miller early in the Trump administration4. It wasn’t meant to be an honor:
The Southern Poverty Law Center notes that Miller apparently has a sadistic side:
In response to seeing photos of children being separated from their parents at the U.S. border with Mexico as a result of the zero-tolerance policy, an external White House adviser, in a Vanity Fair report, said, “Stephen actually enjoys seeing those pictures at the border.” According to Miller, the administration’s decision to institute the policy was “a simple decision.”
To justify a rabid anti-immigrant stance, Miller says things like this:
“You’ve seen what it does to living standards. You’ve seen what it does to wages. You’ve seen what it does in terms of transnational cartels. You’ve seen what it has done to the innocent victims of illegal immigrant crime … You have seen the death. You have seen the needless destruction because we can’t secure this border.
Does any of that rhetoric remind you of someone?
Never mind that the only flames of destruction we’ve seen coming out of Texas lately have been in the heart of climate denial country in the Texas Panhandle:
This all is doublespeak, of course, anyway. His agenda should be clear to you by now.
Unfortunately, Miller has been so tenacious with his vitriol that the majority of Americans now lean anti-immigration, according to most polls.
It probably won’t be long before Republicans finally acknowledge climate change, but blame immigrants for it.
After the failed Trump presidency
Stephen Miller has remained steadfast in his opposition to diversity, and especially immigration, since Trump lost the 2020 election.
While other Trump minions devoted their energy to making up lies about a so-called “stolen election,” Miller has been pounding the American social conscience with lies that immigrants are bad for America, bad for the economy, and have a direct impact on crime (which trended downward during Biden’s presidency).
As a result, Americans are blaming immigrants for everything from housing costs (instead of blaming the huge corporations and private equity firms that dominate rental properties) to crime.
This fiscal year, the Biden administration is spending $25 billion on border security. Biden has drifted right, when he should be drifting left, because most Americans now believe that immigration is a threat to their way of life, instead of the essence of an American dream that has always spanned oceans.
The latest rounds of stochastic terrorism against Haitians have Stephen Miller written all over them. That’s what he does: He works behind the scenes searching the country for places to attack. That’s been his role in life since he was 14 years old.
If Trump hadn’t overshot the net by such a wide margin with his “They’re eating the cats, they’re eating the dogs” remark that became a viral song, the Haitians of Springfield would be facing even more danger than they are.
Immigrants are the backbone of America
Always have been, always will be. They are not a threat to you. They never have been, and they never will be.
The typical day for new refugees from violence goes something like this:
Wake up at 5:00 am. Pound a mug of strong coffee. Spend ten or so hours sweating through day labor doing something nobody else wants to do. You don’t see a lot of dudes in red MAGA hats slinging shingles in the Dallas heat.
Often, new refugees take a second job. Maybe they’ll drive an Uber, or work at the local Walmart. Maybe they’ll bus some tables. But they rarely sit at home, even after a tough day of work. On the weekend, they hustle over to the currency exchange to cash their checks and wire a little money home.
When I say a little money, I mean, you know, like half their earnings.
They probably take a night class of some sort, too. Usually to learn the weird English language, which has about as much structural logic as a Trump golf course next to a shooting range.
The vast majority are thrilled to be here. Try to do a little America-bashing Bastille-style to an immigrant, and he/she will set you straight in a flash.
“America is a great country. It’s been very good to me,” is the most common refrain you’ll hear from a newly settled migrant.
He’s not competing with you for a rental unit in your neighborhood. He’s renting out the kind of place you don’t want, probably with a few other migrants.
He is, however, making sure that you’re drinking out of a clean glass when you are at the sushi restaurant scarfing down California rolls.
The bans on immigration keep growing
Restaurants and other consumers of cheap labor are passing their higher costs of labor to you as America imposes ever-tighter immigration restrictions. Many Americans, including people who should know better, blame Biden when the cost of their pizza goes up while they’re cheering on border security.
Miller has been laser-focused on removing as many immigrants from the nation as he possibly can since his arrival in Trumpland in 2016. He’s the architect of the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance policy, which separated kids from their parents and resulted in children being imprisoned without any criminal charges.
Miller is also the architect of Trump’s attempted Muslim ban. That effort failed, but since he left the White House a lot more judges who are friendly to Trumpistan have infested the court system. A second attempt to ban Muslims will have a good chance of success because of places like the New Orleans-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, where Trump installed six new judges for life.
Now that he’s out of the White House, Miller calls the existence of immigrants an invasion, harkening to his old pal, nationalist Jared Taylor:
He has encouraged people like Texas Governor Greg Abbott to ship penniless migrants to big cities across the country as political pawns. This has created division in big cities like Chicago, where many migrants often find themselves in hostile territory because they get sent by chartered busses to impoverished neighborhoods.
This has been a classic Republican strategy since the days of slavery (when Republicans were called Democrats and vice-versa): Find a couple of groups with limited resources, and get them to fight each other for the scraps left behind by the one percent.
Slavery obtained its initial support in no small part because poor whites considered Black people a threat to their access to the tiny slice of pie American society offered them in the 1800s. They were concerned that Blacks might interfere with their limited opportunities, so they preferred a formal incarceration system for all Black folks.
In the heart of 21st-century Chicago, Blacks and migrants are now competing for crumbs in the parts of the city that offer the least opportunities.
This is part of a grand strategy that Miller has been pushing since Trump was kicked out of the Oval Office by sensible voters.
While other Trumpstans have been pounding the table about their failed re-election, Miller has been hard at work trying to destroy the fabric of America’s social contract with the world as a haven from dysfunctional governments and violence.
He’s doing this while maintaining close ties to Trump.
Vanity Fair Magazine has referred to Miller as Wormtongue, and who am I to argue?
The two champions of hate have each other on speed dial, and they’re not satisfied taking down immigrants.
The great replacement theory
If you’re an aspiring white male writer, one way to break through the clutter is to complain that your white maleness is preventing you from success.5
That’s what Brian Beneker, who has been a script coordinator in Hollywood for twenty years, did when he tried to coordinate a turn in his career to become a scriptwriter himself.
Unable to land a script writing job with the Paramount drama series “SEAL Team”, he turned to Miller to coordinate a lawsuit complaining that diversity initiatives were shutting him out.6
Beneker claims that “heterosexual, white men need ‘extra’ qualifications” to be hired as writers on CBS’s shows.
As a “heterosexual, white man,” this makes me want to punch seals. I am happy to report that there is, indeed, more diversity in the creative arts, but it doesn’t come at the cost of blocking good talent. It may, possibly, come at the cost of blocking some mediocre talent, but is this really a problem?
Stephen Miller’s organization, America First Legal Foundation, thinks so.
America First Legal Foundation is a genuinely evil enterprise that Miller started in 2021. If you can think of a nefarious task, Miller is probably using the foundation to litigate a way to accomplish it, including using it to attack diversity in the arts with lawsuits like the kind he has helped file on Beneker’s behalf.7
It’s all part of Miller’s plan that even if Trumptrolls lose the election, they will try to change government policy through an antagonistic and activist court system.
Miller is a proponent of the Great Replacement Theory, a wild conspiracy theory that began in Europe mostly through a book by Renaud Camus, Le Grand Remplacement, which has become source material for European right-wingers freaking out over non-white refugees flooding into Europe.
The conspiracy theory holds that white Americans will eventually disappear. If you had my mottled white skin, you’d be justified in thinking this is not a problem even if true. In fact, shit. Bring it on.
Even if Trumptrolls lose the election, they will try to change government policy through an antagonistic and activist court system.
Miller would prefer to express his beliefs in a new administration, especially through Project 2025, which deserves a Substack exclusively dedicated to exposing the nearly 1,000-page document outlining its detailed plan to wipe out the bureaucracy and replace every single person in it with MAGA loyalists.
Stephen Miller probably wants to kill you
Remember at the beginning of the article I said Stephen Miller probably wants to kill you? Miller’s America First Legal Foundation has found a new attack vector on Obamacare. His foundation successfully launched a lawsuit that may soon arrive in the Supreme Court’s loving embrace that could end the ACA’s mandate for making health insurers pay for healthcare prompted by pre-existing conditions.8 9
If this happens, many people will die.
Stephen Miller didn’t kill a bunch of kids when he was a wild-eyed lunatic in high school.
He’s making up for that lost opportunity in a bigly way.
And if we end up with Trumplestein 2.0, he’ll have direct access to the levers of power that will leave nobody safe from his grasp.
He may be the last man standing as the country finally burns to the ground. Get that man a hoody.
Update
At least some of the folks (if not all) who perished in the March 2024 Baltimore bridge collapse were migrant workers. So not only do they keep your glasses clean at the sushi place, they are fixing your bridges as you whiz by them in your computerized auto.10
Update #2
As many of you are aware, somehow, the orange blobbish creature, possibly from the Planet K2-18b,11 was temporarily (hopefully) reinstalled into the Oval Office after this article was published.
Notes
This is a Stephen Miller hit piece. I make no apologies for it. I did not create the political environment that necessitates this kind of article.
There are a lot of articles on the web about this goon, and some of them come from surprising places.12 13
Thanks for reading! Please restack this to counter all the hate.
This was written before the election, so please excuse references to things that may have already happened (but also, I told you so).
Notes
Planet K2-18b’s atmosphere contains copious amounts of methane, which suggests that the planet may have been harboring the orange, inhuman creature in question for a long time before its appearance on Earth.
Thanks for the superb piece...Stephen Miller is one vile human. Something in his brain isnt wired right. And he has a child...which is scary.
Like Stephen Miller, my great-grandparents also came to America during the Russian Purge of the Jews. How I came to where I am and he arrived at the polar opposite of everything I believe in is one of life's true mysteries. I can only assume there's a great deal of self-loathing involved. Thanks for an excellent essay.