If
there was any question as to whether Donald Trump is running a white
supremacist, authoritarian White House,
Stephen
Miller
should
erase all doubt.
Yes,
Trump has more than one scary in-house Nazi adviser named Steve. We
all knew about Steve Bannon, the white nationalist senior adviser who
came to Washington via
Breitbart
with
ideas about making America white again. Now there’s Stephen
Miller, who is only 31 and on top of the world as the White House
policy adviser behind Trump’s Muslim ban.
Over
the past week Miller has been blowing up the
television
news
show circuit, with highly inappropriate remarks for someone working
in a democratic system of government. However, anything goes when
you are the mouthpiece of a dictator.
Take,
for example, Miller repeating Trump’s bogus claim that
busloads
of people from Massachusetts
went
to New Hampshire to vote on Election Day.
Consider
also Miller’s appearance on
CBS’s
“Face
The Nation” last Sunday, as he was discussing judges
questioning Trump’s authority on the Muslim ban—the
executive order he had a hand in writing:
“Well,
I think that it’s been an important reminder to all Americans
that we have a judiciary that has taken far too much power and
become, in many cases, a supreme branch of government. One unelected
judge in Seattle cannot remake laws for the entire country. I mean
this is just crazy, John, the idea that you have a judge in Seattle
say that a foreign national living in Libya has an effective right to
enter the United States is — is — is beyond anything
we’ve ever seen before.
The
end result of this, though, is that 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.”
Not
be questioned?
Who does Stephen Miller think he is, and more importantly, who does
Donald Trump think he is to tell the American people to bow down to
his power like a king? And even more importantly, what qualifies
Miller to be a top adviser to President Agent Orange?
Whatever
you may say about
President
Obama
(including
“we miss you” and “please come back”), he had
some well-qualified people on staff, from brilliant minds with PhDs,
to proven civil servants.
Apparently,
to be a policy adviser under Trump,
you
don’t need much policy experience
at all. And in Miller’s case, a history of racial bigotry
won’t get in the way. Miller came from a
liberal
Jewish
family in California and attended racially diverse schools. Yet, he
was known for his
hatred
towards students of color,
particularly Latinos. He is also said to have made racist comments
about black, Asian and Muslim kids and harassed them as well. He
disrespected the black and Latino cafeteria and janitorial staff, and
reportedly told fellow students he could not be their friend because
they were Latino.
In
high
school,
this angry little man complained about Cinco de Mayo celebrations,
Spanish language announcements, an LGBTQ student club and a visit
from a Muslim leader, as
Univision
reported.
When Miller ran for class president, he was reportedly booed off the
stage by 4,000 students. In his high school yearbook, he wrote:
“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.”
When
Miller attended college at Duke University, his racial hatred
continued. Miller was affiliated with extremists such as
neo-Nazi
leader Richard Spencer,
white nationalist Jared Taylor and Islamophobic activist David
Horowitz. Further, as
Politico
reported,
Miller said that
multiculturalism
undermines American culture.
He accused black students of racial paranoia. Although a practicing
Jew, he decried the “War on Christmas.” He even went
after professors who were registered Democrats, and hated Maya
Angelou, calling her a “a leftist” full of “racial
paranoia” and opposing her coming to campus for a keynote
speech.
Miller
later became a press secretary for Rep. Michelle Bachman and
communications director for Sen. Jeff Sessions. During the 2016
campaign, Miller warmed up the crowds at the racially charged and
violent Trump rallies. Now, he is writing Trump’s executive
orders and speeches, including the Muslim ban and an inauguration
speech laced with Nazi and antisemitic overtones.
These
days, Trump’s soldiers are feeling emboldened and empowered,
smelling themselves, as it were, due to the authority they think has
been conferred upon them by President Agent Orange. In another
example of power placed in the hands of the worst people with low
character and no conscience, veteran White House correspondent April
Ryan says that Trump aide
Omarosa
Manigault
threatened
and bullied her. Omarosa also reportedly warned Ryan that Trump
maintained “dossiers” of negative information on her and
other reporters. What is that about? And what is any of this about?
As
one
astute observer noted,
Stephen Miller is what you get when Joseph Goebbels and Pee Wee
Herman have a baby and never give him a hug. With the blessings of
the most powerful man in America, the racist school bully is turning
his hate into policy. God help us all.
This
commentary originally appeared in The Grio
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