What gives Miller his jollies
What’s the deal with Stephen Miller? How did he get to be a racist fanatic?
Jean Guerrero’s new book Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda follows Miller through a conservative media landscape where key figures — including right-wing radio talk-show host Larry Elder; David Horowitz, who founded the David Horowitz Freedom Center; and former Breitbart chief Steve Bannon — propelled the rise of a man who now influences who gets to be an American.
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“I just became all the more fascinated with trying to understand how a descendant of Jewish refugees who grew up in Southern California — how does that person become the person crafting Trump’s harshest rhetoric and policies, targeting people fleeing violence and persecution, people like his own great-grandparents?” Guerrero tells NPR.
Because he’d rather be doing the violence and persecution than fleeing it?
Guerrero has found that while Miller and Trump seem to work well together, they are different: “Stephen Miller is a true ideologue. He’s a fanatic. He believes this stuff, whereas Trump is a lot more motivated by self-interest. But you do see that these two men coming together … they’ve been able to mutually benefit each other in a very unique way. In part, because Stephen Miller gets Donald Trump.”
Trump is more motivated by self-interest but at the same time he does enjoy the racist taunting for its own sake. He hasn’t done all the Deep Reading Miller has, but he’s all about the contempt and bullying and general trashiness. For him it’s fun, for Miller it’s ideology.
David Horowitz was a big influence.
[It’s] apparent from private correspondence that David Horowitz shared with me for the book, where you could see for years, David Horowitz shaping Stephen Miller’s career throughout college, getting him his first job on Capitol Hill, shaping [Donald] Trump’s rhetoric and policies through Miller. And he introduces him from a very young age to this idea that everything that we hold dear as Americans — you know, equality and freedom — that all of these things are thanks to white men and that there’s this unfair war on whiteness. … Stephen Miller was really taken with this idea.
Equality and freedom like for instance Mississippi in, say, 1850? That kind of equality and freedom? Like the Fugitive Slave Act? Like the Dred Scott ruling? Like the Trail of Tears?
Steve Bannon, he remembers when he met Stephen Miller, he remembered listening to his voice on the Larry Elder show in Los Angeles. You know, like so many other key figures who played a key role in shaping Trumpism, he had heard Stephen Miller. So he decides to help Stephen Miller get a platform for his ideas through the right-wing blog Breitbart, which Bannon was the head of at the time. And so, initially Stephen Miller had had some trouble on Capitol Hill getting his ideas through to journalists. Like, at first, he had been trying to derail the nomination to the Supreme Court of Sonia Sotomayor — the first woman of Latin American heritage to be nominated — by saying that her Latin American heritage would interfere with her ability to be an unbiased judge.
Oh? Why would Latin American heritage do that when Euro American heritage apparently wouldn’t? How about Jewish American heritage – does that interfere with people’s ability to be unbiased? How about Japanese American? African American? Russian American? It’s a puzzle.
Miller and Trump both love violence – fantasy violence, but they’re now in positions to translate that into real violence toward other people.
Stephen Miller and Donald Trump really share this morbid fascination with violence. And that’s why you see Stephen Miller contributing these very vivid descriptions of demonizing violence into Trump’s rhetoric, you know, talking about migrants slaughtering little girls and just stuff that is supposed to make you feel afraid, and hatred towards migrants. And the other thing about their relationship is Stephen Miller consistently pushes Trump in the most aggressive direction when it comes to immigration policy and when it comes to his rhetoric. And Trump has learned to appreciate that, because whenever he has listened to a more moderate adviser, he ends up getting ridiculed by his base as — by his very hard-core base — as weak. And Trump hates that. He wants to be seen as a killer. You see him talking about this throughout his life, the importance of being a killer.
In reality he’s a giant marshmallow, but he’s also a sadist. It’s what makes him so intensely repulsive.
How does Miller deal with sharing Trump with Putin? I would think he’d find it hard to have his great prize serving someone other than just himself. I figure Trump has no choice because Putin likely has kompromat he can use against him. But Miller must have some sense that the strategic interests of Russia include a weakened and discredited America? How does that help Miller?What happens when Miller’s needs and Putin’s conflict?
Maybe I’m naive, but it seemed to me that many years ago, there used to be some Republicans who had at least a partial grasp of American interests on the global stage, who thoght about bigger pictures than that cushy lobbying position once they left office. The Cold War may be over, but there are still countries that oppose the United States, Russia amongst them. Not that I’m a big fan of American imperialism, but to see the American abandonment of its allies and relationships is really shocking. It’s like the current crop of Republicans have no thought beyond making the rich richer and the poor hungrier. Russian bounties on US soldiers? Trump relying on Rissian translators? Trump giving away intelligence sources? Pffft. Who cares? Are there none who are not scared to death of the orange idiot, who have any thought for the good of the country as a whole, instead of the country as a hole?
I have just read Isabel Wilkerson’s ‘Caste: The Origin of Our Discontents’, which I found an extraordinarily intelligent and perceptive book where American politics & the legacy of slavery are concerned. The book suggests that the Republican interest is not merely a matter of ‘making the rich richer and the poor hungrier’, though that is certainly an aim, but, rather, a matter of preserving the caste system that was established with slavery and which still holds an immense power over people’s minds. It is a book that I hope will be read by such as Stephen Pinker and Jerry Coyne, and those of rather too many of the latter’s commenters — I am no longer one of them, since I have been silently banned from commenting on his website, after taking issue with the assumption that America’s discontents are due to class rather than with the systemic racism that, among other things, seeks to deny black Americans the ability to vote — which rather calls into question Professor Coyne’s fervency about the virtues of ‘free speech’. I remarked that the interest in ignoring the issue of race in favour of class seemed to derive from a discomfort about addressing the question of race and racism, and trying to pretend that that it was really all about the safer issue of class, which is applicable to many societies and seems more universal, and not fundamentally about the caste system on which, alas, the USA was based, and remains based, as Wilkerson’s book makes clear. There was talk among the the commenters and the owner of the website about the ‘heritability’ of intelligence, and about the deficiencies of the ‘culture’ of African-Americans, which seemed, for them, to exist in some peculiar bubble entirely separate from the wider society of the US. They seemed mostly ignorant of the history of African-Americans, and extraordinarily naive in the assumption that racism is a property of individuals who hold and express racist beliefs, and not, despite all the evidence, a fundamental way in which society is structured. The Republicans have become the party of white grievance, and that is more important to them than allies and relationships with other nations, or Trump’s relationship with Putin and other dictators.
Yes I want to read that. I did a post about it recently based on her interview on Fresh Air, which even in that short space conveyed some very enlightening analysis.
It seems that Miller has found the perfect life partner in Kate Waldman.
I wonder what kind of kompromat Putin could have on DJT that DJT would even care about. Unless it’s DJT’s tax returns.
He’s the Reinhard Heydrich of the Trump administration, and I don’t use that comparison lightly. He’s the same kind of fanatical true believer that would come up with ‘solutions’ to what he sees as the ‘mongrelization’ of the US.