Stephen Miller & Trump’s Presidency
Image Source: DonkeyHotey – CC BY 2.0
On January 30, 2025, Pres. Donald Trump issued “Executive Order to Combat Anti-Semitism” in which he “promised” that the U.S. government will “[p]rotect the civil rights of our Jewish citizens”; “prosecute anti-Semitic crimes”; and “Deport Hamas Sympathizers and Revoke Student Visas” by “quickly cancel[ing] the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism like never before.”
Adding bravado to his Order, Trump insisted, “I will be your defender, your protector, and I will be the best friend Jewish Americans have ever had in the White House.”
It is unclear who drafted the antisemitism order, but it was likely approved by White House staff secretary Will Scharf. He is Jewish, a Princeton undergrad and Harvard Law School graduate who clerked for a federal judge and was an assistant U.S. attorney before joining Trump’s legal team in October 2023; in 2023, Scharf confounded the group, Jews Against Soros.
On February 5th, Pam Bondi took office as Attorney General and quickly released a flurry of executive memos including one that “establishes Joint Task Force October 7 (“JTF 10-7″) and related initiatives to prioritize seeking justice for victims of the October 7, 2023 terrorist attack in Israel, addressing the ongoing threat posed by Hamas and its affiliates, and combatting antisemitic acts of terrorism and civil rights violations in the homeland.” It opened antisemitism investigations of a slew of colleges including Columbia, Northwestern, Portland State, the University of California (Berkeley) and the University of Minnesota (Twin Cities).
However, Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security advisor, most likely played a key role in formulating the Order. As The New York Times reported shortly before Trump took office,
“Mr. Miller will be in charge of Mr. Trump’s signature issue and the one that Mr. Miller has been fixated on since childhood: immigration. And he has been working, in secrecy, to oversee the team drafting the dozens of executive orders that Mr. Trump will sign after he takes office on Jan. 20.”
In late-2015, Miller joined the Trump campaign on a part-time basis and, by early-16, was a full-time staffer, becoming part of Trump’s core election campaign team. Miller previously served as an assistant to Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) and gained political visibility appearing regularly on Steve Bannon’s show on the Breitbart website. During Trump’s first presidency, he served as director of speechwriting and as a senior advisor for policy reporting to Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.
Jean Guerrero, author of Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda(2020), claims that Miller’s support for Trump is not out of opportunism or self-promotion but as “a true ideologue, a true fanatic.” At a Trump team meeting in November 2019, Miller made a final comment to the other participants: “I didn’t mean to come across as harsh,” he said. “It’s just that this is all I care about. I don’t have a family. I don’t have anything else. This is my life.” Perhaps most revealing, Kevin McCarthy, the former House speaker, called Miller “Trump’s brain.”
Guerrero argues that Miller’s childhood played a critical role fashioning his conservative outlook. He grew up in a million-dollar home of a wealthy white, Jewish family in Santa Monica, CA, but — as she notes – went through “a loss of privilege,” moving to a less affluent neighborhood and a slightly smaller house in a more diverse neighborhood. She adds:
“His dad was getting into all sorts of legal disputes. He was very aware of this change of fortune and wanted to hide it, and he associated his Mexican friend, the Latina housekeeper with it. He wanted to be perceived as elite.”
This was a period when “white fear” or “fears about demographic replacement” were spreading through California and, as Guerrero notes, “whites became a minority in California for the first time.” She also points out “Miller was feeding, you know, articles from white nationalist and white supremacist websites to Breitbart and having them do stories about them, you know, painting immigrants as an existential threat.”
Shifting from a private to a public school, Miller listened to numerous radio talk shows, including Rush Limbaugh, becoming increasingly conservative. Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, he was introduced to the conservative theorist David Horowitz and invited him to speak at Santa Monica High School. As a student, Miller wrote:
“In the 1970s, students started a political revolution on campus. Now is the time for a counter-revolution—one characterized by a devotion to this nation and its ideals. David Horowitz will soon launch ‘Students for Academic Freedom,’ an organization dedicated to just these principals [sic]. Acting together, we can succeed.”
Guerrero adds, “Horowitz was riveted by the teenager’s furious rants against multiculturalism.” He went so far as to publish Miller‘s article, “How I Changed My Left-Wing High School,” on his website.
In 2019, Hatewatch, a research arm of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), reviewed more than 900 previously private emails Miller sent to Breitbart News editors from March 4, 2015, to June 27, 2016. (This was before he took a position on Trump’s first election team.) SPLC notes, “[h]is focus is strikingly narrow – more than 80 percent of the emails Hatewatch reviewed relate to or appear on threads relating to the subjects of race or immigration.” It reports that they champion white nationalist websites, a “white genocide”-themed novel in which Indian men rape white women, xenophobic conspiracy theories and Nazi-like eugenics.
SPLC also notes that “Katie McHugh, who was an editor for Breitbart from April 2014 to June 2017, leaked the emails to Hatewatch in June to review, analyze and disseminate to the public.” It informs readers, “Hatewatch made multiple attempts to reach the White House for a comment from Miller about the content of his emails but did not receive any reply.”
It the wake of the Hatwatch revelations, more than 80 members of Congress, 55 civil rights groups and Democratic presidential candidates called for Miller to resign.
The resolution was sponsored by Rep. Joaquin Castro (TX-20), Chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, and cosponsored by Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus Chair Judy Chu (CA-27), Congressional Black Caucus Chair Karen Bass (CA-37), Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz (FL-23), Congressman Don Beyer (VA-8), and Congressman Brad Schneider (IL-10). Senator Kamala Harris (CA) introduced a companioning resolution in the Senate. Miller didn’t resign.
After Trump lost the 2020 presidential election, Miller became a frequent Fox News presenter, often promoting the Trump agenda. He leveraged his Trump ties into lucrative consulting contracts. While not a lawyer, he formed a conservative nonprofit, the America First Legal Foundation (AFLF), that – as reported by The New York Times – “In 2022, the most recent publicly available tax filing, America First Legal paid $1.7 million of its $44 million budget to lawyers, while devoting $29.6 million to promotion and advertising.” It notes that AFLF filed more than 100 lawsuits and helped block a Biden administration plan to offer debt relief to Black farmers, which it claimed was discriminatory. Some of its advertisements accused the Biden administration of “anti-white bigotry.” Miller reportedly earned $266,000 from AFLF in 2023.
In addition, Miller helped establish Citizens for Sanity, a political action committee (PAC), in June 2022 and served on its board of directors. It ran ads costing $94 million attacked Democrats’ policies on transgender youth. According to Open Secrets, Citizens for Sanity backed billboards emblazoned with messages like “Protect Pregnant Men from Climate Discrimination” and “Real progressives support violent criminals in their hour of need” that ran in Massachusetts, Colorado, Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania, California, Michigan, Texas, Illinois and Georgia. The Wall Street Journal reported that $50 million of the donations to Citizens for Sanity came from an outside group that Elon Musk had been donating to.
Open Secrets also notes that a video ad featured ominous footage of “subway riders pushed on the tracks by the violently deranged, stores being looted in broad daylight, elderly women viciously beaten on the street,” which the narrator claims is the “result of far left policies.”
According to ProPublica, on Day 1 of his presidency Trump issued 10 Executive Orders targeting immigrations and immigrants; on January 29th, he issued an Order entitled “Protecting the American People Against Invasion.” In addition, it details 27 likely anti-immigrant policies that would expand the “practices that have been carried out by various administrations, both Republican and Democratic” as well
seven “policies have never been tried before, like his bid to end birthright citizenship.” One must assume that they were shaped in part or whole by Miller.
On January 28th, Miller announced on CNN: “We looked at USAID as an example. That’s 98%, 98% of the workforce either donated to Kamala Harris or another left wing candidate. CNN noted that “he is helping to drive a maximalist immigration enforcement agenda, one he has spent much of his career designing.“ In this he’s aligned with Musk who claims it is “a viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America.” And “deserves to die.”
Together, Miller and Musk are leading Trump’s war against immigrants and all others they identify as enemies.
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