Julia Ioffe is contributing writer at Politico Magazine.

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!

“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.”


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!”

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.”

Who is Stephen Miller? Donald Trump’s policy adviser and resident ideologue warms up the crowd at Trump’s rallies.

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.

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.”

“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.”

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.

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.

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.”

***

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.)

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.

Paul Manafort, right, and Stephen Miller appear on stage ahead of Trump's speech on June 22 in New York. | AP Photo

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.

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!”

“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.

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.

“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.

“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.”

***

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.

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.”

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.

“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.

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.

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.

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 … ’”

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.”

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

“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.”

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.”

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.

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.

***

“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.”

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.”

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.

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.”

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.

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.”

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.

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.”

***

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.

“I’ve stood in a lot of hallway huddles where the talk was, ‘My God, if you look at what he wrote in college…’”

“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.”)

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.”)

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.”

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

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.”

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.

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.

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.

***

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.

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.

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.)

Miller is providing the intellectual architecture for an insurgency against the Republican party.”

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.”

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.

“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.”

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.”

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.)

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.”

Marco Rubio is, like, his biggest enemy,” says one Republican operative. “He just has this really vehement opposition to him.”

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.”

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.

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.”

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.”

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.”

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.

“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.”

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.”

“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.”

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.”

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.”

Stephen Miller gets into a vehicle at the Republican National Committee Headquarters on Capitol Hill in Washington on May 12. | AP Photo

***

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.”

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.

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?”

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.”

“No!” shouts the crowd. Miller closes his eyes and shakes his head.

“They say, 'Oh, well, we’re going to bring back our manufacturing jobs'; but do those jobs ever come back?”

“No!”

“They say they’re going to clean up D.C. and kick out the special interests. Do the special interests ever go?”

“No!”

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.”

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.”

A dramatic pause. A wag of the finger.

“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!”

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.