Few in the orbit of Donald Trump, American president, are so cartoonishly odious as Stephen Miller. The 32-year-old immigration hardliner from Santa Monica has steadily worked himself into the headlines in recent weeks, including when an Absolutely True, This Totally Happened story emerged where he threw $80 of sushi in the trash to own the libs. But Miller popped up Monday for a different reason: His behavior in the White House, which includes public displays as an authoritarian apparatchik who says "the powers of the president...will not be questioned," have roused the disgusted amazement of his own family.

In Politico magazine, Miller's uncle illustrated the historical myopia and resentful nonsense that undergirds Miller's whole shtick:

I have watched with dismay and increasing horror as my nephew, who is an educated man and well aware of his heritage, has become the architect of immigration policies that repudiate the very foundation of our family’s life in this country.

I shudder at the thought of what would have become of the Glossers had the same policies Stephen so coolly espouses—the travel ban, the radical decrease in refugees, the separation of children from their parents, and even talk of limiting citizenship for legal immigrants—been in effect when Wolf-Leib made his desperate bid for freedom. The Glossers came to the U.S. just a few years before the fear and prejudice of the “America First” nativists of the day closed U.S. borders to Jewish refugees. Had Wolf-Leib waited, his family would likely have been murdered by the Nazis along with all but seven of the 2,000 Jews who remained in Antopol. I would encourage Stephen to ask himself if the chanting, torch-bearing Nazis of Charlottesville, whose support his boss seems to court so cavalierly, do not envision a similar fate for him.

There is a stunning echo to the story. Miller's ancestors sought refuge in America just before nativists—who literally used the slogan "America First"—shut the door on them. Now, Miller works in an administration with the same slogan using every mechanism available to slam the door again. In 1939, the U.S. turned away the SS St. Louis, which carried 900 of the thousands of Jewish refugees who fled the emerging Nazi Germany. Ultimately, the ship was sent back and 250 of its passengers were exterminated. What will this era be remembered for?

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Pulling up the ladder behind you is a story as old as America. Every generation of immigrants is smeared and reviled until they work their way into mainstream acceptance—at which point they throw eggs at the next group off the boat. But there is a particularly trollish quality to Miller's work, one that is quintessentially Trumpian.

He appears to be a True Believer, and a particularly sick puppy.

As a reactionary movement, Trumpism is defined almost exclusively as a negation of other things: Barack Obama's presidency; the demographic shifts that have reshaped America's ethnic makeup for decades; dignity; compassion; class. Miller is the perfect stormtrooper for this group, the Santa Monica Gargamel working ceaselessly to bash the most vulnerable and feed red meat to The Base while bragging to his colleagues about how much raw fish he can afford to throw in the trash.



It started young. The White House senior adviser ran for student government at his Santa Monica high school on a particular platform: "Am I the only one," he asked his classmates in a campaign speech, "who is sick and tired of being told to pick up my trash when we have plenty of janitors who are paid to do it for us?!" He was roundly booed off stage.



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Miller has been waging the culture wars since Santa Monica High, where he could be found in the school paper's op-ed pages railing against catering to Spanish-speaking students, the LGBT club, and a decision to invite a local Muslim cleric to speak on campus. "Osama bin Laden would feel very welcome at Santa Monica High School," he said. He suggested students who opposed the war in Afghanistan shared sympathies with terrorists.

Miller went on to Duke, where white supremacist Richard Spencer claims to have "mentored" him. Miller denied this, though they did work together to organize an immigration "debate" on campus featuring Peter Brimelow, whom the Southern Poverty Law Center calls a white nationalist. Miller then worked for Michele Bachmann and Senator Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, where he rose up the ranks and made his way into Trumplandia.

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That's where Miller has really gotten down to business, taking particular aim at the kind of refugee policies that have long defined America as a last sanctuary for the beaten and the oppressed—and which once saved his ancestors. An exhaustingly reported piece published Sunday in Vanity Fair makes clear that there are quite a few mechanisms for doing this, and Miller has found them:

Last September, Miller played a leading role in slashing the refugee admissions cap to 45,000—less than one-half the 110,000 ceiling set under President Barack Obama, and the lowest level since 1980. Now, he has reportedly revived his push for another cut, to a cap as low as 15,000 refugees. Earlier this week, the 32-year-old senior adviser was reported to be focused on an even more ambitious project: imposing strict limits on legal immigration, as well as on individuals seeking asylum from war, famine, and prosecution...

Currently, the U.S. is on pace to admit around 22,000 refugees this fiscal year. Defenders of the policies argue that the cuts offset a surge in asylum seekers, while critics dismiss the notion as a manufactured crisis. “By 2020, I would not be surprised if we just don't have this program anymore,” said Jennifer Quigley, an advocacy strategist for refugee protection at Human Rights First. “I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s 5,000 next year and then zero.”

Apparently, Miller has done this through clever navigation of the federal government's bureaucratic morass. He'll install allies in federal agencies to act as "termites," eating the structure from within to prevent it from providing services. That's part of a larger effort to operate in the shadows. In his dealings with the president, critics compare Miller to Wormtongue from The Lord of the Rings.

Whereas Bannon made controversy his calling card, Miller has operated in a more shadowy—and effective—manner, gradually applying leverage and using shrewd personnel decisions to implement his draconian vision on immigration policy throughout the West Wing and government agencies...

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For instance, multiple sources described how Miller has worked to make the refugee cap irrelevant by bureaucratically kneecapping the refugee program—slowing down the interviews D.H.S. officials conduct with refugees overseas, undercutting the staffing at the agencies that handle resettlement in the United States, and complicating the vetting process. A current administration official told me that Miller is “having D.H.S. intentionally make sure that we don’t get anywhere close to the numbers that we agreed to.”

Miller manipulates the information flow to the president, suppressing information that undermines his nativist narrative. He has destroyed other personnel in the administration who have gotten in the way of this effort. He appears to be a True Believer, and a particularly sick puppy.

Miller championed the family separation policy at the southern border that garnered national and international outrage, and another Vanity Fair report at the time was not reassuring:

As the border crisis spirals, the absence of a coordinated policy process has allowed the most extreme administration voices to fill the vacuum. White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller has all but become the face of the issue, a development that even supporters of Trump’s “zero-tolerance” position say is damaging the White House. “Stephen actually enjoys seeing those pictures at the border,” an outside White House adviser said. “He’s a twisted guy, the way he was raised and picked on. There’s always been a way he’s gone about this. He’s Waffen-SS.”

It is unequivocally horrifying that someone this deeply disturbed is exercising this kind of power in the current regime. Trumpian kakistocracy takes many forms, from the cabinet members nakedly in bed with the industries they're meant to regulate to those who think their appointment was an invitation to live large—and fly private—on the taxpayer dime. But Miller is a kakistocrat in a dark and depraved mold, willing to negate his own family's American story if it means he can curb stomp the world's most vulnerable people.

In the end, many of the true horrors of this administration may not be perpetrated through top-down direction. It may be people who can operate freely in the Wild West environment of the current regime—staffed by anti-government conservatives and a chief executive who knows nothing about anything and cares less—who will do the lasting damage. The child detention centers he helped overfill by tearing kids from their parents have become playgrounds for the worst among us. The current regime seems to be Miller's playground.

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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