Senior Adviser to the President for Policy, Stephen Miller talks to reporters about President Donald Trump’s support for creating a ‘merit-based immigration system’ in the James Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House Aug. 2, 2017 in Washington, DC. Photo : Chip Somodevilla ( Getty Images )

Donald Trump’s senior political adviser Stephen Miller has always been a weird dude. Given that his third-grade teacher confirmed that fact, there’s little hope that anything will change.




In 1993, little Stephen was an 8-year-old third grader who used to kill small animals ate glue. Fine, he never killed small animals. Well, no small animals that went missing near his California home were ever found. That doesn’t mean Stephen Miller killed them—but he totally ate glue.

In third grade, there are really only two groups of kids: those who eat glue and those who don’t. But Miller was a unique glue eater.


Here’s how Miller’s third-grade teacher at Santa Monica’s Franklin Elementary described young Stephen’s behavior for the Hollywood Reporter.



Do you remember that character in Peanuts, the one called Pig Pen, with the dust cloud and crumbs flying all around him? That was Stephen Miller at 8. I was always trying to get him to clean up his desk—he always had stuff mashed up in there. He was a strange dude. I remember he would take a bottle of glue — we didn’t have glue sticks in those days—and he would pour the glue on his arm, let it dry, peel it off and then eat it. I remember being concerned about him—not academically. He was OK with that, though I could never read his handwriting. But he had such strange personal habits. He was a loner and isolated and off by himself all the time.

The most telling part of the trajectory of Miller’s life happened after the teacher shared her concern with the principal and Miller’s parents.

At the end of the year, I wrote all my concerns—and I had a lot of them—in his school record. When the school principal had a conference with Stephen’s parents, the parents were horrified. So the principal took some white-out and blanked out all my comments. I wish I could remember what I wrote, but this was 25 years ago. I’ve taught a lot of third-graders since then. Of course, Stephen wasn’t political then—it wasn’t until later that he started to make waves.


And there you have it, a little bottle of white-out and thus, Miller not only doesn’t get the help that he needs but instead has his glue- eating past absolved, well, because ... whiteness.