Stephen Miller. Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

The Trump administration has wrung an impressive amount of sympathetic press from a handful of uncomfortable public encounters. Trump’s staff is apparently laboring under the expectation that they will never have to publicly encounter a fellow citizen who will express disagreements with their policies in a remotely confrontational fashion. The latest such article, in the Washington Post, includes a story told by Stephen Miller:

One night, after Miller ordered $80 of takeout sushi from a restaurant near his apartment, a bartender followed him into the street and shouted, “Stephen!” When Miller turned around, the bartender raised both middle fingers and cursed at him, according to an account Miller has shared with White House colleagues. Outraged, Miller threw the sushi away, he later told his colleagues.

This account — which, again, comes from Miller himself — shows a high-level presidential adviser responding to a completely nonviolent and nonthreatening gesture by throwing away his own food. The story does not explain why throwing away his own sushi in any way advanced his cause. Was it an anti-Japanese gesture that Miller followed up by buying some authentically American cuisine? Some kind of mini-hunger strike?

All we know is that Miller lashed out at his opposition with an angry and completely self-defeating gesture of defiance. Basically, it’s the Trump administration’s nationalist agenda in a short one-act play.