Asshole of the Month: Stephen Miller
In his encore occupation of the White House, Trump has surrounded himself with a circle of more radically MAGA bootlicking suck-ups than even his first administration. However, it is this retread from Trump 1.0 who is the most sinister of the lot: current deputy chief of staff and homeland security advisor Stephen Miller, who looks like Joseph Goebbels and has the black soul to match. Miller is the architect behind Trump’s draconian immigration policy, and while many MAGA stalwarts dogwhistle their white supremacist convictions; not Miller—he trumpets them. A fact even his boss recognizes. As reported in The New York Times, “In one meeting during the 2024 campaign, Mr. Trump said that if it was up to Mr. Miller there would be only 100 million people in this country, and they would all look like Mr. Miller…”
Our Asshole of the Month’s maturation into a bigot began back in high school. Miller attributes his shift to conservatism to Wayne LaPierre’s book Guns, Crime, and Freedom, and he cites Rush Limbaugh’s The Way Things Ought to Be as his favorite. Confused adolescents often experiment with different belief systems, but these far-right toxins became a lifelong addiction for Stevie, despite being raised in a liberal Jewish household. According to high school classmates, he would “pester” Latino students and was always chiding them for speaking Spanish instead of English. At 16, he wrote to a local publication that he “noticed a number of students lacked basic English skills” and, “there are usually very few, if any, Hispanic students in my honors classes despite the large number of Hispanic students that attend our school.” Miller “was a shameless racist,” tweeted fellow high schooler Charles Gould. “In private conversations, he was constantly making disparaging remarks about the African-American, Latino and Asian students at our school.” In Hatemonger—a biography on Miller by Jean Guerrero—another student, Jason Islas, recalls how the future political operative ended their friendship. He “expressed hatred for me in a calm, cool, matter-of-fact way” and “gave me a whole list of reasons why we couldn’t be friends and almost all of them were personal. But the one that stuck out was because of my Latino heritage.”
After high school, Miller attended Duke University, where he ramped up his vile prejudices. There, he served as president for a chapter of David Horowitz’s Students for Academic Freedom and helped organize “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week” to defame Muslims and Arabs. He accused a Chicano student organization of believing in Hispanic “racial superiority,” and buddied up with Richard Spencer, the infamous neo-Nazi philosopher who gave the stiff-arm salute while braying Heil Trump! after the Orange Fuehrer’s victory in 2016.
