Stephen Miller’s Rise to Power in the Trump White House

We're going to do something a  little bit different tonight. We're going to try to understand some of  the most important and disruptive Trump policies through the prism  of one aide, Stephen Miller. He's no ordinary aide, as you well know.  He's been with Trump since the beginning of his improbable run as  the 21st century's most important political leader, and no one seems  to understand the president and his impulses better than Miller.  He's also a revolutionary. His ideas come from far outside what we  used to think of as the Republican mainstream, and he's a vociferous,  uncompromising advocate for policies that only a few years ago would have  been deemed unworkable and extreme. Joining me tonight are 4 reporters  who have covered Miller for years and know him well. Leanne Caldwell  is the chief Washington correspondent at Puck. McKay Coppins is a staff  writer at The Atlantic. Zoen Kao Youngs is a White House correspondent  at The New York Times, and Ashley Parker is a staff writer,  also at the Atlantic. Thank you all for, for joining me. All of  you have covered Miller for years. You've written a lot about Miller  Ashley very recently landed very recently, but I want to just start at the beginning. Um, McKay, why  don't I go to you because you wrote of the sort of definitive early  profile of Stephen Miller in 2018. So where does he come from? Like,  what, where did his politics develop? Give us a little sense of of of  the forces that created the Stephen Miller. We, we, we know of today.  But before he entered the general political consciousness. Yes, I  think the thing that most struck me in talking to him years ago when  I was profiling him was how much of his political worldview was forged  in opposition to his upbringing, right? He grew up in Santa Monica,  family of very well off, progressive, uh, uh, Jewish parents and was  surrounded by, uh, you know, what he would describe as kind of a bubble  of progressive affluence, right? Uh, he went to a high school where  they would have, uh, you know, multiracial uh retreats and, you  know, multiculturalism festivals and his first exposure to conservative  politics was actually reading on a lark guns and Ammo magazine,  which then led him to people like Rush Limbaugh, Larry Elder, David  Horowitz, the kind of prominent conservative talk radio hosts and  polemicists of the time, and you can see from the very beginning as  a teenager in a very liberal high school, him kind of mimicking the  political style of those people. Wait, wait, you mentioned the high  school. Just watch with me for one moment, a quick clip of this is  Stephen Miller running for student government, student government.  Watch this. Am I the only one who is sick and tired. to to pic rash,  and we have pl ent y janitor. s working for us So, so first of all, the Che Guevara  look really is is I can't, doesn't do that anymore. He's really into  the silk suits now or something, but um, but, but you wrote part  of your profile was focused on the fact that he's an expert troll,  and so in your study of him in your conversations with him back then,  was he, was he just trolling his liberal friends or liberal  adversaries or, or was that something more serious? Well, this was actually  kind of the mystery of Stephen Miller to everybody who knew him  at every stage of his life in high school, later at Duke when he went  to college, he was, everyone was trying to figure out if this was  performance art or if you really believed it. And you know he would  that was a classic example of teenage Stephen Miller, but he  would write, you know, columns for the Duke campus newspaper, picking  culture war fights on campus. What I think, you know, where I  landed because I asked him about this a bunch of times, and he at  first would say, no, no, no, I believe everything that I say. But then  he at one point said, I do believe in constructive controversy for  the sake of enlightenment. Those were his words, and I think that  that gets at something fundamental about him, which is he has always  believed that there is a role for provocation and performance in  politics. So Ashley, let me ask you this. Does he go further rhetorically than than he  actually believes or when you're listening to him, especially in  this second Trump term, is what he's saying, what he actually believes.  Is he trying to just provoke and kind of, then he'll bring it back  a little bit. I mean, again, I think with him at this point, both  things are true, but, but we have sort of come full circle to where the  caricature has become the character and it's really hard to differentiate.  You see in some of those early high school videos of Stephen Miller,  him sort of occasionally breaking the fourth wall to kind of do a  full face, toothy grin or kind of almost smirk at himself as if he  can't believe he said what he's just said, but in reporting my  profile, one of the people I spoke with was Ste ve Bannon, who  recounted, I mean, early on, Stephen Miller would open for Donald Trump  in 2015, 2016, that campaign, his rallies, and Stephen, Steve Bannon  again, who loves all the incendiary stuff recalled saying to Stephen  Miller, Look, the point of an opening act is so the main guy doesn't  have to tap you, right? You have to stop saying these things because  Trump can't come out there and beat it. And so people have told me in  the White House, one of the things they like about him, perhaps  counterintuitive ly is that he is incredibly dogmatic. That intensity, maybe not  the trolling, but that intensity and that passion is the same  behind closed doors and in the Oval Office, as you see in front of  the TV cameras and so whether you agree with them or not, you sort  of always know where he stands, which is on the, the far extreme  when it comes to immigration. Zolin, you've watched this for a while as  well. Has his ideology shift and we'll talk about the the the the the  the the linchpins of the ideology in a minute, but has he shift ed  Has he become more extreme? Because obviously the second Trump term is  very much unlike the first Trump term. I actually think from everyone  I've talked to that Stephen's ideology has been rather consistent.  It's that he's more visible and more powerful in this second  term. You know, in the first term, he might have been limited in in many  ways to being kind of the architect and overseeing immigration policy in  the Department of Homeland Security. And he was a speechwriter, of  course, you know, getting involved in coms as well. And now you have  somebody who you know, is taking the the that ideology that was formed  through his upbringing, through working with Michele Bachmann, now  to uh uh imposing that on domestic policy, foreign policy as well. Um,  his role has expanded. If I could also follow up on the previous  subject, I think that the rhetoric and the provoking, Stephen also  sees that as key to implementing his policy, right? I mean, in the  first term shelling the beach in advance of the actual policy and  and. he believes that America, as you often hear of America having a  role as a sanctuary for immigrants being a pro-immigrant country. He is  trying to change um the perception in the nation towards immigrants.  2 basically make it so that the pendulum of politics shifts, and  there's more of a tolerance for the policies he's trying to  implement. Leanne, talk about, so we know he was he was a expert at  provocation. He was a he was a serious conservative, more conservative  than Republicans at the time as he was growing up. He comes to Washington,  talk about his course through Congress until he until he meets  Trump. Yes, well, yes, as you said, he worked for Michele Bachmann, who  is a remind us, Michele Bachmann is someone who actually ran for  president in 2008. She was, she was a fringe candidate, an outlier,  and she was also very provocative. She crashed and burned very quickly.  He, she was a little bit ahead of her time in terms of she was  kind of pre Lauren Boberg before Lauren. Yeah, absolutely. But then  he found a home in Jeff Sessions. Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama,  who was also very anti-immigrant. um, and the ideologically  they were on the same page. Jeff Sessions was adamantly involved  in comprehensive immigration reform during, you know, the Bush  and early Obama years, Bush years really, and uh and trying to kill  it. And Jeff's and uh Stephen Miller was instrumental in that. He had  a reputation on the Hill. He was a comms director at the time of being way outside the mainstream. He  would also an internal coms meetings with his fellow Republican coms directors would would provocate in the same  way that he does publicly. People used to just roll their eyes and  dismiss him. Now he has won probably the most powerful non-elected official in this  country, and you still see actually that tension on Capitol Hill with  Stephen Miller. People remember Stephen Miller then and and there  is a lot of, you know, grumbling on Capitol Hill, even among Republicans  who think that Stephen Miller's policies are going too far and will  hurt them. It's hard just briefly to overstate. I covered the  Gang of Eight immigration bill for The New York Times is a  congressional correspondent, and this was sort of the last time immigration  bipartisan immigration, had any real momentum, right? You had  4 Republicans, including Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio, um, 4 Democrats.  You had the tentative cautious, but you had the buy-in of the tech  community, of the business community, of the labor community, of the  activist community, of the Hispanic community, and the reason that  bill essentially sank and did not come up for a vote in the House,  was single-handedly because of Jeff Sessions and Stephen Miller working  alongside Breit b ar t News to kill it. And remember, just during  the end of the Biden administration when James Lankford was working  on a bipartisan bill to close the borders and then Trump came in as a potential  candidate and killed it Stephen Miller had a role in that too, right?  Well, let's talk about Sessions and the jump from Sessions to to  try. Obviously Sessions, we don't have to rehearse this one at length, but was a Trump loyalist and Trump  turned on him because Jeff Sessions appointed the special prosecutor,  etc. how did Miller make the move to the big man? So so I mean it's a classic Washington  story also. It's not that unusual, but did he discard Jeff Sessions  when not yet. So what happened is in January of 2016, Miller was one  of the very first people to come and just leave Jeff Sessions' office  and go to to his campaign, and this is when Trump was still  improbable. Yes, very improbable, before the Iowa caucuses, a good month  before then, but Jeff Sessions a month later was the very first person,  first senator to endorse Donald Trump. And so they were still very  close working together to promote this this enigma of Donald  Trump. But then, you know, fast forward to Jeff Sessions being  attorney General, Jeff Sessions recusing himself into the Russia  investigation. Jeff Sessions losing his job, being fired because of  that, and the person left standing is Steven Miller, who who discarded  Jeff Sessions at that moment. When you say discarded, what do you  mean? There is, there is no public statement of Stephen Miller supporting  or saying anything nice about Jeff Sessions in that moment and then a person close to Stephen  Miller said that no one at that time was more furious at Jeff  Sessions than Stephen Miller.