Stephen Miller — we’ve all come to know him as one of Drumpfy’s most deferential racist advisors, and the stories of his youth keep piling up, revealing that, yes, he was always that obnoxious kid in school. No wonder he is so perfect for the Moron; they are both children in man bodies.
There are many well known stories of his douchiness.
Standing behind the microphone before a hostile amphitheater crowd, Mr. Miller — then a 16-year-old candidate for a student government post, now a 32-year-old senior policy adviser to President Trump — steered quickly into an unlikely campaign plank: ensuring that the janitorial staff was really earning its money.
“Am I the only one,” he asked, “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?”
It appeared he was. Boos consumed the grounds of the left-leaning Santa Monica High School campus. Mr. Miller was forcibly escorted from the lectern, shouting inaudibly as he was tugged away.
But offstage, any anger seemed to fade instantly. Students were uncertain whether Mr. Miller had even meant the remarks sincerely. Those who encountered him afterward recalled a tranquillity, and a smile. If he had just lost the election — and he had, the math soon confirmed — he did not seem to feel like it.
He was always an asshole, and he liked being one — already tailor made for this administration.
These formative years supplied the template for the life Mr. Miller has carved out for himself in Washington, where he remains the hard-line jouster many of Mr. Trump’s most zealous supporters trust most in the White House — and many former peers fear.
“I can hear Stephen’s voice,” said a fellow Santa Monica student, Nick Silverman. “Even when Trump reads these statements, I know, ‘That’s Stephen.’”
One youthful prank gives off images that are disturbing.
In his time on this campus of roughly 3,000 students, Mr. Miller sculpted the brand of hard-charging conservatism that would deliver him to the president’s ear, tracing a pathway at once complicated and straightforward. Mr. Miller, the middle child in a financially comfortable Jewish family, plainly relished the attention and notoriety of being the city’s red-hued exception, according to classmates — some of whom recalled chuckling at, or at least shrugging off, the antics of their resident gadfly. The line between puckishness and principle blurred in due time.
Mr. Miller set off on a patriotic semi-striptease before the editor of the student newspaper, according to the editor, Ari Rosmarin, theatrically removing a button-down to reveal an American flag T-shirt in protest of an article he found inconsistent with the national interest. (The White House denied any symbolic unbuttoning, though officials confirmed Mr. Miller’s fondness for the T-shirt.)
Then, of course was his early racism.
Most memorably, classmates say, Mr. Miller established a reputation for barreling eagerly toward racial tinderboxes, leaving some to wonder whether his words were meant to be menacing or hammy. Jason Islas, who had been friendly with Mr. Miller in middle school, has little doubt.
Shortly before the start of ninth grade, Mr. Islas said, he received a call from Mr. Miller informing him that the two could no longer be friends.
“He gives me this litany of reasons,” Mr. Islas said.
Most were petty, if mean, he recalled: an insult about his social awkwardness, a dig at his acne-specked face. But one stuck out.
“He mentioned my Latino heritage as one of the reasons,” Mr. Islas said. “I remember coming away from the conversation being like, ‘O.K., that’s that.’”
Several students said Mr. Miller’s trail of racially tinged comments amounted to a pattern. He railed against bilingual announcements, asking in a local editorial why there were “usually very few, if any, Hispanic students in my honors classes, despite the large number of Hispanic students that attend our school.”
Latino students remembered him engaging them outside group meetings, asking why they required a separate forum to discuss issues of identity, and chafing at Spanish being spoken in the halls.
“He tended to make some of the Spanish language stuff very personal,” said Moises Castillo, a classmate who described the exchanges as hurtful to this day. “There was a ‘if you’re not speaking English, perhaps you should go somewhere else.’”
Okay, this stuff has been pretty well covered, but, did you know about his Rosie Ruiz move?
He jumped, uninvited, into the final stretch of a girls’ track meet, apparently intent on proving his athletic supremacy over the opposite sex. (The White House, reaching for exculpatory context, noted that this was a girls’ team from another school, not his own.)
It was a girl’s team from another school. Well. That makes all the difference.
And this is the person the Moron uses to write his most important speeches, craft his cruelest immigration policy, and "one of the nation’s most powerful shapers of domestic and even foreign policy.” All “the best people.”