Stephen Miller served Donald Trump the way Thomas Cromwell served Henry VIII. And he stroked Trump’s ego the way Roy Cohn did. That explains a lot.
Stephen Miller is the only aide Trump didn’t fire
Peter Baker is a journalist at The New York Times. His wife, Susan Glasser, is one at The New Yorker. They have written many bestselling books together. Their latest is The Divider – Trump in the White House 2017-2021. They discussed it yesterday on the C-SPAN program “In Depth.”
The host asked what accounted for Miller’s influence and longevity during Trump’s presidency. Baker and Glasser cited little more than his sycophantic cunning.
It was common knowledge that Miller felt Trump had more in common with King Henry VIII than President George Washington. He will live in infamy for declaring that:
The powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned.
(CBS’s Face the Nation, February 12, 2017)
Miller made that declaration mere weeks into Trump’s presidency.
Miller was Trump’s Thomas Cromwell and Roy Cohn
Miller propagated dystopian lies with an ease that would make Joseph Goebbels blush. Goebbels, of course, was Adolf Hitler’s minister of propaganda.
Yet Miller often acted as if he were channeling Thomas Cromwell. Cromwell, of course, was Henry VIII’s chief minister. He drafted Henry’s most notorious public policies, including England’s break from Rome. And he fixed Henry’s most notorious personal problems, including his divorce from Catherine of Aragon.
Except that Cromwell fell out of favor with Henry. Miller never did with Trump. And Henry did to Cromwell what I suspect Trump would’ve done to aides who fell out of favor with him. That is if he could get away with it. But Miller’s head would’ve been spared.
Racist and xenophobic speeches and policies defined Trump’s presidency. Miller drafted them. That’s why the Southern Poverty Law Center listed him on its “Anti-Immigrant Extremist” page:
Stephen Miller is credited with shaping the racist and draconian immigration policies of President Trump, which include the zero-tolerance policy, also known as family separation, the Muslim ban and ending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. Miller has also ‘purged’ government agencies of civil servants who are not entirely loyal to his extremist agenda.
That, with all due respect to journalists Baker and Glasser, is why Miller fared so well. What’s more, that’s the Miller everyone knows.
Miller’s distinguishing trait
Trump saw in Miller a practical reincarnation of his mentor Roy Cohn. Miller bears an uncanny physical resemblance to Cohn. That alone answered Trump’s forlorn question: “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” That resemblance may have been enough to endear him to Trump.
But Miller also demonstrated a Cohnian willingness to please Trump – anything to help Trump be his narcissistic, racist, fascistic, homophobic, xenophobic, thin-skinned self.
Trump wanted his attorney general at the Justice Department to be his Roy Cohn, legally. But he continually bemoaned their failure to do his bidding. In contrast, Miller was always waiting at the White House to be his Roy Cohn, politically.
Of course, like Cohn, Miller is Jewish. Yet, like Cohn, he abided by Trump’s boorish and notorious anti-Semitism. He even imbued Trump’s well-known prejudices with a rhetorical flourish.
Indeed, you would’ve thought Miller was as much of a White supremacist as Richard Spencer. Miller even shared fond remembrances of Spencer as a kindred college classmate.
But Spencer himself will live in infamy. He founded the “alt-right” neo-Nazi group. He was scheduled to deliver the keynote diatribe at their Unite the Right rally (of “fine [Nazi] people”) in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. That’s the one that turned out so deadly.
Miller’s manifest self-hatred was the most insidious feature of his presidential service. Interestingly, Trump had in Miller what he had in Kanye – a self-hating Jew and a self-hating Black. And they gave Trump license to be as anti-Semitic and racist as he wanted to be, respectively.
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