Trump's Senior Advisor Stephen Miller Is a White Nationalist

Anybody who caught his warm-up act on the campaign trail in 2016 tumbled in less than two minutes to the fact that Stephen Miller was a creature of the primordial political ooze. He was a nasty bit of business, unleavened even by the slightest bit of wit or humor. He looked on the campaign crowds as though they’d come to watch him torture puppies to death with a flamethrower. Not only was this a guy you didn’t want close to any source of political power, this was a guy you didn’t want close to power tools. On Tuesday, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s newsletter, Hatewatch, published a collection of e-correspondence from Miller that fairly well frames him as an outright white nationalist with more than a little of that Nuremberg torchlight illuminating his thinking. My god, how low have we slipped that this guy commands any part of a democratic self-government?

In the Trump administration, where staffers come and go quickly, White House senior policy advisor Stephen Miller has managed to stick around since the campaign days when he worked as a speechwriter. Miller, who previously worked as a communications director for then Alabama senator Jeff Sessions, became Trump's point person on immigration, particularly after the departure of Kirjsten Nielsen as secretary of Homeland Security. And insiders have credited him with some of the administration's most extreme anti-immigration policies: family separation policy; attempts to undo protections for immigrants in the U.S. legally; and a proposal to permanently block green card access for any immigrant who relied on social services. Miller has long drawn accusations of white supremacist leanings both within and outside the Trump administration. After poignant images circulated of migrant family separations at the border, one outside White House advisor told Gabriel Sherman at *Vanity Fair: “Stephen actually enjoys seeing those pictures at the border. He’s a twisted guy, the way he was raised and picked on. There’s always been a way he’s gone about this. He’s Waffen-SS.” Now there is public record of Miller promoting explicit and virulent white nationalist propaganda. On Tuesday, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which tracks and monitors U.S. hate groups and extremists, released a series of e-mails between Miller and Katie McHugh, a former editor at the far-right website Breitbart. McHugh—who renounced the far right since being fired from Breitbart—told the SPLC that other editors at the site introduced her to Miller to use for direction when covering immigration. Spanning 2014 to 2017, the messages include many examples of Miller referencing white supremacist websites, writers, and books, as well as railing against U.S. immigration policies he would later work to undo in the Trump White House.