Colbert mocked Miller mercilessly. Recalling the promise “to go on any show, anywhere, anytime and repeat it and say the president of the United States is correct one hundred percent,” the late-night comic invited the Trump apologist he referred to as “young Gargamel” to appear on his CBS show with a promise that “if you don’t show up, I’m going to call you a liar. And if you do show up, I’m going to call you a liar to your face.”
There is a favorite fantasy about White House work that goes something like this: just when a presidential administration seems to have crashed and burned, a young aide, fresh-faced and idealistic, untainted by the cynicism of Washington, more in touch with the country than the old-timers who have the president’s ear, steps up and saves the day. It is a fantasy grounded in a little bit of reality and a lot of West Wing episodes. But when Stephen Miller stepped up, he did the opposite, revealing, as Joe Scarborough reflected during that Monday morning autopsy, that the crisis was severe. “Oh. My. God,” marveled Scarborough. “It’s much worse than I ever thought.”
By just about any measure, Miller is the “much worse than I ever thought” Trumpkin, a true believer who says he was inspired to embrace conservatism by reading one of those hysterical Constitution-warping screeds by longtime National Rifle Association CEO Wayne LaPierre—Guns, Crime and Freedom—that even National Rifle Association members know to take with a grain of salt. (Miller didn’t. He famously showed up at a freshman mixer in college and announced: “My name is Stephen Miller, I am from Los Angeles, and I like guns.”)
At Santa Monica High School, Miller literally pestered Mexican American students with demands that they work on their English and, as the Los Angeles Times recounted, “bemoaned the school’s Spanish-language announcements, the colorful festivals of minority cultures, and the decline, as he saw it, of a more traditional version of American education.” His pro–Iraq invasion column for the school paper was titled “A Time to Kill.” (Sample section: “We have all heard about how peaceful and benign the Islamic religion is, but no matter how many times you say that, it cannot change the fact that millions of radical Muslims would celebrate your death for the simple reason that you are Christian, Jewish or American.”)
Miller showed up at school board meetings to criticize programs that served immigrants and delivered a speech that asked why students had to pick up their trash when janitors were paid to do the job. Miller says he “resolved to challenge the campus indoctrination machine,” echoing the combative critique of David Horowitz, the right-wing critic of “political correctness” and “campus radicals.”
Miller preached Horowitz’s doctrines at Duke University, where he headed the campus chapter of his mentor’s Students for Academic Freedom group, griped about liberal professors and appeared on national television programs to amplify those complaints. He got to know white nationalist Richard Spencer, then a Duke graduate student, through the Duke Conservative Union. Miller formed the Terrorism Awareness Project to make “students aware of the Islamic jihad and the terrorist threat, and to mobilize support for the defense of America and the civilization of the West” with events like Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week. He even found time to write a campus column that offered insights like this one: “[The] pay gap has virtually nothing to do with gender discrimination. Sorry, feminists. Hate to break this good news to you.”
“He’s the most sanctimonious student I think I ever encountered,” John Burness, Duke’s former senior vice president of public affairs and government relations, told the Charlotte Observer. “He seemed to be absolutely sure of his own views and the correctness of them, and seemed to assume that if you were in disagreement with him, there was something malevolent or stupid about your thinking.” Burness termed Miller “incredibly intolerant.”
That’s been a common complaint. Oscar de la Torre, a Santa Monica school board member who grew up in the city’s historically Latino and African American Pico neighborhood, recalled arguing with a teenaged Miller about the need to address funding inequities between schools in high-income and low-income parts of town. “Early on in life, he was on a crusade against liberalism and liberals,” de la Torre told the Los Angeles Times. “He just didn’t buy it. He didn’t believe the oppression existed. This guy is 17 years old, and it’s like listening to someone who’s 70 years old—in the 1930s.”
That kind of thinking made Miller a natural fit with the man who would move him from the far-right fringe to the center of American politics in 2016. After a predictable stint working in the office of Minnesota congresswoman Michele Bachmann, Miller—with encouragement from Horowitz—joined the Jeff Sessions team, initially as a Judiciary Committee aide and then as a senior staffer in the Alabama senator’s office. Sessions found an ideological soul mate in Miller, according to Stephen Boyd, the senator’s former communications director. “Miller has demonstrated an ability to capture the voice of his boss in a way that is very important and also exceeds the ability of most Capitol Hill staff,” Boyd told Alabama writer Howard Koplowitz. Politico referred to the Sessions-Miller connection as a “mind meld,” especially when it came to opposing even modest immigration reforms and falsely labeling bipartisan proposals such as the DREAM Act as what Miller called “mass amnesty that would even include those who have committed serious criminal offenses.”
“Whether the issue was trade or immigration or radical Islam, for many years before Donald Trump came on the scene, Senator Sessions was the leader of the movement and Stephen was his right-hand man,” explained Stephen Bannon, who got to know the younger right-winger when Breitbart News provided vital support for a Sessions-led effort to scuttle the “Gang of Eight” effort of moderate Democrats and mainstream conservative Republicans to enact an immigration-reform bill. Miller gets high marks from Bannon for helping to forge the populist anti-immigrant, Muslim-bashing message that fueled the Trump campaign. “You could not get where we are today with this movement if it didn’t have a center of gravity that was intellectually coherent,” Bannon told Politico in 2016. “And I think a ton of that was done by Senator Sessions’s staff, and Stephen Miller was at the cutting edge of that.”
Miller returns the compliment.
“Steve and I got to know each other very well during the 2013 immigration debate,” Miller told Rosie Gray of the Atlantic. “He and I and Sessions would spend an enormous amount of time developing plans and messaging and strategy; also him just covering what we were doing, pushing out narrative and copy. I got to know him, I got to know a lot of his staff, a lot of people who came in to the Breitbart embassy.” (That’s a reference to the Capitol Hill row house where Bannon and his allies set up shop several years before they set up shop in the White House.)
The Miller-Bannon-Sessions connection explains a lot about the Trump White House. Miller was attracted to the Trump campaign in 2015 and quickly got close to the candidate (eventually emerging as Trump’s principal speechwriter and a fiery warm-up speaker at Trump rallies). He quickly drew Sessions into the fold, helping to secure an endorsement of Trump by the Alabaman that came months before other prominent Republicans fell in line. Both men then welcomed Bannon’s arrival (after the exits of Lewandowski and Manafort) as the fall campaign’s CEO and chief strategist. But the trio had worked together long before they were working with Trump. They were not always respected, let alone successful, in the early days of their acquaintance. But they rose together, based on a shared set of ideals that white nationalist Jared Taylor tried to sum up in a piece he wrote after Trump’s inauguration. Though he warned that Trump was “not a racially conscious white man,” Taylor allowed as how there were “men close to him—Steve Bannon, Jeff Sessions, Stephen Miller—who may have a clearer understanding of race, and their influence could grow.”
That is not how Bannon, Sessions and Miller characterize themselves, or their mission. But they understand that they were until very recently outsiders. Miller’s presence in the inner circle is in many ways the proof of the political transform
ation they have forced upon the Republican Party and official Washington by Trump’s election. Even if the insider intrigues of the West Wing may alter the precise roles, and the precise influence, of men like Miller and Bannon, the fact that they are “at the table” when the president’s inner circle gathers is a jarring reminder that this administration operates with a dramatic different set of standards than those that came before.
“The ascent of Mr. Miller from far-right gadfly with little policy experience to the president’s senior policy adviser came as a shock to many of the staff members who knew him from his seven years in the Senate. A man whose emails were, until recently, considered spam by many of his Republican peers is now shaping the Trump administration’s core domestic policies with his economic nationalism and hard-line positions on immigration,” wrote Glenn Thrush and Jennifer Steinhauer in a New York Times profile of Miller. “But his unlikely rise is emblematic of a White House where unconventional résumés rule—where the chief strategist is Stephen K. Bannon, until recently the head of the flame-throwing right-wing website Breitbart News, and the president himself is a former reality television star who before winning the nation’s highest office had never shown much interest in the arcana of governing.”
The Times profile was published just hours before Miller made his fateful round of appearances on that Sunday morning in February. Miller’s moment had come. He was an essential man in the Trump White House, working with Bannon to craft the president’s incendiary inaugural address and the Muslim-ban executive order that unleashed so much chaos.
“Steve is a true believer in every sense of the word, not just in this message of economic populism but in President Trump as a leader,” said Jason Miller, the unrelated Trump spokesman who worked closely with Stephen Miller throughout the campaign. “Steve’s fiercely loyal and has a better understanding of the president’s vision than almost anyone.”
That is probably true. There is no reason to doubt that Miller was channeling Donald Trump when he announced on Face the Nation that the powers of the president “will not be questioned.”
The problem is that presidents are almost always ill-served by true believers who do not know when to stop channeling the worst impulses of their bosses and when to start reassuring the American people that they have not elected an autocrat.
— 5 —
THE JIHAD WHISPERER WITH THE ANTI-SEMITISM BADGE
Sebastian Gorka
Deputy Assistant to the President
When the notorious anti-Semite vice-admiral Miklós Horthy de Nagybánya took control of Hungary in the aftermath of World War I, he dubbed himself “His Serene Highness the Regent of the Kingdom of Hungary” and established the Vitézi Rend, an institution of supposedly “chivalric character.” Later, after Horthy aligned Hungary with Adolf Hitler’s Axis during World War II and approved the enactment of Nazi-style anti-Jewish laws, Hungarian property that was forcibly taken from Jews was awarded to members of the Vitézi Rend and its collaborationist allies.
U.S. State Department officials would eventually include the Vitézi Rend on its list of World War II–era Nazi-allied and Nazi-directed organizations. Despite post-war efforts to dissolve the group, to this day it remains a presence in Hungary. And in the Hungarian expatriate community that includes one of Donald Trump’s most influential aides. That aide was the subject of what was arguably the most remarkable exposé of the Trump administration’s first hundred days. “Nazi-Allied Group Claims Top Trump Aide Sebastian Gorka As Sworn Member,” read the headline of the Forward article by its correspondent in Budapest. “Sebastian Gorka, President Trump’s top counter-terrorism adviser,” the newspaper reported, “is a formal member of a Hungarian far-right group that is listed by the U.S. State Department as having been ‘under the direction of the Nazi Government of Germany’ during World War II, leaders of the organization have told the Forward.”
Gorka did not respond to repeated efforts by the highly regarded paper, which began more than a century ago as the Jewish Daily Forward, to get his response to the news that Vitézi Rend leaders had said that the presidential advisor took a lifelong oath of loyalty to their group. After initially telling reporters to direct their questions about the March 16, 2017, report to the White House press office, Gorka contacted another publication, Tablet magazine, and asserted that he had “never been a member of the Vitez Rend” and had only occasionally worn “my father’s (Vitézi Rend) medal and used the (Vitézi Rend symbol) ‘v.’ initial to honor his struggle against totalitarianism.”
Then a Vitézi Rend faction to which the Forward had tied the Trump aide confirmed to BuzzFeed that Gorka was, indeed, a current member.
The dispute may seem obscure to some, but those with a sense of history (and those with fears that it might repeat itself) recognized the profound implications of the concerns that have been raised with regard to Gorka and his associates in the Trump White House. Whether Gorka is a “sworn member” or simply a young man with nostalgic sympathies, this is not the sort of organization with which presidential advisors ought to be linked.
“The group to which Gorka reportedly belongs is a reconstitution of the original group on the State Department list, which was banned in Hungary until the fall of Communism in 1989,” explained the Forward. “There are now two organizations in Hungary that claim to be the heirs of the original Vitézi Rend, with Gorka, according to fellow members, belonging to the so-called ‘Historical Vitézi Rend.’ Though it is not known to engage in violence, the Historical Vitézi Rend upholds all the nationalist and oftentimes racial principles of the original group as established by Horthy.”
Horthy’s legacy is a complicated one. He was a nationalist who shifted loyalties between the Axis and the Allies and who claimed to have resisted some of Hitler’s most brutal demands. Yet, there was never any question of his anti-Semitism. Horthy declared it in a blunt letter to Hungarian prime minister Pál Teleki. Written as Hungary was imposing Nazi-inspired “Jewish laws” that restricted Jewish involvement in government, commerce and the professions, prohibited Jews from marrying non-Jews and identified non-Jews who had Jewish ancestors as “racially Jewish,” Horthy’s letter explained that “as regards the Jewish problem, I have been an anti-Semite throughout my life. I have never had contact with Jews. I have considered it intolerable that here in Hungary everything, every factory, bank, large fortune, business, theatre, press, commerce, etc. should be in Jewish hands, and that the Jew should be the image reflected of Hungary, especially abroad. Since, however, one of the most important tasks of the government is to raise the standard of living, i.e., we have to acquire wealth, it is impossible, in a year or two, to replace the Jews, who have everything in their hands, and to replace them with incompetent, unworthy, mostly big-mouthed elements, for we should become bankrupt. This requires a generation at least.”
When the Nazis and their Hungarian supporters began the forced deportation of Jews to Auschwitz in 1944, at a rate of twelve thousand a day, Horthy complained about “the handling of the Jewish question in a manner that does not correspond to the Hungarian mentality” but explained that “in these matters I was forced into passivity.”
Only after Franklin Roosevelt carried through on his threat to begin massive aerial bombing of Hungary did Horthy overcome his passivity and order a halt to the deportations. By that time, however, historians tell us that at least 437,000 Jews had been sent to Hitler’s concentration camps, where all but a handful perished.
Yet, today, notes the Forward, “the Vitézi Rend has not left its legacy of racism behind. Horthy is revered among the organization’s members.” The former leader’s speeches about the need for Hungarians to practice “love of their race” are widely quoted at a time when Hungary has experienced a resurgence of right-wing extremism and overt anti-Semitism.
As for Gorka, while he and other Trump administration officials refused to discuss Vitézi Rend or Hungarian nationalism, evidence mounted that he wore his connection to the hau
nted past of his ancestral homeland with pride. The London-born Gorka was for a number of years active on the right wing of Hungarian politics (he’s a man “with close ties then to Hungarian far-right circles, and has in the past chosen to work with openly racist and anti-Semitic groups and public figures,” according to the Forward) before becoming a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2012. And he wore a Vitézi Rend medal when he attended a Trump inaugural ball as a newly minted deputy assistant to the president.
Gorka defended his sartorial choice (wearing not only the badge but a tunic and ring associated with Vitézi Rend) as an homage to his father’s anti-communist activism in post-war Hungary. It was not the first time Gorka had rejected complaints about the use of symbols with anti-Semitic or fascist connections. In 2006, when Hungarian right-wingers were making a priority of displaying the Arpád flag, a historic red-and-white banner that was favored by the Hungarian Arrow Cross Party at the time when its followers were murdering thousands of Budapest Jews, Gorka (then the executive director of a conservative think tank in Budapest) told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency: “If you say eight centuries of history can be eradicated by 18 months of fascist distortion of symbols, you’re losing historic perspective.”
That comment anticipated the rejection of historical memory, and sensitivity, by Donald Trump and his supporters as “political correctness run amok.” When the Times of Israel noted in February 2017 that “Top Trump aide wears medal of Hungarian Nazi collaborators” and when Talking Points Memo asked: “Did Gorka really wear a medal linked to Nazi ally to Trump inaugural ball?” they were attacked with a vengeance by the editors of the Breitbart News site, who decried the “media attempt to smear Sebastian Gorka as a Nazi sympathizer” as “Fake News.”