He’s ba-a-a-ck. This time, Stephen Miller’s bite is worse than his bark

My wife and I were vacationing on the sandy shores of Aruba during President Trump’s first term when I decided to relieve the monotony of sun and surf by writing a piece about someone who both fascinated and repulsed me in what was then the new administration.

I’m referring to Stephen Miller, and during version 1.0, he was the bullying in-your-face non-apologist for his boss’s harshest proposals on immigrants (legal and otherwise), asylum seekers, detentions, deportations, family separation, and border walls.

Early on, he made the rounds of Sunday morning talk shows and kept his pronouncements modulated somewhere between combative and pugnacious. His braying became so loud and outrageous that even his White House minders took note and yanked him back from public view for the remainder of Trump’s initial term.

In version 2.0, Miller has insinuated himself into the highest levels of the White House as deputy chief of staff, speechwriter (“the American carnage stops right here”), and de facto director of Homeland Security initiatives. His profile may be lower but his fingerprints touch wider policy, and his ideology is even more punishing and retributive than that of the boss he serves with an obedience bordering on the obsessive.

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And, yes, Miller is still Jewish. Although he has been called out by his former rabbi, disowned by an uncle for behaving like a Nazi, and sown deep division among his siblings and extended family, he really doesn’t need to depend on a cleric’s blessing or a relative’s avuncularity when the president of the United States attended his wedding at a Conservative shul in 2020 and his bride, Katie Waldman, served as Vice President Mike Pence’s communications director.

Fast forward five years. The Millers now have three children, and Ms. Waldman continues her public function as spokesperson for Elon Musk’s DOGE-ers. If anything, the rise in the fortunes of this lightning-rod couple prove that unswerving loyalty to President Trump is the unsurpassed quality that, well, trumps all else.

Miller’s trajectory, fueled by the malignant forces of exclusion and racism, has been breathtaking. Barely into his thirties, he was already a hardened provocateur of radical right and xenophobic causes that he began embracing at Santa Monica high school, apparently after having difficulty with Mexican American students. Miller burrowed even deeper into the crevice of nativism as an undergrad at Duke, writing liberal-baiting broadsides in the campus newspaper and fronting ultra-conservative pop-up groups.

Graduate study, in a manner of speaking, was spent as an advisor to Representative Michelle Bachmann. The far-right Minnesota Republican peddled anti-Muslim conspiracy theories conjured and written by her eager assistant, who showed an almost unerring aptitude for grasping the inner workings of Capitol Hill.

Miller’s career as an operative received a further boost when then-senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, whose anti-immigrant views, while virulent, didn’t go as far as Miller’s, hired him as communications director. One of Miller’s major assignments was to help torpedo a bipartisan reform bill, crafted across the aisle, that offered both a pathway to citizenship and prosecution of undocumented immigrants.

During this period, Miller sent out hundreds of emails enlarging on his racist, regressive impulses. He found the “replacement theory” and birther arguments especially appealing and couched his views in language that would gladden the heart of any authoritarian apparatchik. He ranted about American identity being diluted by immigrants, cultivated and admired white nationalist groups, and espoused beliefs totally at odds with the essential ethical, moral, and halachic values of his Jewish background.

What’s especially grating and ironic is that Miller’s grandparents on both sides were immigrants. The Glossers and Millers fled the Pale of Settlement to escape pogroms ravaging the Russian empire at the turn of the last century and went on to became part of the immigrant success story. His father, Michael, is an attorney and Stanford graduate; his mother, Miriam, is a graduate of Columbia School of Social Work and worked with troubled teens before joining the family real estate business.

While Miller’s avalanche of emails went largely ignored or spammed, they did catch the attention of Trump guru Steven Bannon, who brought him aboard for the 2016 presidential campaign. Post-election, he became a senior White House advisor and the attack dog for the administration’s targeting of illegals, denying entry to nationals from mostly Muslin countries, and sealing the borders as hermetically as possible.

Guardrails or incremental measures held little attraction for a zealot like Miller. No approach, no matter how legally questionable or politically feasible, seemed too extreme or egregious. With Trump’s blessing, he proceeded to treat the entire country as a laboratory, one in which separating migrant children from their parents and denying entry to whole blocs of ethnic and religious groups was deemed acceptable and effective. Let the courts object to his bludgeon approach, Setbacks could be expected, but Trumpian judges would soon prevail.

In hindsight, Miller’s first four years served as a mere rehearsal for his present stratagems.  When Joe Biden defeated Trump, I thought I had heard the last of him. How short-sighted of me, and how I failed to grasp just how fitfully the last administration responded to the immigrant overflow until it became a dominant issue. Trump’s red-meat campaign rhetoric kept it festering even after Biden’s countermeasures significantly reduced the flow on the southern border.

Still, the situation was tailor-made for Miller. During his four-year absence from the West Wing, he busied himself as president of America First Legal, a collection of former Trump advisors and staffers working out of Mar-a-Lago who positioned themselves as a conservative alternative to the American Civil Liberties Union. They devised a series of harsh, questionable, and extra-legal approaches to have at the ready should their boss be reelected.

And this time around, Miller didn’t have to play the obvious heavy (not that he appeared to slink from the role at all). The new border czar, Thomas Homan, seemed almost heaven-sent from central casting. Big, beefy, blunt, and especially unapologetic for the havoc his squads of ICE agents have been inflicting around the country and abroad. Homan’s most telegenic moment came when he sat next to and dwarfed New York Mayor Eric Adams, who had just made a Faustian bargain to do the administration’s immigration bidding for quid pro on his criminal charges.

All that was missing from the image were the marionette strings.

What bothered me most about Stephen Miller then and disturbs me even more now is that he is a tribesman. A landsman. Not that Jews can’t be thoughtful conservatives or even thoughtless reactionaries. But to have a co-religionist in such an influential position who’s consumed by the deportation of 11 million people, by challenging birthright citizenship, and by dreaming up ways to work around due process and other fundamental rights leaves me both chilled and hollow.

Colleagues have reported a certain gleefulness as Miller goes about his work, undoubtedly gladdening the hearts of the white supremacist groups whose very rules forbid his membership. He’s too bright to be clueless, but possibly too brainwashed to care.

Jonathan E. Lazarus is a retired editor of The Star-Ledger and a copy editor for the Jewish Standard/New Jersey Jewish News. His mother was born in Ukraine, and he is a first-generation Jewish American.