Have you been exposed to Trump senior aide Stephen Miller yet? For my money, he comes across extremely odd. Consider this statement, provided by WaPo but available from dozens of sources:
The end result of this, though, is that our opponents, the media and the whole world will soon see as we begin to take further actions, that the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned.
If I had to guess, I’d say he’s completely surrendered to the charisma of Presidential power – and is finding quite distasteful the idea that there may be severe limits on what his President can do. This might fit in with the research on personalities attracted to autocratic personalities (I can’t seem to find that link – a little help?). He’s smart, bright, and traumatized – as we find out from Politico‘s in depth report on Mr. Miller:
The 9/11 attacks hit when Miller was a junior at Santa Monica High School. The event shocked him to his core and left him feeling isolated in his patriotism, lost in a sea of peacenik liberalism. “During that dreadful time of national tragedy, anti-Americanism had spread all over the school like a rash,” he reminisced in a column called “How I Changed My Left-Wing High School.” “The co-principal broadcasted his doubts about the morality of the air strikes against the Taliban to the entire school via the PA system. One teacher even dragged the American flag across the floor as we were sending off brave young men to risk their lives for it.” Miller describes contacting conservative talk radio personality Larry Elder, and going on his show to complain about this school. Thus began a cycle that would repeat itself over and over in high school and college: Miller would clash with school administrators over a perceived leftist conspiracy—the school not saying the Pledge of Allegiance, say—then escalate the conflict by taking it to a conservative talk show, infuriating the administrators but yielding a compromise in Miller’s favor. After his appeal to Elder, for instance, the Pledge of Allegiance would now be said twice a week, though that was still not enough for Miller. “Policy dictates it should be said every day,” he wrote in a local paper.
If you want a little deeper look, Andrew Sullivan decides to draw a link between Miller and – himself. It’s an interesting look into Andrew’s mind, at the very least, especially since many on the far left heartily detest the man.
I feel like I know Stephen Miller, the youthful Montgomery Burns who lectured the lügenpresse last Sunday morning in his charm-free Stakhanovite baritone. I feel like I know him because I used to be a little like him. He’s a classic type: a rather dour right-of-center kid whose conservatism was radicalized by lefties in the educational system. No, I’m not blaming liberals for Miller’s grim fanaticism. I am noting merely that right-of-center students are often mocked, isolated, and anathematized on campus, and their response is often, sadly, a doubling down on whatever it is that progressives hate. Before too long, they start adopting brattish and obnoxious positions — just to tick off their SJW peers and teachers. After a while, you’re not so much arguing for conservatism as against leftism, and eventually the issues fade and only the hate remains.
Think of it in some way as reactionary camp. Think Ingraham and Coulter and Yiannopoulos. They are reactionaries in the classic sense: Their performance-art politics are almost entirely a reaction to the suffocating leftism that they had to endure as they rose through the American education system. As a young, lonely conservative in college, I now wince at recalling, I threw a Champagne party to welcome Reagan’s cruise missiles to Britain. Of course I knew better — and could have made a decent argument for deterrence instead of behaving like a brattish dick. But I didn’t. I wanted to annoy and disrupt the smugness around me. If you never mature, this pose can soon become your actual personality — especially when you realize that it can also be extremely lucrative in the conservative-media industrial complex.
Miller may only last as long as his boss, which I do not anticipate being all that long – although just achieving the Presidency is enough of a miracle to make you wonder if Trump could complete a term. And what can you do about smugness? Part of the makeup of the human race is competitiveness, and the need to broadcast any superiority that you achieve – in order to attract more support and possible mates. So lefty kids who think they have improved on the status quo tend to get a little smug and self-righteous. And then grow up to be the same, even.
But it’s an interesting peek into Mr. Miller. I’ll bet he goes to extreme measures to support and prolong Trump.
