The FRONTLINE Interviews

McKay Coppins

Political Journalist, The Atlantic

McKay Coppins is a political journalist and staff writer at The Atlantic. He is the author of The Wilderness: Deep Inside the Republican Party’s Combative, Contentious, Chaotic Quest to Take Back the White House.

This is a transcript of an interview with FRONTLINE’s Michael Kirk conducted on June 4, 2019. It has been edited for clarity and length.

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Stephen Miller’s Early Political Action

So who is [Stephen Miller]?What are his circumstances, and what is he like?

In a lot of ways, I think Stephen Miller was a regular member of the Santa Monica community when he was growing up.You know, he had affluent Jewish parents.He went to the local public schools.His, you know, family was a well-regarded Democratic family that generally seemed to buy into the kind of predominant liberal politics of the community.But the turning point for him was, in middle school, when he was doing a magazine drive and bought himself a copy of—or a subscription to Guns & Ammo magazine.And he said that he read that magazine and came across a column written by Charlton Heston arguing for gun rights, and it was the first piece of conservative writing he had ever encountered.And that was kind of the beginning of his ideological transformation.

I mean, the years that followed, he kind of immersed himself in conservative literature and writing and talk radio.What’s interesting is, a lot of the time, when you interview prominent Republicans or conservatives, they talk about the thinkers who influenced them as Edmund Burke or Milton Friedman or even someone like Ayn Rand.And when I asked him, you know, what Miller says is that the people who most influenced him were Rush Limbaugh and David Horowitz, these kind of polemicists and talk radio personalities, and that’s kind of where his conservative thought was forged.But it was also forged in reaction to the affluent liberalism that surrounded him.

So he runs for student body office in liberal Santa Monica, California, and what happens?

Yeah.So he—he gets up on stage in this amphitheater at his high school and gives this kind of outrageous speech, saying that he’s sick and tired of being told to pick up trash when there are janitors who can do it for them.And you know, to this—this crowd of kind of liberal teenagers who have been taught to check their privilege, it was obviously a very provocative statement.And—and he was kind of immediately cut off and dragged off the stage, and he’s getting booed by all of his classmates.But what’s interesting is, if you watch the tape, and you look at his face, he’s clearly delighted by the reaction he’s gotten.And that is kind of the essence of Stephen Miller as a teenager.

One of the things that defined his personality, when you talk to people who knew him at the time, was that his whole goal at any given time was to offend and shock the sensibilities of his liberal peers.He was always looking for ways to make comments in class or pull stunts that would kind of be politically incorrect and—and make his liberal peers uncomfortable.He was kind of very proudly—he would call himself a nonconformist.I think some of the other people who remember him would call him a troll or a provocateur.But he was always kind of getting in their faces and making people uncomfortable.

When does immigration enter his field of vision and become one of the things that he hangs onto all the way along?Is it happening that early?

Yeah, well, you know, Santa Monica and California in general, at that time, when he was growing up, immigration was a big issue, and it was a divisive issue.In Santa Monica, where he lived, there was a pretty diverse multicultural community, and the public schools certainly made efforts to reach out to Hispanic students and immigrants.There were—the class announcements were in English and Spanish.There were bilingual posters.Racial harmony retreats were organized by students.

And Stephen Miller, in his kind of puckish, trollish way, constantly kicked back against that.He would loudly complain about the Spanish-language announcements and say that if you’re in this school, you should learn English.And immigration was just kind of one of these divisive issues that he would engage with all the time.He wrote columns for his local papers or the high school paper talking about it.

And, you know, there was one story that I heard from a friend of his, Jason Islas, who was Hispanic.He and Stephen Miller had been friends in middle school, and—and before they entered high school, Stephen called him, according to Jason, and told him, “We can’t be friends anymore,” and kind of listed all these reasons why, and one of them was allegedly his Mexican American heritage.

So some people who knew Stephen, even back then, say there were these early glimpses of kind of a really—of xenophobia or racism or—or a kind of nativism that they see continue throughout his political career.

Yeah.He’s on the radio, I think I read in your story, 30 times, he says, in his high school years.By 16 he’s been on national radio.What is he talking about?

Well, he is remarkably effective at, even at a young age, at kind of kicking up culture-war controversies.… So when he was in high school, he raised complaints that they weren’t reciting the Pledge of Allegiance in class, and when his complaints fell on deaf ears with the administration, he immediately turned it into a local controversy which then became kind of a broader controversy, by going on local conservative talk radio and writing articles about it, and [he] kind of singlehandedly turned this into a big controversial issue that the administration had to deal with.

And so what’s funny is, you know, it worked.The administration gave in.They started doing the Pledge of Allegiance.But beyond that, it also had the effect of turning Stephen Miller into kind of this local teenage political celebrity.And from that point on, he was frequently invited on both local and national conservative media outlets to weigh in on liberal bias in the schools or various other kind of culture-war issues that he could get his hands on.

…. Any sense about how his family felt about him as a young conservative celebrity?

… Early on, his parents seemed to view this as kind of teenage-rebellion stuff, that he might grow out of at some point.And his broader family, we now know, because they’ve come out and said it, now view his politics as abhorrent.And like I said, he was part of kind of this good liberal Jewish family that, you know, fit in pretty comfortably in Santa Monica and in the broader kind of political-cultural-socioeconomic community.And so, you know, a lot of people are used to their teenage kids acting out.Some kids drink or party or get in trouble with girls.He, Stephen Miller, was—was a—turned himself into a political culture warrior, and I think that his family thought that he would grow out of it, but he obviously didn’t.

Is there an ambition there in young Stephen Miller that you can think about, talk about, for where he ended up now or wherever it is?What is the ambition, if there is some, directed at?

I think that Stephen had ambitions from very early on to be involved in the political arena somehow.Whether that was in media or law or politics, he saw himself as somebody who would be fighting these battles for the rest of his life, and the question was just how.And even as early as graduating high school and heading off to Duke, he wanted to find a way to get into politics.

So he selects Duke as his place to go, certainly a liberally oriented university.He brings with him, as far as I can tell, the doctrine of Mr. Horowitz, a sort of basic plan, a plan of action.Tell me about that.

David Horowitz is this kind of prominent conservative ideologue who writes books, and he organized this national coalition of campus conservative groups and sent a handbook to each of them that kind of laid out, step by step, how to create conservative controversies on your campus.And by all accounts, Stephen Miller followed this advice pretty well and was very effective at it.And so, you know, the handbook had instructions like, you know—the handbook encouraged students to invite controversial speakers to campus, and if the administration barred them from coming, to issue a press release and try to get coverage for the school’s liberal bias.

You—they were encouraged to find ways to report professors for political bias in their lectures.They were taught how to get into the local newspapers and local talk radio.In a way, David Horowitz was trying to train up a generation of kind of campus culture warriors with the idea that the more grief they could cause on at liberal colleges, the more their agenda would get noticed and get attention.

Stephen Miller was the most effective of any campus culture warrior of that time, David Horowitz later told me.He invited—so at one point, David Horowitz published a book identifying what he considered the 100 most dangerous academics in the country, and two of them were professors at Duke, so Stephen Miller invited David Horowitz to come to Duke and give a speech about this.

And in the run-up to his speech, Miller wrote op-eds for the campus newspaper and drew attention to these—these supposedly dangerous professors, and kind of turned it into this big controversy.And by the time Horowitz arrived on campus, there were hundreds and hundreds of people in a lecture hall, ready to hear him.And some of them were hecklers, and some of them were protesters, and some of them were just people in the community who were curious.But it had exactly the effect that Horowitz and Miller wanted, which was, they created this big spectacle.

And Miller leaned into the spectacle, introducing Horowitz.He gets up on stage and gets behind the podium and pulls out this list from his breast pocket of campus entities and clubs and organizations that had refused his request to fund Horowitz’s visit to campus, and then reads it, methodically, as though trying—kind of daring them to react or to give him what he wanted.He’s baiting them, basically.And—and at one point, a bunch of the students start cheering the organizations that wouldn’t fund Horowitz’s visit, and Miller responds by saying that it’s really a shame that people don’t want an open exchange of ideas at Duke.

And the whole thing is just, you know, it’s all spectacle; it’s performance art.But it has the point of creating what Miller would later call “constructive controversy for the sake of enlightenment.”He told me that he sees a lot of value in creating constructive controversy for the sake of enlightenment, meaning, you know, by drawing attention to some issue, even through outrageous, provocative, incendiary means, he could educate or make his argument in a—in a—on a bigger platform than he would have otherwise.

So he’s a provocateur with a point.I mean, he’s serious about it…

Right.You know, Miller has said he doesn’t believe in provocation for its own sake.He doesn’t just want to create a spectacle and draw attention to himself.He has a very robust and fully fleshed-out ideology that lurks beneath the surface of all these stunts and provocations.That ideology becomes sharper and more clear as he leaves Duke and enters politics professionally.

Let’s—before we leave Duke, let’s spend a second on the—or a little bit on the lacrosse, because it’s also going to get him on O’Reilly and Nancy Grace and other things.

… So toward the end of Stephen Miller’s junior year at Duke, the university gets national attention when a black woman accuses three white lacrosse players at the school of sexually assaulting her.So immediately Duke becomes kind of the ground zero of this culture war and the national debates over racism and privilege.An army of reporters descend on the campus.There are local protests.There are—you know, Durham, North Carolina, where Duke is, just immediately kind of becomes this—this epicenter of controversy.

And with so many national media figures kind of roaming the campus, looking for students to weigh in, Stephen Miller sees an opportunity.At this point, he is writing a column for his campus newspaper called “Miller Time,” in which he weighs in on political issues and local issues, campus issues, from his kind of conservative, incendiary viewpoint.

So obviously, cable news bookers see this kid who’s willing to go to bat for the lacrosse players, which is a very unpopular cause, and immediately start putting him on TV.And so this really—this really is the moment that Stephen Miller has the biggest national platform he’s ever had.He’s getting invited on Nancy Grace.He’s getting invited on Bill O’Reilly.He’s being pitted in debates against, you know, social justice activists or people defending this—the accuser.Miller carefully skirts around the racial issues at the center of the—of this case and comes at it from a place of saying that he’s defending the due process rights of the accused and saying that this rush to judgment on campus and—and nationally is symptomatic of the left’s intolerance, and—and it needs to be—it needs to be exposed.And Miller sees himself as the one to expose it.

And so it’s really, you know, watching these clips, you can see the seeds of what he would become, because he is wearing these suits and ties.And he’s very conservatively dressed and has his talking points down.And he comes on these TV shows really ready to—to fight.He wants to get into debates.He wants people to challenge him so he can come right back at them.He is really combative and contentious and makes for great TV.And—and this is kind of a jumping-off point for his career in conservative politics.

When you look back—Santa Monica, Santa Monica High, Larry Elder, David Horowitz, Duke, lacrosse, the Horowitz playbook—what do you see happening?What do you see that we’ll see later forming up during that time period?

Yeah.He’s clearly learning the art of using provocation to advance an agenda, a political agenda, an ideological agenda.He—he is figuring out that the angrier he can make his opponents, and the more attention he can draw in whatever way necessary, the more he’ll be able to draw attention to his ideas and his agenda.He doesn’t think that he needs to make his case in a civilized way.He doesn’t think he needs to appeal to his opponents and try to persuade them.He is there to agitate them.He’s there to provoke them.He’s there to make them angry.And by doing that, he’ll be able to create a place for him to get his ideas out there.

It’s clear, when you watch those tapes or those cuts, that he loves it.He loves himself, and he loves who he is.

Totally, yes.The other important point, just before we move on, about that lacrosse case, is that he ended up being kind of right about a lot of it.The case fell apart.By the time he graduated, the case had unraveled.The lacrosse players had been exonerated, and the—the prosecutor who was pushing the case was later disbarred.And Stephen Miller really took an important lesson from that.He believed that he had been fully vindicated and that he, by kind of standing athwart to all the liberal consensus and the social justice warriors, in his words, was the one man who had really gotten it.

And he came out of college and out of that experience even more convinced of the righteousness of his cause and the rightness of his ideology.And he points back to that experience often, even today.

It’s a very interesting thing about him, that I guess at this moment, this fork in the road, he’s been on TV a lot, been on radio a lot.He knows performance.He could have, I suppose, said to himself: “I’m going to be a politician.I’m going to run for office.I’m going to be something.”But he chooses another path which we’ll watch happen all the way through, with [Jeff] Sessions, with [Steve] Bannon, with Trump.It’s almost like he’s an inside man who knows all the right moves and everything, almost like a caper artist, you know, in some way.

It is interesting.I would have—if you watch the—the first 22 years of Stephen Miller’s life, you would have expected him to be the man front and center.Whether he runs for office, whether he wants to host a TV show, you would have thought something like that.Instead, he—he decides to stay largely behind the scenes, where he realizes that he can have a lot more power and a lot more influence by—by kind of pulling the strings, and attaching himself to strident ideologues and principals who have power.And then he can kind of steer them in the direction that he wants to.And that—that starts very early on, almost as soon as he arrives at Capitol Hill.

Stephen Miller Arrives in Washington

So when he arrives on Capitol Hill, first stop is—is first stop Michele Bachmann?

Michele Bachmann, yeah.

So why Michele Bachmann?And what does he do there?

His tenure in Michele Bachmann’s office is short-lived.But Bachmann was, in a way, kind of the perfect embodiment of his brand of politics.She was this rising star.She was an outsider, antiestablishment figure, sort of a proto-Tea Party congresswoman.And I think that he was attracted to both her influence and media savvy, but also her desire to kind of kick against the pricks and—and make her—and agitate against the political establishment of both sides.From there, though, he gets to Jeff Sessions’ office, and that’s where his influence is really felt.And he really kind of cuts his teeth as—as a—as a mover and shaker on Capitol Hill.

So give me the 25-cent Jeff Sessions bio at that time.

… He had been U.S. attorney.He was a right-wing social conservative, very much within the religious right but also different from the Republican orthodoxy in key ways.He was much more kind of nationalist and nativist in his approach, very much a law-and-order conservative. But he had been elected to the Senate and was kind of widely held—how should I say this?He was not well liked by his colleagues in the Senate.The Republicans generally saw him as a troublemaker, not a team player, certainly an ideologue, but somebody who was completely unwilling to compromise on—even to advance Republican goals.

He was playing his own game, had his own agenda, and he seemed much more interested in kind of pushing that agenda from the outside than kind of signing on to any coalition to advance kind of Republican policy aims.

So Stephen Miller takes a job there, not as a—not as a policy staff guy, but as a—as a communications guy.Does he bring with him immigration as a central issue?Is he—you talk about this pulling-the-strings-from-the-inside guy.He’s—now here he is…

So he—I think Miller certainly had strident views on immigration at that point.But he came into Jeff Sessions’ office right at a time when immigration was coming to dominate the work of Congress and becoming a front-and-center political issue.And I think that that—that his experience in that moment—and we can talk about it in a second—but his experience in that moment sort of made immigration an even more important issue to Miller.

You have to remember, at this time, the Republican consensus on immigration was starting to shift toward the center.Mitt Romney had just—had lost the election in 2012, and the kind of consensus in Washington, and certainly among establishment Republicans, was that one of the big problems the party had was that they were seen as too anti-immigrant, too strident in their restrictionism and not friendly enough to Latino voters.

And, you know, in the wake of the 2012 election, Republicans put out this “autopsy” report that urged the party to moderate their views on immigration and reach out to Hispanic voters across the country.This was kind of the fast-gathering consensus in Washington.This was where Republicans were headed.

And because of those political developments, there was a moment where it seemed like true bipartisan legislation was possible, addressing immigration and kind of overhauling, reforming the immigration system in this country.There was the famous Gang of Eight in the Senate.Republicans and Democrats came together, hashed out this bill that—that the idea was they were going to tighten border security, but also provide a path to permanent residency for undocumented immigrants in the country.

And it was almost—you know, it was the beginning of Obama’s second term.It kind of seemed like maybe we were finally approaching this moment of bipartisan consensus on an issue that had plagued the country for so long, and a lot of people were really optimistic about it.And then you had Jeff Sessions and Stephen Miller and this kind of coalition of nativists and nationalists and right-wing types at Breitbart come in like a wrecking ball, just determined to destroy whatever bipartisan consensus there was and sink this bill.

Stephen Miller and Breitbart

Let’s talk a little bit about Breitbart, the relationship of Miller to Breitbart.The way I remember this story, and I think the way Bannon tells the story, it’s Miller who sort of cross-pollinates.

Yes.

He’s going back and forth.He’s coming over for get-togethers on Friday nights and little parties and stuff like that and eventually will bring Sessions into the fold.But it’s really him working with Bannon and the Breitbart writers and editors, people about his age, Julia Hahn and others, to get the word out about this issue that he’s fixing to figure out as the central issue.

So yeah.So you had in one corner this website Breitbart that was emerging as kind of the noisiest, angriest, most combative conservative website out there.And they—they really liked to engage in the insider Washington politics, but the way they engaged was by throwing bombs. And you know, they—they published screeds against Republican leadership.They were constantly reporting rumors designed to kind of embarrass Republican senators who were viewed as too moderate.And their writers were kind of these bomb-throwing outside agitators who clearly had an agenda but were also completely unafraid of how they’d be viewed at kind of Washington cocktail parties or whatever.

So Steve Bannon is running that site kind of as a weapon to wield in the intra-Republican debates.Then you had Stephen Miller, who comes from Jeff Sessions’ office.He’s working on Capitol Hill.He’s agitating on these issues, and he sees Breitbart as clearly people of common cause.And so he starts—he’s going to parties with the Breitbart reporters.He’s hanging out with them.He’s giving them tips and sending them scoops and—and using them as kind of his mouthpiece.

And as he kind of becomes more and more part of the Breitbart world, those reporters become more and more aligned with Jeff Sessions and Steve Bannon, and all three of them are kind of working together to sink this immigration bill.

You’ve got a legislation moving to the House.They’ve got the website, and they sort of target, at some moment, Eric Cantor…They’re going to, you know, knock down the second most powerful guy.They’re going to move Fox from the center more to the right.Those seem to be their aspirations.Does that feel right to you?

Absolutely.This coalition of Breitbart and Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, they spent very little time kind of fighting with Democrats.The wars, the fights that they were picking were all within the Republican Party.They wanted to purge the party of the moderates and the centrists and the squishes and—and turn the party into a more combative, right-wing, crusading institution.And so all of the work that they were doing was kind of—was kind of geared toward remaking the Republican Party in their image.

And it seemed, to most people in Washington at that time, like a sideshow at best.These people were not taken seriously.Stephen Miller would send these kind of rambling late-night emails to reporters that—that became a joke among the Capitol Hill press corps.People thought he was kind of ridiculous; that he was just this, you know, kooky, chain-smoking ideologue that you didn’t really have to deal with that much.The Breitbart people took him very seriously, and he by turn took Breitbart really seriously.He saw the growing power of the kind of new media right and—and gave them more power by feeding them inside information.

The—the crusade, the crusade to take down Eric Cantor was a classic example.Eric Cantor, in Washington, was seen as completely untouchable.He was one of the most powerful Republicans in Congress.He was extremely well funded.Most polls leading into the primary had him up I think 30 points.Nobody thought that this kind of weird, outside economics professor had any chance of beating him, but Breitbart just kept banging the drum, and they decided to make this kind of their—their cause.

And when on primary night Cantor was stunned to see that he had actually lost, Breitbart and Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon saw this as a moment of triumph, and also of a sign of their further triumphs to come.

Plug immigration into that equation.Was it the issue?

They certainly made it the issue.One of the key wedge issues that Cantor’s conservative opponents used was immigration.Cantor was, along with the rest of the Republican leadership, supportive of this bipartisan effort to reform immigration.Breitbart and the other kind of nationalist right-wing opponents used that to show—used that to argue that he was out of touch with the conservative base, didn’t care about what real Americans wanted, and had been corrupted by the political class in Washington.And that—that message proved surprisingly resonant to voters in his district and then to, more broadly, the conservative movement in the country.

How much of that is Miller?

So from what I’ve been told, Miller was constantly sending tips and story ideas to Breitbart, working with their reporters to form these kind of big, sweeping narratives about his enemies, both in the Republican Party and outside.He wasn’t writing the stories, but he was certainly the one forming the narratives that Breitbart was advancing, and that ended up leading to Cantor’s—Cantor’s defeat.

Rejecting the Republican “Autopsy”

You said the words “the base.”What do they identify that’s different than what the autopsy identified?

The—in retrospect, you look at that document, the autopsy that the RNC [Republican National Committee] created, and you see that they were working from a consensus of what—what they were hearing in D.C. in elite political circles, what they were reading in The Washington Post op-ed page, not what the average kind of conservative voter in this country wanted.

I think the idea of the autopsy was, “We need to expand the tent, and the way to do that is to come off as friendlier and gentler and—and more inclusive.” What Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon and Jeff Sessions and the Breitbart crew believed was that—they believed that if they went the other direction, became more hardened in their views, more conservative, that people would respond to that; that—that conservative voters didn’t want a party that was constantly apologizing and hemming and hawing over their beliefs; that they wanted a party and party leaders who were belligerent and defiantly in support of what they believed, and that—that Americans would respond to that.That was kind of the idea articulated at the time and has continued to be articulated as—into the Trump presidency.

So they were ready to make their bet that the base was the heart and soul of—of what could win for the Republicans, basically.

Yeah.And not only that, I mean, they—they also kind of defined themselves against the pro-business chamber-of-commerce wing of the Republican Party, where immigration was largely viewed as an economic issue.It was a way for large corporations to get low-wage labor in America.And—and I think that Stephen Miller and Bannon and the Breitbart crew kind of rightly identified that there was a populist anger bubbling beneath the surface at the sort of more Mitt Romney wing of the Republican Party, that the—that a lot of Republican voters didn’t want people who were going to be—play nice with big corporations and Wall Street banks and do their bidding.They—they wanted people who were going to position themselves as fighting against those corporate interests on behalf of workers.

And I think that the big success that—that they ended up having was in their ability to frame the debate that way, as opposed to—as opposed to making just average, you know, Hispanic people their only enemies.They were also kind of saying: “No, no, we’re—we’re fighting against the corporate interests, the fat cats on Wall Street.Those are our enemies.”And—and, you know, whether that was true or not, it certainly sold well.

The relationship between Bannon and Miller—what was it?

At what point?

So around this time, when they decided to go to war to beef up the immigration fight on the pages or whatever it is on the website, on the Breitbart website, as they begin to take on the Republican Party, and soon they’ll go looking for a presidential candidate.

I think Bannon saw Stephen Miller as clearly someone who was likeminded and who was useful to the enterprise.There were not that many people on Capitol Hill, Republican or Democrat, who wanted to engage with Breitbart, who wanted to give them scoops, who wanted to kind of help them.Most people kind of held Breitbart in disdain, and so Miller’s treating them seriously gave Bannon the feeling that they were on the same team.

And I think—I think Miller felt likewise.He saw in Breitbart, and certainly in Bannon’s leadership of Breitbart, a vehicle to further his ideas and to reshape the coverage, at least in the conservative press and hopefully more broadly, around the narrative that he had spent all the last several years trying to build.

And so they—they worked together pretty well and pretty seamlessly while the rest of Washington wasn’t paying attention, until all of a sudden they had to, because they were blowing up bipartisan deals and getting Republican leaders thrown out of office.

Mentor/mentee?

I don’t think that—I don’t think Miller would describe it that way.Bannon might.But I think Miller probably looked up to Bannon and appreciated what he was doing.But I don’t think he would consider him a mentor.

… What’s their style as a group?How do you assess the—who are these three guys?Now this is right before we go find Mr. Trump.

All three of them had their own kind of distinct styles.Bannon, it was loud and attention-getting and loved to be at the center of the action.Miller stayed behind the scenes but shared kind of Bannon’s appreciation for trolling and provocation.Sessions, I think, in a weird way, liked to present as this sort of courtly, you know, statesman-like senator, but then you would hear him talk, and you would hear his views, and you would see that he was pretty radical, even for kind of the conservative wing of the Republican Party at that time.

But he didn’t present his views in a way that seemed especially radical.He tried to, you know, follow all the laws of decorum and—and kind of conformed to the general tone of the Senate.It was only when you kind of listened carefully to what he was saying that you would realize how radical his project was.

… Bannon told us that he was looking for Lou Dobbs to run for president, and he asked Sessions if he would run for president, and they finally find a willing participant in Donald Trump.Take me through that.

Yeah.I mean, it’s interesting.Like you see—even before Donald Trump ran, you saw kind of an appreciation for his bombastic right-wing, immigrant—immigrant-bashing rhetoric.Stephen Miller sent an email saying that he wished Trump would run.Breitbart was kind of promoting Trump all the time, giving him interviews, covering his various political stunts at a time when no one in Washington was really taking Trump seriously as a political figure.

And you know, as the Republican primary field started to form, it was clear this was going to be a big field.There were a lot of people running, a lot of candidates, a lot of outside kind of Tea Party types even that you could have seen Breitbart getting onboard with.But Donald Trump was really the embodiment of this agenda and style and political ethos in a way that no one else, not [Sen.] Ted Cruz, not [Gov.] Bobby Jindal, not Marco Rubio, could really grasp.

Trump—it wasn’t just that Trump was—it wasn’t just that Trump was willing to say outrageous things.It wasn’t just that he—that he was able to kind of speak the language of the new conservative movement and the online right.It was also that he—his political instincts were where this new vanguard of right-wing nationalism in Washington wanted them to be. He—you know, Trump was not somebody with a fully formed ideology.He had spent most of his life as kind of somewhere between a moderate Democrat and an apolitical—you know, apolitical figure who just spouted whatever came to his mind.

But he clearly—he clearly had an instinct that led him to nativism and—and immigration restrictionism.And, you know, that was evident from the very first speech he gave, talking about a supposed invasion of Mexican rapists coming across the border.When Stephen Miller saw that and Steve Bannon saw that, they knew immediately that this guy was somebody who—who got what they were doing and who could be useful to them.

The Trump Campaign and Transition

Do you have any sense that they directly or indirectly brought him to immigration as a big issue before he was already there? ...

Bannon talked to Trump a lot in the years leading up to Trump’s entrance into the race, and so it’s possible that Bannon did.But—but beyond that, I mean, the way that they did this was that they had created—they had made immigration a central issue in the right-wing media in America, and Trump, who was not a kind of avowed ideological conservative, took his cues from the right-wing media and realized that immigration was—was this very salient issue with the kinds of voters he wanted to attract.And so in that way, Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller and Jeff Sessions kind of laid the groundwork for Trump to emerge as the—the signature immigration hard-liner in the race and end up winning the Republican primary that way.

And then of course, in some way that you, given what you know about Miller’s background, can appreciate and not be surprised by, Stephen Miller ends up writing Trump’s speeches and being the opening act.

Yes.Well, that—that is really interesting.So Miller knew right away that he wanted to work for Trump.It was clear that this guy was most aligned with him, both on issues like immigration and—and criminal justice and law-and-order issues, but also in his style, in the way that he—he got up on stage and said politically incorrect things and riled up crowds by making jokes you’re not supposed to make and—and kind of locating the tension points and just driving at them.That—that was classic Stephen Miller.So he knew he wanted to work for the Trump campaign.

And so he—you know, he was very good at channeling Trump’s instincts and turning it into prose.He would write speeches on the plane, on their way to a rally, and would kind of be typing furiously as Trump dictated to him and kind of shape them into some kind of coherent paragraphs.But what’s interesting is that somewhere along the way, Trump decides, hey, this guy would make a good warmup act for me, and starts sending Stephen Miller out onto stage at these rallies before he comes out, before the candidate comes out, to kind of whip up the crowd.

And you see Miller out there.When you see Miller out there, you can kind of see echoes of his former teenage self.He’s—he’s out there kind of, you know, speaking very stridently, but also having—he has a kind of half-suppressed grin or smirk as he says certain things, because he knows that whatever he’s about to say is going to rile up the crowd, but also drive Democrats and journalists just crazy.And—and that was a—and Miller really enjoyed that.He—he took a lot of joy in that.

And before long, Sessions joins the team, and so does Bannon eventually…

Yes.All three of them kind of end up in this unlikely place, where they’re now—where they’re pushing in the same direction.They’re making the same arguments they’ve always been making.But now they’re on the presidential stage with a candidate who’s just beaten 16 other Republicans to win the nomination, and has every camera in the world pointed at him.And this was really kind of the apotheosis of what all three of them had been working toward up until that point.

…. Trump gets elected, and suddenly our three guys are in tremendously powerful positions.

Yeah.You know, most people, even people on the campaign, didn’t expect Trump to win.Bannon and Miller both claim that they knew he would; to the bitter end, they knew that he was going to win.All of a sudden, they’re three of the most powerful people in the country.You have them in the White House, making decisions that are going to affect millions of people.These are people that just a couple years ago were, you know, responsible for writing blog posts and maybe kicking up some controversy on Twitter.Now they’re drafting executive orders and changing Department of Justice policy and shaping legislation.And they—they really are three of the most powerful people in America.But they haven’t lost their core instincts, and certainly haven’t lost their core kind of principles, which I think is best demonstrated by that first executive order with the travel ban.

The Travel Ban

… And Bannon, of course, said: “We knew it was going to be chaotic.That’s what we did it for.”

…. The executive order is assembled in a way that completely circumvents whatever traditional policies or processes exist in the White House to make sure that executive orders are legally grounded and that everyone has buy-in.This is really a Bannon-Miller special.They work together.They churn it out.They wait until Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump are out of the room, and then they present it to the president, and he decides to sign it.

And immediately, chaos ensues.There are protesters at the airports.People are getting detained left and right.The ACLU is filing lawsuits.Cameras are—are showing up at the airports to capture the chaos and the pandemonium.And most people from the outside saw that as a complete failure for the Trump administration.Look, the—all our worst instincts are confirmed: This president has no idea what he’s doing.The people around him have no idea what he’s—what they’re doing.This is—this has been—you know, this is—this is a mess.

But if you talked to Miller and Bannon about it, they claimed that this was all part of the plan.You know, again, this is another constructive controversy for the sake of enlightenment.They have drawn the attention of the country to Trump supposedly fulfilling a campaign promise, which started a year ago, to ban Muslims from entering the country.They—they believe that, for every liberal protester who shows up waving a sign in defense of—of a Muslim immigrant or a person from a Middle Eastern country, they’re going to win two more voters in the heartland.There’s this kind of grim political calculus that underlies all of it.And as chaotic as it seems, Miller and Bannon believe that they know what they’re doing, and this is actually going to help them, and help their cause, in the long run.

They had another item on the agenda right then at the very beginning, which was DACA [Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals], which they had promised the voters, Trump had promised the voters, repealing Obama’s executive order.They even had written it up.Trump didn’t sign it, but they were ready to go even then.

Oh, yeah.They—the idea that Bannon and Miller both had was that, as soon as they got into the White House, they were going to try to hit the ground running and check off as many boxes as they could.Bannon had this list of campaign promises written out on a whiteboard in his office that was composed of everything Trump had said on the campaign trail he was going to do.And the idea was, let’s try to work through as many of these as possible.No matter how many people get angry, no matter how many kind of programs or policies we circumvent or norms we break, we’re just going to, you know, push, push, push until somebody stops us.

And there were other elements in the administration, in the White House, that were much more cautious.And certainly the courts and judges had something to say about it, and they slowed them down.But Bannon and Miller, their—their instinct was to, you know, it doesn’t matter how many—how many things we break along the way, we’re going to try to shove this agenda down the country’s throat.This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

And that weekend, after the Muslim ban, Miller is on television.Trump loves what he sees.

Oh, yeah, yeah.So Miller gets sent out on—onto the Sunday shows to defend the executive order.And instead of kind of making a reasoned case for—for the executive order, instead of—instead of kind of defending the policy specifics, he goes out and gives this kind of virtuoso performance, saying that anyone who questions the president is going to be disappointed, and this president will not be stopped.

It’s the continuation of Miller’s supervillain persona that he’s been honing.When he gets on camera, he tends to affect kind of a very grim, glowering, mean visage, where he wants to be seen as kind of scary, an almost Darth Vader-like character.And whereas a lot of the Republicans who joined the Trump administration ended up kind of stumbling into supervillaindom, Stephen Miller had been courting infamy since he was in his teens, right?And so he loved this.He would go—so he goes out on the Sunday show, and—and just—just completely, you know, he unleashes a tirade against the president’s detractors and opponents, is completely unapologetic.And the president loves it.He compliments the performance and—and is convinced that Miller is one of—is a great surrogate for him, a great defender, and that more of his surrogates should be like Stephen Miller.

So then, in—like all avenging heroes, our guys hit the wall.

Right.

Fairly quickly.That spring—

Within like a week.

—… And Stephen, what does Stephen do during this moment of pushback from the moderates?

Well, so Miller realizes pretty quickly that the worst way to gain power in this White House is to overshadow the president, and so whereas Bannon is—is putting himself on magazine covers and kind of casting himself as protagonist in his own story, Miller immediately kind of recedes behind the scenes and decides that he’s going to cultivate alliances with whoever he needs to, whoever is in power at that moment.

So remarkably, he ends up kind of becoming allies with Jared Kushner for a while, two people who could not be further apart in their—in their politics and ideological worldview.But at that moment, Jared Kushner is ascending in the West Wing, and so Miller makes common cause with him.At other points, Bannon is ascending.At other points, Reince has ascended.And Miller kind of is very good at navigating the power structures and various infighting within the West Wing.Notably, very rarely shows up in any of the New York Times or Washington Post stories about the infighting in the White House.Miller is kind of keeping his head down and keeping his cards close to his vest, knowing that he can—he’ll find his moment to affect policy change, but he has to do it discretely and quietly and carefully.

Jeff Sessions and Stephen Miller Work on Immigration

Now Sessions, of course, after recusing himself, lots of things happen that spring.And of course [James] Comey gets fired, and a special counsel is nominated or named…Sessions does decide to do many things that are kind of infrastructure building for what’s going to come in September with the DACA stuff…He’s building judgeships, getting people—getting ready for immigration to come back up on the table.And I gather Stephen is working with him on that.

Yeah.So during this period of kind of being sidelined, Miller and Sessions do not drop their priorities.They continue to lay the groundwork for a big fight over immigration.They—Miller is working with the Department of Justice to—to create or to shape policies that will set the stage for a big fight over DACA.But the key is that they’re not doing it in public view, right?Miller isn’t leaking to the press.He isn’t out there making his case.He isn’t even kind of arguing in front of other people in the White House who might disagree with him.He’s kind of working very carefully and quietly, behind the scenes, with people in the Department of Justice, with Sessions, with Bannon, to set the stage for—for an eventual kind of clash over immigration, believing that, eventually, the time will be right, and the president will be ready to get on board.

But the key was that they didn’t do it in full view of other people.And Miller—Miller is very effective at channeling whatever Trump’s instincts are and making him think that he’s always on his side, even when they’re really not.

So he’s biding his time through August, through Charlottesville, through all those things.He’s around, I gather, writing speeches.

Yeah, he’s running the speechwriting team.He’s—he’s weighing in on any number of issues that the president wants him to weigh in on.One of the roles that he plays is, when Trump wants to hear an argument, an opposing argument for an issue, he calls Stephen Miller in and says, “What’s the case against what this guy is telling me?”And Miller, whether he agrees with it or not, will kind of lay out the case in sort of debate-team mode.That’s something that Miller is good at.But—but he’s—yes, he’s biding his time.He’s kind of waiting in the wings for his moment.

His relationship with the president?

It’s good.He—Miller is—is, in some ways, the quintessential staffer.He is—he’s all about kind of anticipating the president’s needs, telling the president what he wants to hear, being there to bounce ideas off, but never pushing the president further than he’s comfortable doing.There—there are a lot of people in this White House who get frustrated with the president and kind of break character and unleash their frustration in the Oval Office or to others, and it gets back to the president.Stephen Miller never does that.He’s very careful about—about only saying kind words about—about Trump.Even if it’s an off-the-record setting with reporters or with, you know, friends and allies in the White House, he’s just—he never says a negative word about Trump.And because of that, Trump—Trump likes him.Trump likes people who say nice things about him, and Miller is good at saying nice things about him.

And Miller’s good.The fight with Jake Tapper is just astonishing.But here it is.This is the kind of thing Trump would—would endear you to Trump.

Yes.And that’s the other thing.He picks—Miller is almost kind of performatively defensive of the president, and he picks these moments to showcase his loyalty and his fealty.And—and those tend to be the people who do the best in the White House, are—are the ones who are good at performing.The ones who are good at performing their loyalty to Trump are the ones who tend to excel, and Miller is very good at performing his loyalty.

So when somebody like Jake Tapper happens, what’s Miller doing?

What’s the strategic calculus behind it?

Yeah.

Yeah.Miller is, he almost kind of—he’s willing to martyr his own reputation to get closer to the president.So often, when Miller will go on TV, he’s not there to save face for himself or to make the host like him or make the audience like him.He goes on TV with the audience of one in mind, which is the president back in the Oval Office watching him on TV.And so he’ll pick fights.He’ll channel the president’s aggrieved feelings about the media.He’ll say—he’ll talk about how this is the—about how unfair these attacks are.And he’s basically saying things that most viewers would think are strange and outrageous and—and might make us scratch our heads.But he—he knows that the president is going to feel validated and vindicated watching him.

And in a funny way, it’s like a reverse playing possum.He’s not pretending to be hurt; he’s pretending to be something else.Meanwhile, he’s got something cooking.

And that’s the thing.Miller, when he goes on TV shows, he’s playing a long game.He’s there to ingratiate himself with the president in hopes of eventually advancing his own agenda, which he believes that the president mostly agrees with.Maybe he doesn’t always, but Miller—Miller, at the end of the day, sees Trump as a vehicle for his own ideas.He doesn’t really care about the success of the presidency and other facets.He cares about immigration and—and a few other issues.But immigration is the issue that animates Miller, and he’s using the Trump presidency as a vehicle to advance that agenda.

The Dreamers and DACA

It comes September.We’re at DACA now.Sessions and Miller have worked this up.They’re ready to go.They’ve been saying, for a while, the base is unhappy.It’s been months, and nothing has happened on the immigration front.I gather they—they read the tea leaves, they look in the air, and they say to themselves: “This is the moment.Everybody’s back from vacation.Here we go.”

Mm-hmm.The summer ends.Lawmakers return to Washington.The stage is set.And they convince the president to make his announcement that he’s ending the DACA program.And immediately it’s like a bomb goes off in Washington.You know, millions of people suddenly don’t know what their immigration status is, if they’re going to be able to stay in the country.It dominates the news cycle.And lawmakers are kind of suddenly in a frenzy, fielding calls from their constituents, asking, “What’s happening?”And—and Trump—Trump has effectively now turned the entire Washington conversation on its head, making it about immigration, with Miller kind of standing in the background, you know, very pleased with himself, obviously.

… Trump has always been a kind of wobbly guy on the “Dreamers” thing.He’s always been kind of supersensitive to them.So Trump is this kind of squishy guy on the issue, back and forth and back and forth.And so here we are.It’s interesting that the thing they bring up, and that he wouldn’t sign the DACA thing back when the administration began, and the thing they bring forward and really kind of box him in.It’s almost like Sessions knows what he’s doing.

Well, so the thing is, you’re right.President Trump’s instincts, when it comes to the Dreamers, are to help them out.What animates Trump about immigration is the idea of building a border wall and increasing border security, these kind of big, tangible things that he can see and photograph and make part of, you know, a photo-op.But he has, if nothing else, smart media instincts, and the president understands that Dreamers are among the most sympathetic figures in the national drama over immigration.I mean, he doesn’t want to be seen as a bad guy.You know, he thinks that there’s probably a way to help them out.We don’t have to mass-deport these people.Let’s figure it out.This is not a top priority for the president at all.

It is a top priority for Jeff Sessions and Stephen Miller, who see this as kind of the perfect flashpoint in the immigration wars, right; that if they can convince the president to do this, then it will send a very clear signal about where he stands on every other issue.This is about the most hawkish thing that the president can do.And by—by kind of pushing him in this direction and getting him to plant his flag, they have made it very clear that they’re now open for business on immigration; that there are a number of other issues that he’s going to—to work on, and they’re ready to fight about it.

Why does he do it?

That’s a good question.

Because he does it, and then he doesn’t do it, right?

Well, Trump seems to understand that the optics are not good for deporting all these—these Dreamers.He also seems to understand that the base elected him on the immigration issue.This is—there is no other issue more important to Trump voters than immigration.And I think that you had Stephen Miller in his ear, telling him: “Look, the base is unhappy.Your voters are getting restless.You promised that you were going to do this.You have to do it now.”And that argument ultimately prevails, at least—it doesn’t ultimately.That argument in that moment prevails.

Then MSNBC and all the news, they just annihilate him.It blows up.They kick him around.And he’s like, “Whoa, wait a minute.”And he has that meeting that he puts on CSPAN or whatever it is, where the crews come in, and he promises [Sen.] Dianne Feinstein that he’ll—“We’ll work something out.”

Again, Trump wants to be seen as a dealmaker.He wants to be seen as a reasonable guy.So he gets the lawmakers in the room and says: “Look, we can—we can hash this out.We can do this.Let’s make a deal.”And it was like an episode of The Apprentice.He’s playing the part of the wheeling-dealing businessman and wants to show his opponents, “Look, I’m not so unreasonable.”And by all accounts, that’s where his instincts were.He thought that there was a deal to be made.He didn’t realize that people on his own staff were going to sabotage that deal.

Miller is probably standing in the corner going berserk when he hears this.You see [Rep. Kevin] McCarthy trying to pull the president back.And meanwhile, Fox News, Laura Ingraham, Ann Coulter, they’re just going crazy.

Yep.All the right-wing media figures who championed Trump through the Republican primaries, through the election, saying that this is the guy who’s going to finally crack down on immigration, are losing their minds, because all of a sudden, everything Trump said during the campaign seems like it’s up for debate; that he’s willing to trade—trade all of his campaign promises away as bartering chips.

And so you see the kind of Breitbartian conservative media churn into gear and—and look like they’re kind of on the brink of turning on the president for really the first time.The—all of a sudden, the conservative media is banging the drum against Trump, and Trump is not used to that.He—he’s—he has always relied on Fox News and conservative talk radio to be behind him.And so he’s really stuck in this situation where, on the one hand, he wants to be seen as—as a dealmaker, and on the other hand, he wants to appease his base.And he realizes he has to choose one or the other.

Not 48 hours later, he’s talking to [Sen.Dick] Durbin and [Sen.] Lindsey Graham, and they say: “We’ve got a deal.We’ve worked out a bipartisan deal on this, on the DACA thing.”And he says: “Come on over here.Come to the White House now.”And meanwhile, Miller and Marc [Short], I guess, have been lining up [Sen.Tom] Cotton and [Sen. David] Perdue and others, and getting them over there, and whipping the president up.Take me inside what’s going on in that 48 hours.

So you have Durbin and Graham on their way over to the White House.Miller senses that their plan might be in trouble.He’s worried that if you get Trump in a room with these guys, they’re going to be able to talk him into going along with whatever they’ve worked out.And so he kind of hastily convenes a number of more conservative immigration hawks in Congress and says: “Get—get over to the White House right now.You need to be in the room for this.”And it’s really Miller who makes sure that the room is filled, not just with people trying to work out a bipartisan deal, but with immigration hard-liners who are going to represent, effectively, the Miller-Sessions-Bannon position.

And this is the meeting where Trump utters the—

…. So that is the meeting where Trump utters the notorious “shithole countries” comment, and that really blows up the bipartisan deal that was on the table.Republicans and Democrats thought that they had a—had a chance to get something done, but the second that Trump says that, and it’s leaked immediately, the deal is blown up.The media is wall-to-wall coverage of it.It’s one of the more brazenly xenophobic things that the president has said, and Democrats just feel like they can’t be at the table with this guy anymore.

And all the while, Stephen Miller, once again, standing at the perimeter of the room, listening to that comment, and must be pleased that he knows that it’s been—it’s mission accomplished.He’s done what he—he wanted to do.

Stephen Miller’s Staying Power

…I’m backing up just a little bit.What do you figure the impact on Miller is that—when Bannon leaves and is back at Breitbart?

You know, it was kind of the final nail in the coffin of this—this coalition that had been working together, these three guys, hand in hand, for years, to get to this point.You already had—if my chronology is correct, yeah, you already had Sessions on the outs because of the way he had handled the Russia—the Russia probe. Now you have Bannon out of the White House.Miller is the last one left, kind of pushing this agenda.Now all—none of them would give up, but Miller is now the only inside man.He’s the one in the room talking to the president.And I think it, in some ways, left Miller more exposed, because he didn’t have the allies that he—he came into the White House with.But on the other hand, it only made him more influential, because these right-wing immigration hawks, nationalists saw Miller as their—the most important guy in the White House.And so, in a way, within that movement, he became only more influential.

It is true that—here he is, the last man standing.And in some ways, as we find ourselves at the DHS [Department of Homeland Security] purge, as we find ourselves at “zero tolerance” and all the headlines associated with it, as we—as we find ourselves in the midterm elections and everything, here’s Miller seemingly, at least to us, really powerfully in place and with the president’s ear in a way that’s—that’s more powerful than ever before.

Right.Miller—Miller benefited from his patience.By holding back, waiting behind the scenes, waiting for his moment, he was able to outlast a lot of the other people who came into the White House with him.And at the same time, he eventually—he was able to wait for the moment that the president kind of came around and decided that he wanted to really go full bore on the immigration issue.And once that happened, Miller all of a sudden was one of the most powerful people in the White House, because he had—he was clear—that was clearly his issue.And he also was the most combative. And he was ready with a strategy.The child separation policy at the border, this was a policy that Stephen Miller had aggressively pushed inside the White House, and once it came out into public view, it once again was exactly the kind of controversial episode that Miller tried to orchestrate, right?He—when I talked to Miller, he said that he believes anytime the country is focused on immigration, the president is winning.It doesn’t matter what the polls say; it doesn’t matter what the tone of the media coverage is.If people are paying attention to this issue, it’s a win for the president.

And so when you’re at the border, you know, getting footage of crying children being ripped from the arms of their mothers, that would seem to most people like bad—a bad development for the president.To Stephen Miller, he thinks that this is just drawing the attention, once again, to the issue that we care about most, and—and he sees that as a win.

Leadership Changes

…. So he and the president have been unhappy with the leadership of DHS for a year.… He and the president decide to make some changes.

Miller and Trump had been impatient with the pace of progress on their restrictionist agenda on immigration.They felt that Homeland Security was dragging its feet, that there were too many, you know, moderates who were trying to kind of subtly undermine the president.And so after the midterms, Miller basically convinces Trump that now is the time to make a change.Kirstjen Nielson is ousted.There is a reported purge of several other members of the department who Miller viewed as insufficiently committed to their immigration agenda.And—and this is probably the moment of peak power for Miller.You now have Trump listening to him, more than he ever has before.He’s being given power to kick people out of the administration who aren’t on board with his agenda.And they’re heading into the 2020 presidential campaign, with the belief that immigration is going to have to be a key issue to keep the base motivated.

Miller’s whole strategy—and he’s gotten the president to buy into it—is to convince the country that even if the president hasn’t delivered on all his campaign promises on immigration, he has been fighting for it.And so the way to show that the president’s been fighting for them and for these issues is to keep picking fights and keep drawing the media’s attention to them.So I think that we’re going to keep seeing these big, explosive, divisive episodes around immigration, not because of incompetence, not because of mismanagement, but because it’s all part of a political strategy that they believe will reelect Trump.

What was that phrase you used?

“Constructive controversy.”Yeah.They’re going—I think Miller is going to keep creating these constructive controversies as he calls them, to not only pick fights about immigration, but to get the president reelected.

Even if it means blowing up people who otherwise should have been your allies…

No.No.And again, there’s a—there is an incorrect impression when these stories come out that the president has botched something, or these were mistakes that were made, and they’ve been leaked in a way that is—is meant to damage the president.The reality is, Miller wants these stories out.Trump might even want these stories out there.They need to show to their conservative base that they’ve been fighting for this issue of immigration, whether or not they’re actually making substantive progress.They just—they—they need to create the spectacle.They need to create the constructive controversies.And that’s what Miller’s whole life has been about creating, and he’s going to keep doing it.

So even when you see a 60 Minutes piece, or you see crying babies, or you see people being arrested, or you see the chaos that’s actually—it’s now a real crisis, I take it—they’re not worried about this.This is not causing the president to change or Miller to change their policies.

There are people in the administration who see these chaotic episodes around immigration and are chagrined or embarrassed or worried, at least, about the political implications.Stephen Miller sees these episodes and wants more of them.He thinks that this is nothing but good news for the president and for his agenda.

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