The FRONTLINE Interviews
Robert Costa
National Political Reporter, The Washington Post
Robert Costa is a national political reporter for The Washington Post, the moderator of the PBS series Washington Week, and a political analyst for NBC News.
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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The Breitbart Embassy
So let’s start with the get-together of three guys at the “Breitbart Embassy”—[Steve] Bannon, [Jeff] Sessions and [Stephen] Miller—for a sort of sit-down and a dream session about: “You know, we could knock off the Republican Party.We could get immigration as a sort of major issue.Maybe that would work.Maybe we could find a president.We could slide Fox over to the right,” right, “or more to the right,” as their great wish-dream in ’14, ’15, somewhere in there.Who are those guys?What is the Breitbart Embassy, and what was their actual dream scenario?
It was “Exile on A Street,” just steps from the Supreme Court, a few steps from the Capitol.Steve Bannon, this raconteur, the head of Breitbart, he wants to revolutionize the Republican Party.He also wants to revolutionize world order.But for them, the project was the GOP, and he needed a horse.He needed somebody to help him change the party from the inside.
Remember, Bannon had tried to get Sarah Palin just a year earlier to run for president.She rebuffed him; she didn’t run.So in 2013—you’re talking about 2013, right?
Yeah, right around the time of the Senate, Gang of Eight and all that.
Yeah, so in 2013, Bannon has done a Palin documentary.He’s running Breitbart, but he still needs a candidate, a candidate who shares his nativist impulses, a candidate who’s on the outside, who’s a fringe character, someone he can guide and shape, someone who could really be an embodiment of what the Republican base was becoming: an outsider group, a group that rejected the global economy, that rejected the establishment.
And he looks out, and there was Jeff Sessions, this outsider from Alabama, a former judge.Bannon saw in Sessions someone who wasn’t the greatest speaker in the Senate, was known as a gadfly, wasn’t a friend of major corporations, but he had the right views on immigration.For Bannon, immigration was the key to political success in America because immigration was the way to win the hearts and minds of the working class.
And he didn’t have a relationship with Jeff Sessions, but he wanted to build one.He thought, he’s at least in the Senate; he’s inside the arena.He may not be close to the center of power, but he’s on the inside.And Bannon, having talked to a thousand different characters in the GOP, realized he wanted someone in elected office.Enter Jeff Sessions, and enter Stephen Miller.
Rejecting the Republican “Autopsy”
So, immigration.Now, in the post-Romney Republican Party, they have a different strategy about immigration.
In the wake of Mitt Romney’s defeat, it’s civil war inside of the Republican Party.The establishment thinks it’s time to move to the center.They write an “autopsy” at the Republican Party National Committee.The biggest faces in the GOP go on Fox News and urge caution on immigration.It’s time for the party to reach out to Hispanics.But there’s an undercurrent beneath all of that: The Bannon wing, Breitbart, they’re spoiling for a fight.They want tougher laws on the border.They want a big wall, or at least a fence.They want some kind of action on the border because they see an influx of illegal immigration as the major threat in the United States.
This is the split in the GOP.Mitt Romney had moved to the right on immigration, and he had alarmed many people inside of the party.But he had not gone far enough.2013 is this moment in the Republican Party where no one was in power.There was a vacuum.Romney had lost.The establishment, in effect, had lost their political capital.Into that vacuum walks Steve Bannon and Jeff Sessions.They said there’s no longer a president.George W. Bush was long gone.There’s no longer a presidential nominee.Romney had lost.
Into that whole atmosphere, there was an opportunity, an opportunity for the right wing of the right wing to step forward and take power.
When people say “the base,” I’m always interested in who was that base?What did they identify, Bob?
The base of the Republican Party in 2013 was a group of working-class conservatives.But they weren’t business owners necessarily.They weren’t the type of people who ran insurance companies or carpentry companies or worked in the office parks around suburban America.These were former Reagan Democrats who had moved to the right with cultural issues and with immigration, and they were unhappy with the Republican leadership.They thought people like Speaker John Boehner and Mitt Romney were only reflecting corporate America.There was a schism inside of the GOP.
There was the base that the party leadership thought existed, which was free trade, friendly to corporations, the chamber of commerce crowd.And then there was this new wing, a silent majority of sorts, of people who watch Fox News, hated illegal immigration, and they wanted a fight against the global establishment and the Republican establishment.It was a group of angry people.
And in the economic dislocation in the post-2008 period, they were the ones who felt they’d shouldered the burden for that collapse?
The biggest moment for the Republican Party wasn’t Mitt Romney’s defeat in 2012; it was the economic collapse in 2008.It’s a decade-long story between the economic recession in 2008 and the election of Donald Trump in 2016, the beginning of his presidency in 2017.The recession had broken the middle class.I remember sitting with Steve Bannon.I was sitting with Steve Bannon in Pella, Iowa, and he told me that the middle class could be radicalized; that it could be driven to the right on issues like immigration because of the frustration with the global economy.Bannon saw the unrest, and he wanted to capitalize on it.
Who is Stephen Miller?
… Who is Miller in this?You’ve described Bannon, and you’ve described Sessions.Who is Miller in this setup?
I first got to know Stephen Miller as a reporter.He was this shadow around Jeff Sessions.You would walk by Johnny Half Shell’s, the seafood restaurant on Capitol Hill.You’d see Sen. Sessions, and there huddling with him at the table would be Stephen Miller.If Jeff Sessions was somewhere, Stephen Miller was likely right there at his side.
He was the aide.Officially speaking, Stephen Miller was the press secretary.He was the spokesman.But he was more than that.He as the id for Sen.Sessions.He was the connection of Sessions to the Republican base, this new Republican base that was developing.
Stephen Miller became known to a lot of reporters.He would write emails that were 10, 15 paragraphs in length.It would come into your inbox surrounded by other press releases from different senators that would be one or two sentences or a paragraph long.Stephen Miller wrote screeds, screeds about immigration, and he was not taken seriously by most reporters or most Republicans.He was seen as an outsider, a gadfly, writing all these press releases.And he was in his 20s, and he was a staffer for Sessions, and you couldn’t get more on the back bench than Jeff Sessions.So you had a vocal press secretary in his 20s for a back-bench senator from Alabama, as far from power as you could get in Washington at that time.
But Stephen Miller had something very important that was growing day by day for him.He had relationships with the new Republican Party, with people like Steve Bannon, the outsiders.The outsiders were certainly on the outside, but they all knew Stephen Miller, and he would come to social events at the Breitbart Embassy.He would mix and mingle with them at CPAC [Conservative Political Action Conference] and other conservative gatherings.Stephen Miller was building his relationship and building his stature on the right throughout 2013.
When immigration becomes the fight in 2013, all of the critics of the Republican plan look to a voice on Capitol Hill like Sessions to be their champion.And to work with Sessions, they have to work with Stephen Miller.Stephen Miller became the point person for all of these talk radio hosts and activists and other back benchers like Steve King.They had to come through Miller to get to Sessions, and that was power.
So he’s a sort of behind-the-scenes-lever guy.We’ll see him appear, and we saw him as a youngster—anybody who was paying attention—back in Santa Monica and at Duke on The O’Reilly Factor and stuff.He was a great performer.He probably could have gone that way.
He wasn’t a performer, though, on Capitol Hill.He was a quiet presence.Stephen Miller was suspicious of the press; he was suspicious of the party establishment.So whenever you encountered him, he said very little.He didn’t like to reveal much about who he was or what he was doing.This was someone who was mounting a secret project of sorts to change the Republican Party, to install new kind of immigration reforms into Congress.He didn’t want to talk about it so much.He would rail against the establishment on email.
But he was a writer more than a speaker.Did he become a speaker on the campaign trail?To be sure, for President Trump.But back then, Stephen Miller was a writer of emails and a whisperer into Sen.Sessions’ ear.
And what did he get from Bannon?What was Bannon to him?What was their relationship?Was it actually mentor-mentee or something else?
Bannon, at the time and ever since, sort of collects young people inside of the right wing of the Republican Party, people he thinks could be his allies, his acolytes, his associates.Steve Bannon was always looking for people like Stephen Miller to either bring into the Breitbart fold or to operate as an ally inside of Congress.
He saw in Miller a kindred spirit, someone who also saw immigration in the same way.And Miller was someone who talked about immigration in policy terms that was very stark, but also very informed, on how visas worked and how border security law was implemented.Miller has a knowledge base from Sessions’ work on Capitol Hill that really gave him depth on immigration.It was to the right; it was considered radical thinking.But you had Miller with real knowledge about how the committee process worked, how the federal government spent money on immigration.That knowledge appealed to Bannon.It was his status as a staffer; it was his relationship with Sessions.
But it was Miller as someone who could speak the language of hard-right conservativism on immigration.Bannon and Miller spoke the same language; they focused on the same issues.
Defeating Eric Cantor
So in 2014, they aim for [House Majority Leader] Eric Cantor.They from an alliance with [Laura] Ingraham and others, Mark Levin.
Oh, yeah, I covered that.I was the only person to put it on the front page.
So tell me the story of how they aim for Cantor, and why Cantor.
A friend of Bannon’s named Ron Maxwell who directed the Gettysburg film back in the ’90s was living in the Richmond area, and he thought Cantor should be taken down.So he told his buddy, Steve Bannon, “Pay attention to this college professor, David Brat.”And so Brat gets on the radar of Breitbart; he gets on the radar of talk radio.His campaign seems to be going nowhere.Cantor doesn’t take it seriously.
But there’s unrest in Richmond.Down in Virginia, illegal immigration and the economy are causing a lot of anger inside of the Republican Party.And so a little clique in Richmond starts to grow and grow into a movement.And David Brat, who has a clean-cut look—he’s a college professor, but he has libertarian views on the economy, and he has Bannonite views on immigration—he starts to attract crowds and attract interest.
The right wing thinks they need a scalp politically.They need to take down somebody like Cantor to prove that they have real power, that they have mettle.The context matters.In 2013, the right wing of the GOP had kicked the GOP immigration plan to the ground.They killed it in 2013.In 2014, way ahead of the 2016 election, they were trying to build their stature to do even more than they did in 2013.And that’s when they started to look to congressional primaries.Who could they take out?If they could take out the immigration bill in 2013, maybe they could take out Eric Cantor in 2014.
And Brat was an inexperienced candidate.Everyone who knew him says he wasn’t really ready to run for Congress.He gave these long talks about the economy and monetary policy.But the right-wing advisers on Brat’s campaign told him: “Don’t focus on any of this economic stuff.We know you want to talk about it.Talk about immigration.That’s the way you take down Cantor.”
Cantor was at the forefront of the Republican Party leadership that was pushing for centrist reform.That was going to corporate America and saying, “Let’s work with you on immigration.”That appalled Bannon; it appalled Jeff Sessions.And so you had people like Laura Ingraham say: “Let’s at least try to give Brat some attention.He may not go anywhere, but let’s give him some attention.”
It was a perfect storm.David Brat continued to rise, continued to get grassroots donations and attention from talk radio, all as Eric Cantor didn’t pay attention.Eric Cantor was in Starbucks on Capitol Hill the day of the primary.Wasn’t even in his district.And it became the surprise of the decade, at least inside of the Republican Party, an upset that no one predicted.
Inside the newsroom of The Washington Post, people thought we should just go home; there’s no way Cantor could lose.But there was a grain of thought that Cantor could go down.You could feel the tremors inside of Richmond.You could feel the tremors inside of the congressional district, inside of the Republican Party at the time.Something was happening.There was a fire, and it started with David Brat’s campaign in 2014.
You can trace this entire story from 2013 and that immigration fight on Capitol Hill to David Brat all the way to 2015 and the rise of Donald Trump.It’s part of a larger story of those who oppose illegal immigration taking control of the Republican Party.
Donald Trump the Candidate
And those three guys, Miller, Bannon and Sessions, are right at the heart of it.We spent a few hours interviewing Bannon a little while ago, and we were walking through, how do you arrive at Trump as the candidate of choice? …
It took Bannon and Miller and Sessions some time to gravitate toward Donald Trump.It was not an immediate embrace.I used to call up Bannon in 2014, even early 2015, and he wasn’t impressed by Donald Trump.He thought he’s saying some of the right things on immigration, but can he be trusted to really be the standard-bearer for his ideals, for his views on immigration?Bannon wasn’t so sure for a long time.Others, like Sessions, weren’t so sure.
I was with Sessions in Alabama.When Sessions first comes to Alabama with Trump in 2015, he’s nervous backstage.Is this really the right thing to be doing, to be with Donald Trump?He tells everybody he’s putting his career on the line by even appearing with this New York businessman who’s a celebrity and a populist.But can he really be trusted by the right wing?
On immigration?
On immigration.It took a lot of time.There are long memories on the right wing.People who are really in the know, they don’t forget that Trump in 1999 teased a presidential run.And who did he tease a presidential run against?Pat Buchanan.Trump said back then Pat Buchanan was too far to the right on immigration and he was about to mount a Reform Party candidacy based on saying Pat Buchanan’s too far to the right on immigration.
In a short space of time, politically speaking, Trump had gone from being anti-Buchanan to being the successor to Pat Buchanan on immigration.That evolution kept some Republicans and conservatives on edge.Could Trump really be the guy?
How did it happen that he makes that movement across the spectrum?Is Bannon sending Breitbart—?
No.Trump, at his core, is a marketer.Trump saw the birther issue played in 2011 and 2012, and it elevated Trump inside of the Republican Party base who saw him as willing to go further than any other Republican on a question like President Obama’s patriotism and love of country.And then it was immigration.The more President Trump would talk about immigration, the louder the roars got.
I’ll always remember being with Trump in 2015, his first rally in Arizona.Backstage with Trump at that first rally in Phoenix.He was taken aback—and this is someone who’s not usually taken aback—taken aback by the way the crowd was electric when he talked about building the wall and going after illegal immigration.The way they responded caught Trump’s attention, and ever since then, he has ridden that wave being the candidate, the politician, the president who’s against illegal immigration.
At its core, it’s someone making a choice, a choice to be that person on the right.It doesn’t come from a long career like Sen. Sessions’ of having those views.He took those views, cultivated them, and then stoked it in a way that no one else could.
…. So what did they bring to Trump?What is it that Miller has, for example, that makes him the guy who goes out first and warms up the crowd for Trump?
Well, it takes Miller a long time to join the campaign.Corey Lewandowski was working on Miller for months trying to get Miller to join the campaign.But Miller was taking his sweet time because he didn’t want to put his career on the line.Miller waits until early 2016 to join the Trump campaign.Was he informally being supportive for months? Sure.But Miller waited until Trump really caught fire before there was—Miller waited until there was momentum to sign on.
I remember Corey Lewandowski calls me out of the blue—I think it’s in January 2016—Lewandowski calls me out of the blue and says: “We got Stephen Miller.We finally got someone to help us with speeches, help us with policy.”They needed Miller to be the mind for the Trump instincts on immigration and trade.They knew Miller had the expertise from working with Sessions.They’d recruited him for a long time, and then finally he decided to sign on.
That was a big move for the Trump campaign because they were floating for a long time with certain broad strokes on immigration, winking at the right issues for that voter on the Republican side, but they didn’t have depth on how they would build our border security policy, how they would build the wall.It took Miller to come on in early 2016 for that to happen.
It sounds to me like a sort of mutual admiration society in lots of ways.These three guys are looking for somebody to be the—what Bannon calls, what is it, the “imperfect vessel” or … “Imperfect instrument,” he calls them.
Oh, yeah.Bannon’s often called Trump an imperfect instrument, a blunt instrument.Trump needed credibility.Sessions provided the credibility because he was a member of the Senate.Trump needed expertise to help actually fill in the gaps on immigration policy.Miller provided that expertise.
What did Sessions and Miller need?They needed someone who was a celebrity communicator who could actually build a national following for their views.There had always been a wall blocking Miller and Sessions from catching on inside of the Republican Party.They weren’t salespeople.They couldn’t actually mount an argument that would take over the Republican Party.By, in effect, handing over their playbook to Donald Trump, they stepped back and let him take the reins, and they ended up in the White House.
What were they worried about, about Trump?He’d vacillated on things like DACA [Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals].
They were worried about if they could trust him, trust him on the issues.They worried that Trump could be susceptible for moving to the center on immigration, and there’s still some of those worries today on something like DACA.Could Trump move to the center?There’s always a lingering concern that President Trump doesn’t, at his core, really want to move that far to the right on immigration on every single issue.He knows it’s a winning issue for him politically, but there’s always been this concern, is he really there?
But Trump has known that immigration is the key to his political ascent, so he’s kept Miller close at every turn.
So they’re the tuning fork to the base, I suppose, for him, in lots of ways, especially Bannon and Miller, I would assume.
Yes.
Fox News
Let’s back up for just one second before we get Trump elected and we move into the White House for the things that ensue.Let’s talk a little bit about Fox, because we’re interested —in the early going, Fox was not—not only was it not with Trump, but it was not with Bannon, Miller and Sessions either.
Not at all.
We see Sean Hannity taking the autopsy position, taking the Reince Priebus position.Fox, [Rupert] Murdoch, [Roger] Ailes, they’re all over on that sort of more—Bannon calls it the corporate establishment side of the Republican Party.Tell me about the early days of Fox as you observed them in the immigration story.
There was a consensus inside of the Republican Party leadership, inside of Fox News, inside of corporate America, that the Republican Party would no longer hold power in America unless they turned on immigration, away from Breitbart and toward reform.That was a widespread consensus.And after being defeated in 2012, there was a thought that this just has to happen.And everybody has to get on board whether you’re Sean Hannity or John Boehner, you have to be there with the new position, not being nativist at all on immigration, but realizing—they believed that there would be no way for the GOP to ever win the White House again unless they won over Hispanic voters.
Bannon and others are sitting on the outside saying, “Actually, let’s torque up the issue of immigration to drive out white voters and others in the Midwest, in other parts of the country, that feel the effects of deindustrialization.”Those were competing arguments, but they weren’t really competing.In the minds of most Republican leaders and conservative media personalities, the corporate view that reform was necessary had won.There was always the fringe opponents to it, but it was about keeping the Republican Party on a track to actually be able to win national elections.
Reince Priebus, Sean Hannity, they all wanted to keep the GOP eventually winning the White House again.And to do that, they just thought you have to put aside this view on immigration.
So what we witnessed, both with the fall of Cantor and the election of Donald Trump and the success of Donald Trump and the way Bannon, Miller, Sessions and Trump himself moved it along, we witnessed a sort of revolution that Fox missed.
And there were tensions at the time.You think about 2013.It’s not just the immigration fight.It’s also the shutdown over Obamacare.There’s a belief in the Republican base that there needs to be more fight on immigration, on health care.So, as people like [Rep.] Steve King and Donald Trump are rising in 2013 in the whole culture of the GOP, so is [Sen.] Ted Cruz because of his ability to be aggressive on health care and be the face of the Republican shutdown.It was about tactics and strategy as much as it was about policy.
So OK. So I guess when Trump wins, Fox heads back to a more sort of—over to the slightly right of—
And even during the presidential campaign in 2016.
They were not with him?
The top people at Fox, Rupert Murdoch, he’s not someone who’s known as being right there with Donald Trump on immigration.There’s always a more corporate mentality at the top levels of a news corporation.But Fox News saw that the Republican Party had been changed by Donald Trump, and they brought in personalities, at least into their prime-time slots, who reflected the changing mood on the right.Immigration was the issue, and so Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity and others would hammer that night in, night out.
The Dreamers and DACA
So that’s the move, OK.…. From all the executive orders they prepared during the transition, day number one was going to be a DACA signature, a warning shot to the rest of the country and a gift to the base on that day.But he doesn’t sign it.What’s happening there?
You mean early on with DACA?
Yeah, yeah.
There is a belief that DACA could be a way to get a major immigration deal.So President Trump comes in, and there is talk about, could there be a grand bargain on immigration?Could they give the Democrats DACA and get something with the wall in response?The wall, for Bannon, for Trump, for Miller, was critical early on.They needed to get something to show their voters, their core voters, that they were making progress on the wall.
And to make progress on the wall, DACA had to be on the table.But it was an uneasy argument inside of the White House.There was always a concern in the high-level talks that if you started to bring DACA into anything, you’d alarm and maybe even alienate some of Trump’s voters.So as much as you needed DACA to get the wall, there was a thought that maybe let’s never go there.The less DACA’s actually addressed, the better for Trump politically.
The Travel Ban
I got it.So by Friday of the first week, it’s the Muslim ban.It’s the super-chaotic whatever.When you observed it and when you’ve talked to Bannon and Miller and others about it, what was the point?
Yeah.The strategy was chaos.It was about disruption for the sake of disruption to rattle Washington and let President Trump set the pace and alarm everyone with extreme policies.There was a belief that Trump was so much an outsider that he had to take Washington by the throat from the start and make it afraid of him; that he would go to the extreme on something like the travel ban to make his point on immigration; that he wasn’t playing around.
And so he was being stirred by people like Bannon and Miller to go to the mat, effectively, and to make that travel ban happen.Were there some voices in the White House saying, “Don’t do this; it’s too much”? Sure.But the president didn’t listen to them.He wanted to be seen as someone who would go there, someplace Republicans usually would avoid.
OK. So that weekend Miller is on television, on Sunday-morning television.
He’s one of the only people that wants to defend the travel ban.
Let’s hear about it.
Miller, he believes this in his gut, that this is the policy that needs to happen.Other people in the administration are appalled privately, sometimes even publicly, and say they don’t want to be on television defending something that, in essence, bans people from Muslim faiths from entering the United States.
Miller puts his hand in the air and says: “I’ll go on TV.I’m there.I’ll make the case.”And that deepens his relationship with President Trump.Trump sees in Miller a warrior for the cause of fighting illegal immigration, someone who would really be there on the line.Even though he wasn’t the perfect communicator, to say the least, he’s someone who could be jarring in the way he speaks.He could be combative. But the president liked it because he was willing to go on TV.TV is everything for President Trump.He’s either being defended, in his mind, or he’s being attacked.And as long as Miller was on there, as imperfect as it was in its presentation, at least Miller was on there making the case.And that’s what Trump wanted.
Divisions at the White House
So something else is also happening after that Muslim ban and the sitting-on-the-shelf 200 executive orders.There’s another group of people in the Oval Office—Jared Kushner; the daughter Ivanka [Trump]; Gary Cohn—countervailing forces, who it seems like, if you look—if you step back and look at the spring of 2017, they pull him away from immigration.They pull him away from the controversy started by Bannon, Miller and the president.And what happens to Bannon and Miller and Sessions during those first months of the Trump administration?
Bannon eventually, quickly, becomes radioactive. He becomes isolated inside of the White House, and by the spring of 2017, early summer, he’s on his way out.People are fed up with his personality; they can’t stand his ego.And he’s fed up with them.He actually doesn’t like the job.He’s lost some of his relationship with President Trump.President Trump saw him on the cover of Time magazine, “The Great Manipulator,” and had a fit about it.The president said: “Enough of Bannon being seen as the person who’s making this all happen.I’m the decider.I’m the person who makes all the decisions.”
Bannon’s on his way out, but as Bannon fizzles inside of the White House, Stephen Miller is cultivating his relationship with none other than Jared Kushner.He sees in a relationship with Kushner a way to survive. So as much as Bannon is flaming out, Miller is solidifying his place, his perch, inside of the White House by playing nice with Jared Kushner, by staying close to President Trump on every speech.He keeps a low profile.From time to time he’s on television, but he doesn’t do anything to seem like he’s the puppeteer.So he recedes from the spotlight in many respects as Bannon flames out and burns out.
Like all good crypto lever pullers, there he is, waiting, planning.We know that he was back and forth with Sessions creating the infrastructure for future—for DACA, for “zero tolerance,” all of that—lawyers, attorney generals [sic]—moving the pieces carefully and quietly.
Miller has his fingerprints everywhere.He is working with the Department of Homeland Security trying to have a hand in controlling ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] in other programs while also having a hand in the Department of Justice working closely with his longtime ally, now Attorney General Jeff Sessions.And his title may be senior policy adviser inside of the White House, but he’s the president’s confidant on the president’s signature issue, immigration.And he also makes sure he keeps Kushner in the mix, not outside.So he’s balancing all of these different worlds within the Trump administration: DHS, DOJ, Kushner and his orbit and, of course, President Trump.And even at a young age he’s saying: “I can navigate this.If I just barrel down and focus on my issue, I can actually have a hand in controlling how it plays out.”
How does he do it?What is it about him?
He’s aggressive in meetings.He’ll call people out in meetings.Sometimes he’ll say nothing.He’s unpredictable.He can be surly.He can also be friendly if he feels you’re really on his side of an issue.He doesn’t do a lot of social appearances.Once in a while, he would show up at the Breitbart Embassy to tip the cap to some of his allies in the conservative media.But otherwise he would go home to his apartment in downtown D.C., go to sleep, wake up early, come to work.It was an ideological mission from day one.
So that period, spring, summer, Sessions has recused himself from the—
That’s an important point.
—the Russia thing.Talk about a guy who was in and then fairly quickly is really on the outs, but has an issue that’s at his heart that he wants to get done.The impact of Sessions?
Huge.That’s such a great point.The recusal of Sessions creates an opening for Miller.Sessions was supposed to be the point person on immigration running the Department of Justice.He then immediately falls out of the president’s favor, and into that void walks Stephen Miller.He now has more control, more sway, because his longtime boss and friend, Jeff Sessions, has been diminished.Sessions is diminished.He’s on the ropes.The president doesn’t even want to take his call.That lets Miller control more on immigration, to really have a say, to be the person everyone believes represents the president’s views and the president’s hand on all these fronts.
Fascinating.You know that great moment that we’ve put in a couple of films where [Deputy Attorney General Rod] Rosenstein calls [White House Counsel Don] McGahn, and they happen to be—McGahn happens to be in the Oval Office; Sessions is there.He tells Trump that a special counsel has been picked.Trump berates Sessions, who runs out of the room.Bannon eventually is with Sessions and talks about Providence and “God has put you here to do this, Jeff.”
Sessions is just—Sessions is reeling.He’s lost his relationship with the president; his aide is kind of keeping him at bay, Stephen Miller.Isn’t trying to be seen as a Sessions guy anymore; he’s a Trump guy.And that dynamic has left Sessions, attorney general of the United States, but recused from the Russia investigation, out of the president’s favor and effectively out of power.Has a hand in immigration policy, but the White House now is driving everything.
Trump Wavers on DACA
…And it is in this fall where all of it, from DACA to zero tolerance, up into January or whatever, that all starts to happen, right at this moment.
The states are looking for an answer on DACA.They’re dealing with all these “Dreamers,” and they’re turning to the federal government and trying to get some kind of guidance, some kind of solution.Then the attorney general says, “No thanks, I’m not going to defend it in court.”Tries to kick the ball to Capitol Hill.This is an administration that doesn’t actually want to solve the DACA issue, but wants to continue to push its own policies on immigration and see if Congress and the House and congressional Democrats can be forced at all to come to what the Trump administration wants to do.
Right.
I mean, the thing about that is Sessions, even though he was unpopular with Trump, is constantly trying to win back the president’s friendship, win back the president’s favor.And by saying he wasn’t going to defend DACA in court, that was him trying to get back into the inner circle, knowing he would never fully get back there because of what happened with the recusal.But he wanted to be in the room with Miller and [John] Kelly making policy, making decisions.
Yes.And of course what happens is the very hint of Trump supporting the DACA—the Sessions position, and saying, “We’re taking this—we’ve got six months to solve this; this is going to get bad; I can’t do anything about it; it’s the law; I can’t blah, blah, blah,” instantly MSNBC, The New York Times, that press goes after him, and he’s getting killed.And you’re seeing pictures of crying Dreamers everywhere, and Trump starts to drift.
Trump seems to drift for many months because he continues to get hammered in the news for his policy.And there’s nothing the president detests more than negative news coverage.And so he starts to resent Sessions a bit for not having a real answer for him on immigration.But the president’s torn.He doesn’t actually want to move on DACA in many respects because he knows it would cause an uproar inside of his own base, but he doesn’t like being seen as the president who has no answer on the Dreamers.
He also has Jared Kushner.Kushner is there, and Ivanka Trump are in this mix, and they’re saying to the president: “Why not just try to cut some kind of deal on DACA?Check the box; get some wall money; move on from this.It’s festering.You have to address it, or else you’ll pay a bigger political price.”
And he has a meeting that he invites the TV cameras into, and they cover it, where he basically is negotiating a deal with [Sen.] Dianne Feinstein.[Rep.] Kevin McCarthy’s trying to pull him back, but he can’t, and it—Trump—it looks like Trump is going to give something over to [Sen. Dick] Durbin, [Sen.] Lindsey Graham and all of them on national television.
Sen. Feinstein almost can’t believe it.Every Democrat is sitting on the edge of their seat in that room wondering, is the president about to break from his own party and cut a deal because he’s under such immense political pressure?It’s then when Kevin McCarthy speaks up and says: “No, sir, that’s not actually what you believe. It’s not what we believe.”The president pauses and pulls back.But that whole scene was indicative of how much the president was looking for a solution to get some of these challenges off of the table.But McCarthy’s voice was the voice of the Republican base, the rank and file: Don’t deal with these Democrats on immigration.Don’t cut a deal on DACA.
… There’s 48 hours or so before the next meeting which is, you know, the profanity will be issued.Durbin and Graham call Trump on that Thursday morning, and he says: “Come on over to the White House.Let’s do this.Let’s talk about what you’ve got for me.”
Miller gets in the middle of it, and [Sen. Tom] Cotton and [Sen. David] Perdue and others get invited in, and a whole crucible is waiting for Durbin and Lindsey when they walk into the room.
The conservatives are nervous.They say, “We’ve got to get to President Trump ASAP,” stop him from making some kind of rash decision, in their eyes.They really feared President Trump could be tempted by Sen. Durbin and Sen. Feinstein and others to cut a deal.They thought the president was actually being tempted to make a move on immigration, to seem like he was actually able to cut a deal, and they all went into motion: Stop the president; get their allies to call the White House.Madeleine Westerhout, the president’s assistant, her switchboard was lit up.Calls, meetings.Everyone on the right wing of the GOP seemed to want to get into the Oval Office to tell the president, “Don’t go there.”
But Durbin was building a relationship at the same time with Kushner, and he thought maybe through Kushner there could be a channel to get the president to deal.And the more the president suffered in the news coverage, there was a thought on the Democratic side that he would be willing to actually get something done.Maybe he needed a fig leaf on the wall, but give him the fig leaf, because if he cut a deal—if the Democrats got DACA, they felt like they would break the president’s base from the president, and they would get something that would motivate their own base.
So you can imagine that that day between Feinstein—“Cut a deal?Maybe I’ll look at it.It’ll be great; I’d be happy”; McCarthy: “No, no, no”; Miller: “Get everybody over here; there’s a fire in the White House.”That day in between, Fox is basically—Ingraham and [Ann] Coulter, they’re just going crazy about the president, pushing him from the other side now.If the so-called liberal press is one way with crying Dreamers, these people are saying, “The base will eat you alive, Mr. President, if you cut this kind of a deal.”So that’s what the stakes were that day when Graham and Durbin showed up, and the fight was on.
And sometimes the president would be confronted with information about migrants, about people coming from different parts of the world, to be pushed toward the right without seeming like it was a heavy-handed push.So people like Miller would just share what they thought were facts about migrant issues and hope it would make the president get angry, to get his fury going, so he would stop himself from cutting any deal with the Democrats.
Those who wanted the deal kept saying to the president: “This could be your Nixon-in-China moment.This could be a chance for you, who’s so far to the right on immigration, to actually cut a deal, because no one would question your bona fides on this front.You’re the only person who can make a deal.Make a deal, Mr. President.”That was the Democratic message.The Democrats’ message was, “Cut a deal; we can make it happen.”
And in that second meeting at the Oval Office, Trump utters the profanity, “shithole countries.”The impact of that statement?
It cracked apart the fragile deal that was on the table.If it ever existed, it died with the moment those words were uttered, because President Trump was saying to the Democrats, “I’m going to go raw, coarse, vulgar on the issue of immigration,” in effect making it impossible for the Democrats to say to their own voters and their own constituents, “We can work with this president on this issue.”If he talked about immigrants in those terms, it made it very hard for the Democrats to say we can do anything that’s a grand bargain, that’s bipartisan, with the president.
And the president was already in an unhappy mood because he kept reviewing all this migrant data from Miller and others about different countries and how many people were trying to send people up to the United States and the influx, in his view, of immigration and illegal immigration.And so the president was on the brink of a—he was very unhappy.And so the senators come in, and he just erupts.He erupts.It’s gone from a chummy chat with the senators on camera; it’s gone from cordial rapport with Sen.Feinstein to vulgarity in front of Sen. Durbin and others.
It’s over.The talks are finished.Any kind of grand bargain has been killed.The Democrats walk away and say, “We can’t deal with him.”
How do you think Miller felt about that?
Miller’s an ideologue.He’s not looking for a deal.He’s only looking to enact policy that’s conservative and that’s hard right on immigration.If a deal dies, Stephen Miller’s not going to complain at all…Miller got exactly what he wanted.He got the president to be persuaded that any kind of deal wasn’t an effective or smart thing to do politically.
And when the firestorm happens, Trump seems to like the chaos of being caught up—caught out saying the—
There’s nothing President Trump likes more than being seen as tough, and by using that kind of language, in his eyes, he was tough.Tough’s the way he would always talk about his father.Tough’s the way he always talks about opponents he respects.And by using that kind of language, he himself was casting himself as a tough guy, someone who would use tough words to talk about the issue of immigration.
Zero Tolerance and Family Separation
It doesn’t take long before we get to zero tolerance as the next ramping up of what is happening.What’s the impact of that?
The president just keeps trying to find new ways to show that immigration is his issue, and he’ll go as far to the right as possible to be the president who’s against illegal immigration.And so John Kelly, as a former DHS head, and Kirstjen Nielsen, his successor at DHS, they follow along with Stephen Miller and the president—sometimes uncomfortably—but they follow along as Miller articulates this idea of zero tolerance and trying to say we’re not going to have any kind of breach or else we’re going to have severe consequences.And it creates this culture inside of the administration where immigration and zero tolerance are everything.
Is Miller now firmly in place?No more hiding, no more burrowing down into the woodwork.He’s there, and he’s the president’s ears, eyes and sensors on immigration?
He’s not only that; he’s the president’s chief domestic policy adviser.The issue that really animates Miller more than anything is immigration.So you have a domestic policy adviser who, instead of focusing on a whole scope of issues every day, is always turning back to immigration.That changes the dynamic inside of the White House.The Domestic Policy Council, it’s looking at trade; it’s looking at the economy, jobs and taxes and other issues.But it’s immigration and Miller.They have the perch inside that really matters with President Trump.
And as others fall and leave the administration, from Bannon to John Kelly, Miller stays; he survives.He stays at the president’s side.
What is it that he does that keeps him there?Everybody else is gone, and yet there’s Stephen Miller, young Stephen Miller.
He’s ingratiating.He knows how Trump operates.He knows he can never be the star.Miller doesn’t speak to reporters a lot; he doesn’t go on television as much anymore.He knows the way to keep that position of power, which he wants, is to not become too big in the public eye.And so he never engages with his profile in the same way Bannon would engage and sometimes encourage people to think of Bannon as the “great manipulator” or the chief strategist.Miller wants to be the chief strategist but not have the title.He knows you can’t last long in this White House if you’re seen as the chief strategist.You have to be someone who knows how to be the chief strategist without being seen as the chief strategist in the president’s eyes.
He knows the way to work President Trump is to not be seen as working President Trump: present him with information, try to prod him in a certain direction, but always stepping back and letting him make the decision, him take the credit.
When zero tolerance is articulated, is that when Sessions does the biblical verse?...
No, there’s a biblical nature to what this policy was.It was a moral cause in the eyes of the Trump administration, Sessions and others, who came from the evangelical wing of the GOP.To them, illegal immigration was about protecting the borders; it was about protecting the identity of the country, the moral core of the country.And they would cast their policies not just in federal terms, but in biblical terms.
The 2018 Midterm Elections
By the summer of ’18, of course, we know there’s a midterm election coming.Everybody’s anxious, everybody in the administration, certainly everybody in the Republican side of the administration.[Senate Majority Leader Mitch] McConnell is very worried about holding onto the Senate.The crisis of the border really starts to become like a real crisis almost.And things begin to happen—[murdered student] Mollie Tibbetts; the troops to the border; the caravan is coming.How much of that is a Stephen Miller production?
Miller’s critics sometimes like to think he has control over all these things, but President Trump and Stephen Miller are part of a larger galaxy of conservative Republicans who have seized on illegal immigration as the cudgel in American politics.And the caravan was an idea that percolated on the right.It started to bubble up and rise.Miller, the president, they take hold of it, but they’re not in total control.It spirals and unfurls into this issue.It metastasizes into an issue that activates and excites the right.
Republicans say to themselves privately: “We can’t run on the tax cut; that’s boring.The caravan, that stokes interest on Fox News.In our districts, people are talking about this stuff at town halls.”Immigration becomes the way in a tough year for Republicans to rouse their voters.Many of their voters they worry would stay home because President Trump wasn’t on the ballot.To put President Trump back on the ballot, they needed to put immigration back on the ballot, and they did that by talking about things like the border crisis and the caravan.That was the way to try to generate turnout.
There was real concern that the left was more energized than it had been in a long time.The #MeToo movement, the Women’s March, all these new activist Democrats out in the streets, Republicans were alarmed.They said: “Where are our voters?How do we get them out?”Immigration was it.
It is absolutely true that in that time period, I think it was—it’s almost like it’s a preliminary bout leading up to the 2020 election.All of those issues get a kind of—
Republicans were able to keep the Senate, because in a lot of these states, they were able to turn up Republican turnout.They were able to really spark Republican turnout in states that were contested.Republicans lost the House, in some respects, because of immigration.The cost of keeping the Senate through immigration, in some part, the cost of that was also losing the House.Suburban seats fell away for the Republicans in places like suburban Philadelphia and suburban Ohio because many suburban voters, Independents, don’t like this rightward turn on immigration; they don’t love the talk of the caravan.But in states, broadly speaking, it’s easier to try to get immigration as a tool—to use immigration as a tool to get the voters out.
In the post-election period, right after, we’ve got a couple of months in there, it almost feels like it was get-tough time on immigration; get-tough time on DHS; get tough with Nielsen; get tough with ICE.You know, let’s go.That feel that way to you?
It did.I mean, the closer we get to 2020, the more this president and his advisers are saying immigration is our fire.That’s the fire we put in our torch to try to win in 2020.There’s no other issue that galvanizes our voters in the same way, they tell us.
So the president is stymied on Capitol Hill.On almost every issue, Democrats don’t really want to cut a deal, and the president doesn’t know exactly how to cut a deal in divided government.Speaker [Nancy] Pelosi now runs the House.She’s not running to try to cut a deal with the president on infrastructure, prescription drugs, because the president’s not putting anything on the table.
Immigration then, again, becomes the issue he’s turning to the most to try to keep his party together, his party with him, and to run and to get ready for 2020.
The Government Shutdown
Let’s get the wall, they begin to say.Let’s have the wall.Let’s get the money for the wall.Let’s make everything about that.Fox, which we talked about earlier, and has pushed him around during family separation pretty hard, “Don’t step back; don’t do what you tried to do on DACA,” pushing him very hard, now we get into the period where Fox is basically—Lou Dobbs and others—on all of this.
There’s no one who’s more important in the president’s inner circle on immigration than Stephen Miller.A close second would be Lou Dobbs. Lou Dobbs’ show is something the president watches every night.President Trump told me about this.He said Lou Dobbs is the person who helps guide him on immigration from the outside.He loves Lou Dobbs because he believes Lou Dobbs was there on immigration long before President Trump was seizing on these issues all the time.
Dobbs is a generational peer.He shares Trump’s mentality of being business-friendly but also being nativist and very much against illegal immigration and legal immigration.Dobbs is a personality who knows how to sell the Trump position, sometimes in a way that President Trump is not even thinking about.He looks to Lou Dobbs for cues on how to make the message work.He looks to Stephen Miller for policy advice and guidance on the federal government.How do you keep control of ICE?How do you really run DHS from the White House?That’s where Miller comes in.
But for the sale with the voters, it’s Lou Dobbs.This little-watched show, in some respects, this show on Fox Business Network is more influential than almost any other program on television, because the president is listening intently.The president is listening intently to what Lou Dobbs has to say.
At some moment, Dobbs essentially says, “Shut the government down,” and he does.
It’s hard for the president to communicate to Republican leaders about strategy.They don’t share his brinkmanship; they don’t share his outlook on immigration.So he turns to Dobbs as a viewer for guidance.Dobbs is someone he believes is totally in his corner, understands who the president is, and comes up with extreme ideas to put on the table in terms of strategy.
When Dobbs says something, the president is known to immediately fire off phone calls to his top advisers and say: “Think about this.Lou Dobbs just said that.”He’s brought Lou Dobbs onto the phone before.He’ll call Lou Dobbs up after a show to hear more about what Dobbs’ perspective is on an issue.
What do you make of that?
The president, in some respects, is a lonely figure.Presidents are often lonely, but President Trump, as this celebrity outsider Republican who doesn’t have many friends inside of the Republican Party, he lives a totally public life.He identifies with people who also live public lives, who live their lives through the media.Lou Dobbs shares his generation.Lou Dobbs is similar in age.He’s similar in background.He’s someone who came out of the business world and became populist.That’s just like President Trump.
They speak a similar language, they have similar instincts, and they also believe that immigration is the be be-all, end-all of American politics; that everything comes down to trade and immigration, and they’re intertwined.And so they share a worldview, and they also share a disdain for the Republican establishment and the Democratic establishment.Lou Dobbs believes the Republican establishment has failed the country, and President Trump believes the Republican establishment never really took him seriously.Dobbs did.That’s why Dobbs always has the president’s ear.
Leadership Changes
The purge of DHS. Why?
The president grows angrier and angrier by the week as he continues to hear new numbers, new data about what’s happening at the border.He can fly into fits of rage, telling advisers, “We’ve got to get rid of everybody at some of these agencies and departments because of what’s happening with the influx of migrants and illegal immigration.”He’s driven to have total upheaval at some of these agencies and departments.Miller doesn’t discourage this at all.
What is it to Miller?What does Miller get out of it?Who is Miller in that purge?What does he want?
White House officials tell me, in Miller’s world, he would prefer to run DHS from the White House; that immigration is the central issue for President Trump.Why not have the White House effectively be in control?And the more DHS has seen its leadership watered down or removed, Miller has taken control.
But these are people who under other circumstances would be allies of Miller and Trump.They are the good people, theoretically.
They all share the same positions, but they don’t share the tactics.Miller always wants to push these agencies and departments to do more, to challenge more of the authority, to challenge some of the laws.President Trump shares that view.
… Will Stephen Miller be standing in the Oval Office or working over at the Committee to Reelect the President?
Miller is going to be at the president’s side.He knows there may never be another nationalist president who has these kind of views on immigration in his lifetime.He knows his career in Republican politics long term could be very troubled.Corporate America may never come calling for Stephen Miller.He may never be invited to this conference or this university to give a speech.
Stephen Miller doesn’t really care.What he wants is the federal government to become hard-line conservative on immigration across the board, and the more he can do to forward that project, the more successful he is.Doesn’t want to be praised in every book.He doesn’t really care about his name in newspaper articles.His friends say he doesn’t really think about his career long term.He’s obsessed with immigration, and there’s never going to be a president like this, in his view, who really has the rapport with Miller and shares the policy views.
And so Miller, more than Bannon, more than anyone, has been a survivor because he truly cares about the cause from the inside.He doesn’t just want to be throwing darts; he wants to reform, overhaul and revolutionize the way this country deals with people coming in and out.
And the world according to Miller would be what?
The world according to Miller would be a world of walls where it was very hard to get into the United States, where the rules were piled high.It would be almost impossible, unless you’ve got certain kinds of visas, to really enter the United States.Miller is a restrictionist.He wants to have restricted entry for legal immigration as well as illegal immigration.
Let’s see what we missed.Thank you.
I’d like to say one more thing.Stephen Miller is not an unusual character in American politics or global politics.The rise of nationalism around the world has been pushed by people like Stephen Miller in Europe, in the United States, in South Africa.Stephen Miller is one of dozens of people just like him in governments and right-wing parties around the world who see immigration as the way to react to the global economy.The anger the global economy has caused for the lower and middle class is to be restrictionist on immigration, to close up the borders, to huddle together as national identities and to turn out the world, and to not try to have a global economy that’s free-flowing, but to have people with the same national identities stick together and fight outsiders, to build the walls as high as possible to make it difficult for other people to enter your space.
Stephen Miller has had a reaction to the global economy and the recession that we’ve seen worldwide.And that’s why right-wing parties are on the rise, because people like Stephen Miller across the world, globally, are pushing for these kind of policies.
The Wall
… So this is the lame-duck session after the midterms, and they say, “This is our chance to get the wall, to get wall funding.”And McConnell says, “Let’s get a deal,” and it seems like Trump might be willing to do it.But they end up shutting the government down.Where are Trump and Miller in that period that leads to the government shutting down?
President Trump and Miller knew the wall was an impossible dream.Democrats were framing the wall in moral terms.Speaker Pelosi was telling her Congress: “We’re not going to budge on the wall.I’m not going to give him $1.”They knew the reality.The Democrats weren’t going to work with them on the wall.They needed the process to be a signal, a signal to the Republican base that they were going to the brink to try to get the wall.Even if they didn’t get the wall, they needed to be seen as straining to make it happen.To keep that Republican base stitched together, you needed a shutdown, the White House argued, to show the base that you cared, that President Trump wasn’t walking away from his promise.Even if he didn’t get money in return, he was going to fight until the death politically to try to get the wall.
The shutdown was always a futile effort.There was never an expectation inside of the White House or the Republican Party that the Democrats would somehow break on the wall.There was no reason for the Democrats to break.But the Republicans, President Trump especially, needed to be seen as fighting.
It’s a management-of-appearance moment?
Yeah, it was a management of political capital.
Right.And early on, when McConnell says he has a deal, and it seems like maybe Trump is on board, do you think Trump was on board and then was pushed by Miller or Fox to shut down the government?Where was the president?
The president is tracking all of these television programs at night on his “Super TiVo,” he calls it, where he checks in with all the major cable hosts.He watches their programs closely, and he sees the growing unhappiness about a possible deal.And the last thing he wants is to be seen as caving.
One other question about Miller, which is, at this point where we are now and where there’s the purge going on at DHS, and Miller’s had these policies—they haven’t built the wall; at least the original travel ban got knocked down; the Dreamers thing is still stuck in the courts; the zero tolerance policy got pulled back—where does Miller see himself and his success, and is he frustrated?How is he seen as an effective sort of policymaker inside the White House around that time of the purge?
Miller is successful to this day because he loops the president in on what he’s doing.Miller loops the president in on what he’s up to.He’s not someone who’s trying to operate on the side.On immigration more than anything, Miller is saying to the president: “Here’s what’s going on.Here’s what we should do.It’s your choice.”He’s also bringing the president into the equation, into the discussion.By working so closely with the president, Miller is saying to him, “You can effectively control these agencies with my help.But it’s you controlling DHS, you controlling ICE.”
So Miller’s not casting himself internally as the person now in control.He’s saying to President Trump: “You’re in control.Let’s work together to make sure you’re in control.”Always bringing it back to President Trump.
Just two things.Back to the campaign 2016, you talked about the success of the wall issue.Talk a little bit about how Trump gets to the wall, the number of stories, why that worked and how he came to it.
He’s a builder.He’s someone who likes to talk about construction, to brag about his construction exploits, and so the wall was a device that Sam Nunberg and Roger Stone proposed that he liked; he thought this could be useful.But then when he started to test it out on the road, almost like a rock star testing out a new song from a new album, he started to see the reaction was visceral.He would talk about building it higher, and the crowd would roar.And it was a useful device that then became an effective device.Then it became the core of his entire campaign.
He was always adjusting it, exploiting it, talking about it more.It wasn’t just a line; it became part of his whole narrative. He was going to be the person who built the wall with Mexico.He originally would focus on trade more and talk about the trade deficit with Mexico, but then he would bring in the wall and immigration as part of his solution to the trade deficit.It was always connecting trade with immigration.That’s what the wall was about.It was punitive, and it was simplistic.People didn’t really understand the trade deficit issue.It’s more of an economic thing that’s in the sky that not everyone’s thinking about the trade deficit day in, day out, like President Trump.
To make the trade deficit issue something that had emotional appeal, he needed to link it to immigration, and the wall enabled him to talk about his construction background and talk about trade and boast that he was going to be tough and build a wall.And it was as simple as that.It worked.He always had his antenna in the air politically, what was working in his speeches and what wasn’t, and he would pick and choose and build out his argument following the crowd response.
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