Today, Explained - Controversy for controversy's sake

Episode Date: June 25, 2018

A 32-year-old from Santa Monica, California, helped President Trump conceive of the most divisive immigration policy in decades. The Atlantic’s McKay Coppins explains how Stephen Miller went from high school troll to West Wing advisor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Uber. Still with us, still moving forward. They're building new features to take the stress out of your pickup and working on ways to keep you better protected and connected throughout your ride. You can find out more by going to uber.com slash moving forward. If you want to hear the president defend his immigration policies, you've got any number of outlets to choose from. You've got Twitter, you've got the tweets on cable news, you've got the rallies, you've got the rallies being broadcast on cable news. But his senior advisor, Stephen Miller, the guy everyone

says helped craft these policies inside the White House, he's been really quiet. From what I've heard and what's been reported, the reason for that is that the Trump administration realized that Stephen Miller really isn't a good spokesman for this issue. He excels at agitation, not persuasion. McKay Coppins writes for The Atlantic. Before Stephen Miller went quiet, McKay got some firsthand experience with his particular brand of agitation. He often, you know, would say things that seemed, you know, calibrated to kind of get a rise out of me or to just kind of needle me. Give me an example. Give me an example of a Stephen Miller troll. Oh, man. I mean, some of the things were little. He called himself a conservative social justice

warrior early on in the conversation. He was making this very kind of emphatic case that the best movie he'd seen in the last 15 years was The Dark Knight Rises. And when I kind of raised an eyebrow, he said, you know, it takes on issues of anarchy and social breakdown, and it's a commentary on the French Revolution. And he said, I thought that would be something you would be all over. And I said, me specifically? I was kind of confused. And then he kind of sarcastically said, well, it's just your reputation is a very deep thinker. So he basically started the conversation nagging me, which I think was a pretty good indication of how that conversation went.

Did you feel like it was an act or did you feel like this was an intrinsic part of who this dude is? I think he believes the things he advocates. I don't think I would be willing to let him off the hook there and say that this is all opportunism. He is genuinely a kind of right-wing nationalist ideologue. But I think that he genuinely seems to get a delight out of trolling, for lack of a better word. And I know some people think that's euphemistic.

But I think he really comes from this tradition, especially in the kind of younger conservative generation that's rising up now, where, you know, he sees melting snowflakes and owning the libs and, you know, triggering the left as an inherent value. And it's something that seems to drive a lot of what he's done throughout the course of his life in terms of conservative activism. And one of the most surprising things about Stephen Miller is that he comes from a place that is almost like comically liberal, right? Right. Some of his most famous trolling goes back to high school where he was one of the very few conservative students at Santa Monica High School, which is famously very liberal and diverse and kind of multicultural. And when he was a student there, now he's only 32 years old now, so this wasn't that long ago,

but when he was a student there, he would, you know, kind of derail classroom conversations with these very incendiary comments defending the Bush administration or the war on terror. His most famous in high school was he ran for class government on a platform of increasing the janitorial staff's workload. Hi, I'm Stephen Miller. And there's this video you can see of him giving a speech. Am I the only one who is sick and tired of being told to pick up my trash. And we have plenty of janitors who are paid to do it for us.

He said this with kind of a smirk on his face, and he was immediately booed offstage. And you could see that he was looking pleased with himself as he was being removed from stage. And I think that that kind of scene captures the whole kind of Stephen Miller approach. So he grew up in a super affluent part of Santa Monica, but Santa Monica is a pretty diverse place, right? Was he encountering all walks of life?

Yeah, his high school was pretty diverse, and there was a significant Hispanic population there. There were, you know, Spanish language announcements over the PA system. And he did kind of inherently push back against that. In fact, one of his friends that I interviewed,'t be friends anymore and listed a variety of reasons. And one of them was Jason's Latino heritage. Now, that's something that the White House disputes. They dispute that anecdote. But at least some of the people who knew him in Santa Monica say that there were kind of early signs of this kind of racial prejudice that they think now

informs his worldview today. I imagine in high school to hold the beliefs that he held and to speak out about them the way he did, it probably got noticed. Did he make any political headway? Was he already interested in a life in politics at that point? Well, it was very clear that he was interested in kind of being in the arena, so to speak. After 9-11, he kind of emerged as this very outspoken defender of the Bush administration. He would write op-eds both for his high school paper and for local community papers and websites, kind of attacking his high school and his liberal classmates. At one point, he wrote that Osama bin Laden would be very welcome at Santa Monica High School. He, I think it was his junior year, he agitated for the school to start leading regular recitals

of the Pledge of Allegiance. And when the administration kind of dismissed him, he agitated for the school to start leading regular recitals of the Pledge of Allegiance. And when the administration kind of dismissed him, he actually pretty effectively started kicking up controversy on local talk radio and started appearing on radio with conservative hosts who took up the cause and eventually the school acquiesced. So this was kind of an early case of him seeing how effective his particular brand of conservative activism could be and how it could yield results. And did he graduate into expanding those horizons?

He did. Well, once he graduated, he went to Duke University. And that's where I think he became pretty serious as a kind of conservative activist and agitator and troll, frankly. You know, it's funny, in a way, he was kind of ahead of his time. Huh. This was, you know, 10 years before college Republicans started inviting speakers like Milo Yiannopoulos to campus to kind of create campus controversies. He was doing this early on. He was inviting controversial speakers. He hosted or

organized an Islamo-fascism awareness week and wrote a column for his college paper where he basically kind of took on the voice of Rush Limbaugh and those other conservative writers and talk radio hosts that he had idolized when he was younger, kind of just every week or every other week kind of skewering some liberal target in a way that, of course, earned him a lot of enemies on campus. And when he graduates, does he graduate immediately into the Republican Party? What does he do after school? Yeah, he was destined for Capitol Hill right away. He got a job first with Michelle Bachman in her office and then moved over to then Senator Jeff Sessions' office where he kind of made a name for himself on Capitol Hill as this strident kind of right wing immigration hawk. He played kind of an important role in 2013 in torpedoing the bipartisan immigration reform legislation that was winding its way through the process at that point. And he also became good friends with a lot of

writers and reporters at Breitbart News, which was then kind of asserting its power on the populist right just at that moment. And he kind of became an important figure in that world. And so how does he graduate from Sessions to candidate Donald Trump? Well, once Donald Trump entered the race in 2015, it's interesting, you know, no one was taking it seriously. Everyone saw it as a publicity stunt. And Miller immediately recognized it as not only a potentially successful candidacy, but also one that he wanted to be part of. In a lot of ways, Trump embodied all the things that Miller cared about most, right? But it's also true that Trump early on showed a talent for, lack of a better

word, trolling. You know, he, from the very beginning, was giving speeches and saying things that were designed to kind of whip up a frenzy of controversy. When I talked to Miller, it was clear that that was one of the things he most admired about Trump. He kind of would breathlessly describe and reminisce about these various speeches and stunts that Trump had performed. He was in love with it. You know, he saw at the time that this was not only effective strategy, but there was something kind of viscerally appealing to him about it. And I think that continues to be true. Is this like the most successful troll in the history of trolling? If that, I mean, to be seated next to the president of the United States, it's, he couldn't have done any better, right?

Well, right. I mean, this was the question that kind of motivated the profile for me, which is what happens when this rising generation of right wing trolls who are kind of wreaking havoc on college campuses or writing for websites like Breitbart, what happens when those guys grow up and get jobs in the Oval Office or, you know, running big, powerful institutions? I think Stephen Miller is an early test case of that. But that's why I think this is an important question to interrogate, because maybe it started out as something that was performative and obnoxious and fairly low stakes. But once those people who have that kind of inherent instinct for trolling get into positions of power, they have the ability to impact a lot of people's lives. And, you know, when they're using the policymaking apparatus of the federal government, the way that Stephen Miller is to, you know, own the libs, the consequences are serious.

I will say and I will do things that no one else in their right mind would say or do. Welcome to the middle of the show. Uber wants you to know that they're turning the page and moving forward. The company's goal is to improve the experience for both riders and drivers. They've been listening to feedback and working on ways to keep you better protected and connected during your ride so your rides can get better every ride. They've got a bunch of new features, making it easier for you to verify the details of your ride, showing you the driver's name, car, and license so you can make sure you get the right ride every time. You can learn more at uber.com slash moving forward.

One more thing before we get back to business. Vox has a new show on Netflix. It's called Explained. Every episode is a 15-minute deep dive into one important topic. And there's new episodes every week. The latest episode, it's about the stock market. It explains why the average family's net worth still hasn't recovered from the Great Recession, even though the stock market is booming. It features a lemonade stand. You should check

it out. It's on Netflix, or you can go to netflix.com slash explained. Donald Trump enters office in January 2017. What is Stephen Miller's job officially at that point? He's senior policy advisor and chief speechwriter. So he basically runs the speechwriting team and advises Trump on an array of domestic policy issues. And is it rare for someone so young to have, say, that much power and influence in the White House?

Yeah, I think that's fair to say. I mean, it's not rare for someone in their early 30s to get a job in the White House, but to be in the president's inner circle and to have as much influence and leverage as he's had is unusual. And in a lot of ways, his power has only increased since then, as there have been all these shakeups and purges and high-profile departures, Stephen Miller has been one of the few survivors from the campaign who is still in the president's inner circle. Yeah, how does he fill the role that Steve Bannon held once Bannon's ousted? You know, Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller shared a worldview in a lot of ways. They both proudly wear the term nationalist to describe their ideology. They both come from, frankly, the same trolling tradition. Obviously, Steve Bannon was

running Breitbart before he joined the Trump campaign. And they also just kind of see the world the same way. I think the mistake that Bannon made among many was that he viewed himself as the principal, as the star in his own narrative. Bannon was constantly talking to reporters. And of course, he talked to this author, Michael Wolff, and that ended up being kind of his undoing. Stephen Miller is content to stay behind the scenes for the most part. He, you know, when I interviewed him, was incredibly obsequious and fawning toward the president. You know, every other answer, he tried to pivot toward lavishing praise on the president.

Right, yeah, I think I saw that on the Jake Tapper show one time. The reality is, is the president is a political genius who won against a field of 17 incredibly talented people who took down the Bush dynasty, who took down the Bush dynasty, who took down the Clinton dynasty. And he did it all through the people and through his strategy and his experience. And I think that that is the reason

that he's been able to retain his place in the pecking order in the White House. So it just sort of speaks to his political cunning, right? Like he can read a room and play it to stack the Oval Office with a bunch of hawkish conservative immigration hardliners. So that by the time Durbin and Graham actually got there and were ready to present their deal, Trump was sort of whipped up into a frenzy and made the famous comment about shithole countries. Stephen Miller wasn't in the middle of the room kind of working the room. He was standing on the periphery. But he had done his thing behind the scenes.

And I think that that's what makes him so effective. As long as Stephen Miller is in charge of negotiating immigration, we're going nowhere. He's been an outlier for years. With all this influence he has in the White House, where is he focusing his attention? What is he trying to accomplish? You know, it's a good question. I mean, the president had to kind of backtrack on this zero tolerance policy amid all the outrage and public backlash. But I think to Stephen Miller, this whole episode was a success for him. He believes that there is political value in getting the left angry.

This is what he described to me as a constructive controversy. He told me that there have been times throughout his life that he's found value in generating constructive controversy with the purpose of enlightenment. When you hung out with him, I wondered, did you get the sense that he's a happy person? Satisfied? Among all the people I've ever profiled, the most enigmatic in a lot of ways, I find myself in kind of the same situation as a lot of the people who knew him and spent a lot of time with him in college. I feel like he definitely seems to enjoy the work that he's doing, but I don't know what kind of satisfaction or fulfillment it gives him. He's 32 years old, right? Mm-hmm. Where do you think he's going next?

Is a podcast empire in his future? Some kind of crooked media, you know, spinoff in the fever swamps. I don't know. It's a good question. I mean, he's so young and he's achieved levels of power at such a young age that often that can actually be counterproductive for people

in the political world. But going forward, I think that he's going to continue to try to champion this kind of conservative nationalism that he believes in. I mean, we've seen it sweep across Europe. We're now seeing it take root in America. Whatever happens to Trump and whatever happens in the next presidential election, that strain of ideology, I don't think is going anywhere anytime soon. McKay Coppins is a staff writer at The Atlantic. If you want to read his profile of Stephen Miller, it's called Trump's Right Hand Troll. I'm Sean Ramos for him. This is Today Explained. Thank you. get better with every trip. They're building new features to take the stress out of your pickup and working on ways to keep you better protected and connected throughout your ride. You can find out more by going to uber.com slash moving forward.