Finally, Some Answers About How Stephen Miller Became a Very Powerful Monster

Excerpts of Jean Guerrero’s incisive and terrifying book, Hatemonger, are trickling into the wild, and they have some helpful–if not entirely satisfying—information on how Miller, a bona fide monster in human form, became so influential among the party’s right. Guerrero chronicles Miller’s influences, and unsurprisingly he seems to have been deeply inspired by Rush Limbaugh and has been writing buddies with Ann Coulter for what seems to be a very long time. One of the more triggering anecdotes involves Miller’s predilection for mobster movies, like Casino and Goodfellas, which seem to form the basis of much of his personality. From Vanity Fair:

He appeared to study De Niro’s gestures—the loose hands, the fingertips-on-fingertips, the head tics—and incorporate them into his persona. Years later, he’d stand at podiums and conjure the old mobster in himself. “All these conservative guys can’t help themselves, it’s such a horrible cliché but they love the mafia,” recalls one classmate. “The mobster is the perfect encapsulation of the conservative worldview, where there’s no real law and order apart from ‘might makes right.’”

But the most telling story involves Miller’s inexplicable and constant obsession with using his political career to personally and viciously attack Latinx people, both individually and as a group. Miller reportedly cut his teeth in Jeff Sessions’s office leading a bizarre campaign against Justice Sonya Sotomayor when she was first appointed to the Supreme Court. Miller attempted to seed stories to the press that she was a “lesbian” and that her Latina background would necessarily create bias in her judgments. (Journalists and editors seemed to have been baffled by these pitches.) In fact, Miller appears to be the architect of the vilest policies engineered by Sessions, working behind-the-scenes against any policy helping marginalized groups and branding Sessions as the extreme racist with ties to White Nationalism he is known as today.

What comes across is a baffling portrait of a man driven simultaneously by a need to desire to crush Latinx people and block pathways of immigration that people like *cough* Stephen Miller’s family have enjoyed, but also an understanding that such a vast bubble of hate might a way to rally support around an invented enemy–a political calling card, so to speak, for an ambitious and despicable man.

It’s worth reading the excerpt in its entirety and if you have the stomach for it, Guerrero’s book. [Vanity Fair]

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• Deja vu from this exhausted punchline…