To say, as I would, that Stephen Miller is unlikable, or that he is a detestable, draconian sort of man, is a statement so trite that when said outright, people will wait for you to get to your real point, as if the idea expressed alone is not enough for conversation. (“I mean, yeah… what else?”)
This man, who is our current Homeland Security Advisor and Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy, has been known to frequent neo-Nazi websites and associate with noted White-supremacist Jared Taylor, who called Miller a “race realist.” It’s a set of behaviors partly responsible for the discriminatory and extra-legal handling of illegal immigrants in this country.
Miller also has a long history of pettiness. Back in 2023, for example, the American First Legal Group, which is associated with Miller, sued Kellogg over the company’s decision to implement some rather benign diversity-inclusion policies. These included a program to hire Black in-house chefs and another to achieve gender parity in leadership. Most recently, a New York Times investigation revealed that office-holding Republicans directed the FBI, the Secret Service, and the Virginia State Police to investigate a neighbor of Miller who had been spreading leaflets with his home address and writing messages in chalk on the sidewalk. Federal officials seized his neighbor’s phone under the pretense that she posed a physical threat to Miller’s family, their evidence being a WhatsApp message saying she’d “make his life hell” and that she’d once pointed “her index and middle fingers to her own eyes and then point[ed] directly at Mrs. Miller,” making the universal “I’m watching you” hand gesture.
Even the sight of Miller himself evokes strong emotions, as he’s someone whose physical characteristics embody their inner self so clearly. He has these particularly darting reptilian eyes and pouty mouth, and, according to one speech coach from New York, tends to pitch down his otherwise fragile voice to sound more masculine and authoritative (on issues where he has little ground). It contributes to this sense that Miller is a know-it-all elitist, someone of comfortable distance to the issues they dog over, and “the dude you had classes with in high school or college who everyone mostly wished would stop talking.” He wants to be Lex Luthor, basically.
Thus, when Miller takes to the podium in the White House Press Room with one of his monologues on immigration or “wokeness,” it routinely baffles me how someone so flagrantly terrible has made it this far. (This is in special consideration of the fact that Miller has survived two Trump administrations, both of which have had notoriously high rates of turnover.)
I think to understand Miller’s situation, then, it can be best to view his life through the lens of another man: James Pike.
Pike was a sort of fervent cultural figure of the 1960s, someone who Joan Didion passed as a “Michelin to his time and place.” He was born in 1913 on a forty-acre homestead in Oklahoma; his mother was poor and his father died not long after his birth. He was their only child. His adolescent years were much about climbing out of this hole. He was ambitious. He was a zealous Catholic. His mother would later tell his biographers that as a toddler, he dressed up paper dolls in priests’ vestments and studied the dictionary cover to cover and won the Better Babies pageant twice in a row.
In his teenage years, he and his mother moved to L.A., where he attended Hollywood High with the Jesuits, and then college at Santa Clara. He’d “repudiate” his faith at Santa Clara, however, and would convince his mother to do the same. Catholicism wasn’t fit for the times — not to get ahead, at least. Soon after, he’d move out east for Yale Law and convert to the growing Episcopalian Church… and so continued his ambition. He’d have The Dean Pike Show at one point, be a civil rights speaker at another, go high church for a few years, then write a condemnation of his faith for national syndication and pick up new-age spirituality for another few — maybe sell a few books in there too. He’d hastily shed the vestments and reclothe on all axes in an act of “moral frontiersmanship” if it meant putting one foot in the direction of whatever it was that he wanted in that moment. The other foot rarely backpedaled.
I think Stephen Miller was born of this same creed. Like so many in the Trump administration, his politics are amorphous, lacking any strong commitment to theory or strategy, other than that the strategy is on the fly — it’s adaptable. In the post-truth era, someone like Miller is able to harness the same power of celebrity as James Pike and move with such brutal haste towards a vague something he feels is right, yet has little substantiating evidence for. Most of Miller’s points have been disputed by just about everybody (other than his friends at Breitbart and AmRen). His data is shoddy. His facts are what he chooses to be facts. But that’s what’s allowed him to survive, so far, five years of Trump turnovers. Like a reptile, he will adapt and adapt for whatever situation he’s put in, go in for the offensive, sit on defense, and punch down as hard as he wants to, so long as it gets him one step closer to this burning notion inside of him on what’ll satisfy his ego. It just so happens that for Miller, that notion is something vaguely White-supremacist and stupid and we have a government very accommodating to those sorts of beliefs.
I suppose, then, that the current question is how does this all end? For Miller, it’s tough to say in the immediate. Even considering that he has worked through both of Trump’s terms, the President’s administration doesn’t seem to have many qualms with suddenly axing an official who steps out of line. In the long-term sense though, I suspect we’ll see a coming-down of Stephen Miller.
After years of moving fast and riding high, living under the entitlement that he could “forget it and start over,” James Pike ultimately succumbed to his own hubris. He believed that he could survive the Jordanian Desert as Jesus did with only a rental from Avis, the companionship of his former student and new wife, Diane, and two bottles of Coca-Cola. Diane made it out alive. They found Pike’s body five days later on one of the canyon walls.
Now, I’m not suggesting that a similar thing will happen to Miller. I don’t believe he’s eccentric enough to expose himself to that much risk. But, I do suspect that we’ll see the political version of this where his ambition pushes too far and is held in contempt by others’ sets of facts. Maybe his canyon is hosting yet another one of those culture war podcasts — that feels very much in-step with the direction our political culture’s been heading.
* All biographical information and quotes provided on James Pike come from Joan Didion’s essay, “James Pike, American,” published as part of her collection, The White Album.
The Zeitgeist aims to publish ideas worth discussing. The views presented are solely those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial board.
