Michael Wolff on Stephen Miller
- Thomas Neuburger
- 15 hours ago
- 3 min read
By Thomas Neuburger
“You can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, the real world, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.” —Stephen Miller to Jake Tapper (source)
“You can’t spend five minutes with [Stephen] Miller and not understand there is something wrong with him, some point on the spectrum where he dwells, alone. Indeed, you can’t watch him in a television interview without seeing the psychopathology.” —Michael Wolff
In 2017, Michael Wolff, whom the first Trump administration had accepted within its doors as its future chronicler, was meeting with Steve Bannon when the subject turned to Stephen Miller, then a Bannon aide. This is Wolff’s telling of that moment (from Wolff’s paid Substack post):
Steve Bannon and I were talking in an office hideaway he used in the Old Executive Office Building in the summer of 2017. As a point of amusement, he asked if I wanted to meet his young aide, Stephen Miller, who had an office a few doors down the hall, and who was then occasionally popping into the news as a genuinely weird figure, a kind of South Park version of a Trump dweeb, pre-programmed with daft and belligerent talking points. A joke. Bannon, always jovial about the accusations that he [Bannon] was a fascist, said, “Now, this is a real fascist,” and rolled his eyes to indicate we were in some truly unchartered territory. So, Bannon led me down the wide EOB hall and showed me into Miller’s office with a wink. I did my twenty minutes with him. His eyes focused over my shoulder while he, with a dead man fixed expression, and as though performing a finely self-aware parody, recited the details of the wreckage of American society and how pride, strength, and purity had to be restored. … “You see,” Bannon said, snickering when I finished with my genuinely alarming twenty minutes with Miller and came out of his office, “Goebbels.”
According to Wolff, Miller was brought into Trump’s first administration as a kind of “inside joke” — someone so nuts the outside world could imagine him seminal MAGA. Even Trump mocked him, calling him “Crazy Stephen.”
That Was Then, This Is Now
Miller rose to the top of the 2017 advisers, and after Trump was defeated, he tried other work. That didn’t go well. Wolff: “no one in the private sector would have him, for obvious reasons. So, in the wilderness, without other options, he became one of the architects for Trump’s improbable return.”
Now, according to Wolff, Miller is running the joint, running Trump’s second term. In his podcast Inside Trump’s Head, Wolff calls Miller “arguably the second most important person in the White House.” I think that is right. Many credit him as the “architect of ICE,” one the most important, and deadly, of Trump’s homeland agendas.
‘I Am Your Retribution’
I disagree with Wolff about much. He has, in many ways, an unrevised “normie” view of a radical world. But he’s right about Trump as a man, an increasingly mad man at that. In Miller, Trump found his match, his agent, his creature, his work-wife perhaps.
“I am your justice. I am your retribution,” said Trump to his base. As Trump is MAGA’s revenge, so Miller is his own.
Mad king and mad prince. Mad prince and more insane jester. We’re well off the rails, well into Dante’s dark wood, to tangle our metaphors.
And yet also, we’re not.
Three Truths About Trump's Second Term
There are three truths about this time that should not be lost:
Trump didn’t invent America’s brutal world rule. He just pulled off its mask.
Trump didn’t invent the imperial presidency. He’s just testing its tires.
Trump didn’t create the cruel neoliberal world. He’s just the first to smile while delivering it.
And a fourth, that’s not about Trump, but perhaps you can relate this to some more current event:
Cops have been murdering Americans since policing began. What’s different today?