The Stephen Miller Presidency

[struggle4progress]

By ALEX SHEPHARD
April 8, 2019

... In recent days, President Donald Trump’s senior adviser for policy has overseen a purge of officials who were seen as insufficiently extreme on immigration. Homeland Security chief Kirstjen Nielsen was pushed out on Sunday. Two days earlier, Miller persuaded Trump to cut ties with Ronald Vitello, the president’s nominee to lead Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “Ron’s a good man but we’re going in a tougher direction,” Trump told reporters.

... On Monday, CNN reported that Miller also wants the president to fire two more high-ranking immigration officials. “He’s actively trying to put in place people who have very different points of view than the current leadership within the agencies,” a former DHS official told Politico, referring to Miller. “His idea is basically <to> clean house.” Trump reportedly has informed aides that the 33-year-old Miller will oversee all immigration initiatives.

In a White House defined by dysfunction and turnover — the departments of justice, defense, and veterans affairs are all led by acting directors — Miller is the thriving cockroach ... He has shown an unwavering commitment to Trump’s toxic immigration agenda, perhaps even more so than the president himself. Miller’s expanding influence and seemingly permanent tenure suggest that Trump’s immigration policies will become even more radical than those he implemented during his first two years in office.

... Miller is an experienced troll after Trump’s own heart. In high school, he would try to own his liberal classmates by railing against feminism and bilingualism, and in college he accused Maya Angelou of exhibiting “racial paranoia” ...

https://newrepublic.com/article/153525/stephen-miller-presidency

[struggle4progress]

1. Stephen Miller is the lone survivor

April 8, 2019, 4:36 PM EDT
By Jonathan Allen

WASHINGTON ... Miller has unofficially taken the reins of border security amid a purge at the department that has also seen Secret Service Director Randolph "Tex" Alles removed from his job and Trump's pick to head the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, Ron Vitiello, yanked.

The Department of Homeland Security, a sprawling agency charged with defending the nation at home, does not have Senate-confirmed officials in the roles of secretary, deputy secretary, ICE chief, Secret Service director or inspector general. When Kevin McAleenan, who has been tapped to take over Nielsen's job on a temporary basis, moves into his new digs, there won't be a Senate-confirmed leader at Customs and Border Protection, either.

Miller has always had a strong hand in the administration's internal wars over immigration policy, but now there's no one left to fight him.

"Stephen Miller's fingerprints are all over Secretary Nielsen's resignation letter," said Dan Eberhart, a major Republican donor who is in touch with administration officials. "Trump wants to double down on the immigration strategy and Nielsen was apoplectic at the idea of closing the border" ...

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/center-trump-s-homeland-chaos-stephen-miller-lone-survivor-n992196

[RDANGELO]

2. This guy is obviously some kind of racist sociopath,

who should be nowhere near government administration.

[Blue Owl]

3. Don't forget the school days glue eating

n/t

[struggle4progress]

4. Miller rode white rage to West Wing

BY WILLIAM D. COHAN
MAY 30, 2017

... Into this conflagration of economic, racial, and sexual politics came Stephen Miller, a 20-year-old Duke junior from Santa Monica, California, who wouldn’t have known a lacrosse stick if he were hit over the head with one. A columnist for The Chronicle, the Duke student newspaper, Miller defended the lacrosse players in print, despite nearly universal condemnation of them by others on campus and in the media. His outspoken support for the players—even before the indictments were handed up—got him plenty of national media attention, which he enthusiastically embraced. As he expounded nightly on CNN and on The O’Reilly Factor, among other television shows, it became apparent that the sordid allegations surrounding the case gave Miller the perfect opportunity to hone the right-wing political views he had espoused since adolescence. His passion for American exceptionalism and racial superiority eventually led him to jobs in Washington, D.C., first as a spokesperson for two right-wing members of Congress, Michele Bachmann and John Shadegg, and then as a policy adviser and communications director for conservative Alabama senator Jeff Sessions ...

Now, at 31, the still-single Miller is President Trump’s youngest senior policy adviser, with his own office in the West Wing and a seat at the table during crucial decisions. His most visible act in that job so far was helping his friend Steve Bannon, for the moment Trump’s chief strategist, to craft and roll out the Trump administration’s first try at instituting a travel ban on the citizens of seven predominantly Muslim countries. In the wake of a federal judge’s decision to strike down the ban, Miller was ubiquitous on television news shows. In one astonishing interview, dressed in his trademark dark suit and skinny tie, Miller told CBS’s John Dickerson, without irony, “Our opponents, the media and the whole world, will soon see, as we begin to take further actions, that the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned” ...

People who know Miller personally are not surprised by his unflinching support for Trump or his recent exclusionary antics. Growing up in a wealthy, liberal Southern California enclave, he delighted in challenging political convention and social niceties, even as a high-school student. “I will say and I will do things that no one else in their right mind would do,” he admitted in a 2002 speech to his Santa Monica High School classmates. In the same speech, to a chorus of boos, he said, “Am I the only one who is sick and tired of being told to pick up my trash when we have plenty of janitors who are paid to do it for us?” ...

Ironically, the family would not have made it to the United States had someone like Stephen Miller been in the White House a century ago. Facing religious persecution, Miriam’s family—the Glossers—fled Belarus, arriving in New York in 1903 ...

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/05/stephen-miller-duke-donald-trump?verso=true

[struggle4progress]

5. Miller Is an Immigration Hypocrite. I Know Because I'm His Uncle.

Dr. David S. Glosser is a retired neuropsychologist: formerly a member of the Neurology faculties of Boston University School of Medicine and Jefferson Medical College.

Let me tell you a story about Stephen Miller and chain migration.

It begins at the turn of the 20th century, in a dirt-floor shack in the village of Antopol, a shtetl of subsistence farmers in what is now Belarus. Beset by violent anti-Jewish pogroms and forced childhood conscription in the Czar’s army, the patriarch of the shack, Wolf-Leib Glosser, fled a village where his forebears had lived for centuries and took his chances in America.

He set foot on Ellis Island on January 7, 1903, with $8 to his name. Though fluent in Polish, Russian and Yiddish, he understood no English. An elder son, Nathan, soon followed. By street corner peddling and sweatshop toil, Wolf-Leib and Nathan sent enough money home to pay off debts and buy the immediate family’s passage to America in 1906. That group included young Sam Glosser, who with his family settled in the western Pennsylvania city of Johnstown, a booming coal and steel town that was a magnet for other hardworking immigrants. The Glosser family quickly progressed from selling goods from a horse and wagon to owning a haberdashery in Johnstown run by Nathan and Wolf-Leib to a chain of supermarkets and discount department stores run by my grandfather, Sam, and the next generation of Glossers, including my dad, Izzy. It was big enough to be listed on the AMEX stock exchange and employed thousands of people over time. In the span of some 80 years and five decades, this family emerged from poverty in a hostile country to become a prosperous, educated clan of merchants, scholars, professionals, and, most important, American citizens.

What does this classically American tale have to do with Stephen Miller? Well, Izzy Glosser is his maternal grandfather, and Stephen’s mother, Miriam, is my sister ...

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/08/13/stephen-miller-is-an-immigration-hypocrite-i-know-because-im-his-uncle-219351

[JohnnyRingo]

21. That's interesting

What a pathetic piece of shit.

Thanx for posting.

[struggle4progress]

6. Grassley warns White House not to oust more top immigration officials

By Seung Min Kim April 8 at 8:16 PM

The most senior Senate Republican is warning the White House not to oust another top immigration official, making appeals to the administration against dismissing Lee Francis Cissna, the director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, amid a purge of Homeland Security leaders.

In an interview with The Washington Post, Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) said he was “very, very concerned” regarding reports that Cissna could be next in a series of rapid-fire DHS dismissals that began late last week when the White House suddenly pulled the nomination of Ronald Vitiello, who had been tapped as director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“One, those are good public servants,” Grassley said Monday evening, after rumors of Cissna’s potential exit percolated all day. “Secondly, besides the personal connection I have with them and the qualifications they have, they are the intellectual basis for what the president wants to accomplish in immigration” ...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/grassley-warns-white-house-not-to-oust-any-more-top-immigration-officials/2019/04/08/0b896e26-5a55-11e9-b8e3-b03311fbbbfe_story.html?utm_term=.cc54a2a70f2c

[struggle4progress]

7. At the chaos, Stephen Miller is lone survivor

... He's unofficially taking the reins of border security amid a purge at the department that has also seen Secret Service Director Randolph "Tex" Alles removed from his job and Trump's pick to head the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, Ron Vitiello, yanked.

Miller has survived them all. He's the only permanent fixture on immigration policy. That means he's running the show — and the president's success or failure is on him ...

https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/national-international/Trump-Homeland-Chaos-Stephen-Miller-Lone-Survivor-508285821.html

[struggle4progress]

8. Muslim ban author in charge of immigration

By Emily Singer - April 8, 2019

... Trump's assault on immigration in the United States could get exponentially worse, as he has unofficially told anti-immigrant extremist Stephen Miller that he's "in charge" of the Trump administration's immigration policy, the Wall Street Journal reported Monday.

With Trump's blessing, Miller feels "newly empowered" to push Homeland Security and Justice Department officials to enact cruel immigration policies, the WSJ reported, some of which have been blocked by federal judges, including the family separation policy.

The WSJ reported that Miller wants to reinstate the Trump administration's zero tolerance policy, which has led to family separations and the jailing of children and infants.

The thought of Miller having a bigger say in the Trump administration's already racist and illegal immigration policies should terrify Americans ...

https://shareblue.com/trump-puts-muslim-ban-author-stephen-miller-in-charge-of-immigration/

[struggle4progress]

9. Is Homeland Security purge a mistake?

By Jonathan Chait, Benjamin Hart, and Eric Levitz

~snip~

Jon: ... Trump is not a terribly smart person, and his actions often fail to advance a coherent long-term strategy ...

Eric: ... It is difficult to understand how Trump could believe that he can overcome legal constraints on his border enforcement options by simply replacing his DHS director. He can order McAleenan to reestablish family separation, but the judiciary would presumably still block it ...

Jon: ...Trump is responsive to basic numbers about immigration, and he is apparently upset that his policy is failing. He does not grasp any of the constraints or the relation between policies and outcomes.

Eric: It’s also possible that the real agent here isn’t Trump but Stephen Miller.

Jon: ... Trump would not think below the top level of an agency ...

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/04/is-trumps-homeland-security-purge-a-political-mistake.html

[struggle4progress]

10. Our rapidly-blossoming authoritarian state

BY CHARLES P. PIERCE

... Camp Runamuck is showing its teeth these days. The president* wants to put the ghastly Stephen Miller in charge of all immigration matters, and now he's tossing the head of the Secret Service out as well, and in such a manner that Senior Administration Officials are calling it a "purge" which, historically, do not end well for spies and intelligence operatives. He also seems to be gathering a large portion of federal law enforcement under his control, which, again, historically does not end well for a country. If the president* is trying to draw fire away from the Mueller Report, he's going about it quite enthusiastically.

Once again, an entirely new cast of characters will discover what it's like to work for a petulant would-be authoritarian whose empathy for other human beings stops at what he sees in the mirror, and whose idea of whimsy is to mock the disabled and to accuse the victims of natural disasters of ingratitude while they're trying to avoid starvation and cholera. He will be done with them soon enough. After all, apparently part of what set off the current tantrum was a reluctance of DHS officials to break the law on his command ...

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a27078784/president-trump-fire-kirstjen-nielsen-homeland-security-purge/

[struggle4progress]

11. "If judges give you trouble, say, 'Sorry, judge, I can't do it.'"

XENI JARDIN / 2:10 PM MON APR 8, 2019

President Donald Trump today instructed federal agents to break the law. “If judges give you trouble,” the President instructed the armed men, “Say, 'Sorry, judge, I can't do it.'”

The news hits just as a related breaking news story crosses the wires: “Judge blocks Trump administration policy of returning asylum seekers to Mexico but won't immediately put order in place.”

Trump doesn't like those judges ...

https://boingboing.net/2019/04/08/trump-to-armed-border-agents.html

Let us now recall:

... Before he enter on the execution of his office, he shall take the following oath or affirmation:--"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States" ...

... he shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed ...

The judicial power of the United States, shall be vested in one Supreme Court, and in such inferior courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish ... The judicial power shall extend to all cases, in law and equity, arising under this Constitution, the laws of the United States, and treaties made, or which shall be made, under their authority ...

[struggle4progress]

12. Thwarted on Immigration, Trump Is Firing Everyone

Noah Lanard

The Department of Homeland Security’s four most important immigration officials are its secretary, the director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the head of US Citizenship and Immigration Services, and the commissioner of Customs and Border Protection. Since Friday, President Donald Trump has forced out the first two, moved toward firing the third, and promoted the fourth. The moves, all of which were unexpected, signal a new phase of Trump’s flailing efforts to deter immigrants: Instead of blaming Congress, Mexico, and judges, he is now getting rid of his own people without any coherent plan for how it will help him achieve his goals ...

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/04/thwarted-on-immigration-trump-is-firing-everyone/

[struggle4progress]

13. Pathologies and lawlessness worsen

By Greg Sargent | The Washington Post
Published: 5 hours ago
Updated: 1 hour ago

... Each time President Donald Trump parts ways with one of his top advisers or associates, that person then embarks on an effort to expunge the deep moral stain left behind by his or her service to Trump's depraved, corrupt, incompetent, and even sometimes criminal designs.

In the case of Kirstjen Nielsen, who has just been pushed out by Trump amid his rage over the spike in asylum seeking families at the border, this process is proving more revealing — and unsettling — than usual ...

Among the most indelible moral stains that Nielsen will take into private life, of course, is her role in implementing Trump's horrific 2018 policy of family separations. We are now learning, via leaks to The New York Times, that Nielsen "hesitated for weeks" before signing the memo authorizing the policy. But Trump castigated her mercilessly in private, leading her to capitulate.

Such leaks will not have the desired cleansing effect, however, because .. Nielsen became a "defender" of such policies ...

https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/commentary/2019/04/08/greg-sargent-kirstjen/

[struggle4progress]

14. Trump's 'help wanted' administration

By Editorial Board April 8 at 3:39 PM

THE FEDERAL government, so often vilified as bureaucratic or intrusive, shields the American people. The Departments of Defense and Homeland Security protect against security threats, the Food and Drug Administration guards food-supply and drug safety. The Federal Aviation Administration has jurisdiction over the largest aerospace system in the world. Yet, every one of these agencies today is led by an “acting” chief, a temporary status that is sometimes necessary but been abused by President Trump in his ongoing contempt for public service ...

Undoubtedly, “acting” agency chiefs take their duties seriously. But their status stymies decision-making and paralyzes leadership. An acting secretary lacks the full authority to deal with outside stakeholders or the inside workforce. The “acting” boss has no idea how long the appointment will last, so the incentive at best is to tackle short-term problems. Under Mr. Trump, who values personal loyalty over capability or principle, acting appointees have every reason to cater to his whims and forsake the knottier problems that won’t earn brownie points in the White House. “Acting” chiefs often don’t have the chance to install a team, though no leader of a major department can succeed without one. It makes recruitment harder, too — who wants to work for a boss who may be gone soon? By appointing so many “acting” chiefs, Mr. Trump undercuts the Senate’s job of giving advice and consent on major appointments, postponing the confirmation process that can set the direction of long-term policy and an appointee’s priorities. Overall, the practice injects uncertainty and disruptiveness. Max Stier, president and chief executive of the Partnership for Public Service, says it is rather like substitute teachers in school; they are committed educators, but classes tend to be unruly ...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-trumps-help-wanted-administration-erodes-public-service/2019/04/08/10f84d86-5a24-11e9-9625-01d48d50ef75_story.html?utm_term=.e26badfa0c27

[dalton99a]

20. +1

[Ligyron]

15. When the "President Bannon" meme appeared in the MSM, he got canned quick.

As someone pointed out in another thread, Trump can't stand anyone else getting the limelight.

Let's make "President Miller" a thing and rid the country of him as well!

[area51]

19. +1

Please spread the meme of #PresidentMiller on FB, Twitter, etc.

Maybe Trump will get rid of Miller in a jealous fit.

[panader0]

16. Excellent compilation. Thanks s4p.

[Pepsidog]

17. Good idea. Make him a star like the MSM did to Bannon and turn Dumpster

against little Goebbels. Transpose Miller”s face over Goebbels and put it on the cover of Time magazine. I remember comparing Trump to how Hitler came to power to a friend of mine who scoffed and said I doubt Trump is the next Weimar Republic.

[pangaia]

18. Look, this isn;t just about the border, or whatevewr.,,

This is a stalinist purge...
--think about all who are being done away with...

and
the courts are another track....
wake up folks !!!!

[zaj]

22. Insufficiently white supremacists...

Can we please speak directly now?

[PatrickforO]

23. I was just reading the Wikipedia article on Reinhard Heydrich.

I'm thinking this is a striking parallel with history.