Stephen Miller goes into a long Trumpish "weave," and the reporters don't turn and walk away.

I guess they're still waiting and hoping that they'll be the one to wedge in a question that will somehow stymie the man who's never going to stop:

I am SO GLAD the Trump administration decided to completely UNLEASH Stephen Miller on the media.

He regularly displays a masterclass in debunking their lies.

"Guys - do you know the difference between a deportation order and a withholding order? Do you know the difference? Any… pic.twitter.com/sDmzpLtiyu

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) April 14, 2025

What a dysfunctional relationship! Miller will take any question and return to the tortured, raped, and murdered women and girls who rule his world. The reporters cling to the hope that the plight of the deportees will seize the hearts of America. If only Miller would say something sufficiently inhumane about them, but every answer is the same: Think of their victims — the women and girls!

"Under what theory of the constitution does a single marxist judge in San Francisco have the same executive power as the Commander-in-Chief elected by the whole nation to lead the executive branch?"

Tweet Stephen Miller, quoted by David French in "Trump Is Coming for Every Pillar of the State" (NYT). 

French continues:

As Miller put it in a press briefing last month, “The whole will of democracy is imbued into the elected president.” He is the only elected official who represents the whole of the American people, and he embodies the people’s general will....  

Trump and his team are furious at the federal judiciary, but they’re to blame for their own legal struggles. Trump has issued a host of poorly drafted executive orders. Trump’s administration has snatched people off the streets without adequate due process. The so-called Department of Government Efficiency is unilaterally wrecking agencies that were established by Congress, usurping Congress’s primacy in America’s constitutional structure.

It is not the judiciary’s fault that Trump has chosen to attack the constitutional order, and it is hardly the case that he’s losing only to liberal judges....

"There's a term in law: justiciable. This is not justiciable."

Stephen Miller instructs Kasie Hunt:

ADDED: From the comments over there: "The Gish gallop is a rhetorical technique in which a person in a debate attempts to overwhelm an opponent by presenting an excessive number of arguments, with no regard for their accuracy or strength, with a rapidity that makes it impossible for the opponent to address them in the time available."

Is it possible for both sides to do the Gish gallop at each other?

"[Trump] is fighting for the fundamental idea that this country belongs... not to the radical left Communists...."

"We are going to have to be on top of it every single day focused every single day, driving forward every single day with unrelenting focus and passion because God gave us this country our founding fathers fought and died for this country, generations of Americans have sacrificed and bled for this country and we are not going to let the radical left — the Communists — and the American haters take our country. It's not going to happen. Not now. Not ever. So I ask you all to send a message right now to all the bureaucrats, to all the radical left commies, to the criminal aliens... to everyone who threatens the future of this country...."

Stephen Miller — at CPAC yesterday — called America's left wing "communists" and even "commies."

I think this is the only serious current use of the word "commie" that I've recorded in this blog. I've quoted a couple comic deployments of the word — here and here.

And I quoted Rush Limbaugh describing the "Dr. Strangelove" character Buck Turgidson: He just loves war and hates the Russians, hates the commies."

And I've got John Wayne in a Playboy interview — back in 1971: 

"The threat to democracy — indeed, the existential threat to democracy — is the unelected bureaucracy of lifetime, tenured civil servants..."

"... who believe they answer to no one, who believe they can do whatever they want without consequence, who believe they can set their own agenda no matter what Americans vote for. So, Americans vote for radical FBI reform, and FBI agents say they don’t want to change. Or Americans vote for radical reform in our energy policies, but EPA bureaucrats say they don’t want to change. Or Americans vote to end DEI — racist DEI policies, and lawyers in the Department of Justice say they don’t want to change. What President Trump is doing is he is removing federal bureaucrats who are defying democracy by failing to implement his lawful orders, which are the will of the whole American people."

Said Stephen Miller, at yesterday's press briefing.

Want to see a murder?

Libs in the White House press corps screamed at Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller that Elon Musk is “unelected!”

What happens next is a fatality.

I promise you - this is the single best video on the internet today:pic.twitter.com/Nxcw0qTtj1

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) February 20, 2025

ADDED: In the same vein, here's Victor Davis Hanson:

 

Jake Tapper vs. Stephen Miller.

Hi. Want to see a murder on live TV?

I give you White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller vs. Jake Tapper on CNN.

Tapper said we need illegals here to pick our crops.

Then, Fatality…

pic.twitter.com/W10tfKT2Od

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) January 28, 2025

"[Stephen Miller] had these big thoughts of execution... what I'll just call flood the zone."

"His idea of flood the zone is you do so many things at once, so many aggressive, controversial actions at once, at speed, that your opposition is scattered and almost defenseless when it's one of 50 or a hundred actions that are extremely controversial. There's only so much bandwidth for the opposition to muster resistance, muster resources, muster outrage, muster legal action. So you just flood the zone. You do so many things at once that your opposition, they might stop some of them that they can't stop all of them.... Overwhelm. Overwhelm...."

Says Jonathan Swan, on the new episode of the NYT "Daily" podcast, "Stephen Miller’s Return to Power" (transcript and audio at link).

"Mr. Trump repeatedly used the word 'we' in his remarks that day. 'We will not take it anymore, and that’s what this is all about,' Mr. Trump said."

"'And to use a favorite term that all of you people really came up with: We will stop the steal.' Mr. Miller rebutted the implication that the word 'we' indicated that Mr. Trump was trying to incite the crowd to action... arguing that it has been used in political speech for decades, including by President John F. Kennedy in reference to the moon landing."

From "Jan. 6 Panel Presses Stephen Miller on Whether Trump Sought to Incite Crowd/In about eight hours of questioning, investigators pressed the former White House aide on former President Donald J. Trump’s use of 'we' in his speech to supporters before the riot" (NYT).

Imagine spending 8 hours getting asked over and over what Trump might have meant by "we"? Everyone has access to the speech and can speculate. What's Miller supposed to say?

"We" is an important word in political speech. "We, the People." And hasn't Trump ended every rally with a litany that repeats "We will..." with various aspirations expressed, culminating in "We will make America great again"? 

It's a trope. 

Here's your palate cleanser. JFK saying "We choose to go to the moon...."

What do you mean "we," Jack? We weren't all going to the moon!

"The Trump administration pressured the Department of Homeland Security to release immigrants detained at the southern border into so-called sanctuary cities in part to retaliate..."

"... against Democrats who oppose President Donald Trump's plans for a border wall, a source familiar with the discussions told CNN on Thursday. Trump personally pushed Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen to follow through on the plan, the source said. Nielsen resisted and the DHS legal team eventually produced an analysis that killed the plan, which was first reported by The Washington Post. The proposal is another example of Trump's willingness to enact hardline immigration policies to deliver on border security.... White House senior adviser Stephen Miller urged senior DHS officials to make the plan a reality, the source said. The plan finally died after Miller and other White House officials pushed it in February, according to the source. Miller was angered that DHS lawyers refused to produce legal guidance that would make the plan viable, saying the proposal would likely be illegal.... 'Sanctuary city' is a broad term applied to jurisdictions that have policies in place designed to limit cooperation with or involvement in federal immigration enforcement actions.... 'The extent of this administration's cynicism and cruelty cannot be overstated,' [a spokesperson for Nancy Pelosi] said in a statement. 'Using human beings — including little children — as pawns in their warped game to perpetuate fear and demonize immigrants is despicable, and in some cases, criminal. The American people have resoundingly rejected this Administration's toxic anti-immigrant policies, and Democrats will continue to advance immigration policies that keep us safe and honor our values.'"

CNN reports.

I don't think it's true that the American people have "resoundingly rejected" the Trump administration's approach to immigration, but it does seem obvious that this policy — was it seriously proposed? — would have upset and offended a lot of people. I wonder who wanted this story out and how accurate it is. People say a lot of things when they are brainstorming behind closed doors. But this supposedly reached the stage where DHS "produced an analysis." An analysis of what? Of "the plan"? What plan? Was there an idea that might have been worked into a plan that was analyzed and found unworkable? Who knows? This report on a phantom plan seems like a platform for denouncing the desire to enforce immigration law as "despicable" and "toxic."

UPDATE: Trump has now tweeted about this:

Due to the fact that Democrats are unwilling to change our very dangerous immigration laws, we are indeed, as reported, giving strong considerations to placing Illegal Immigrants in Sanctuary Cities only....

....The Radical Left always seems to have an Open Borders, Open Arms policy – so this should make them very happy!

"White House senior adviser Stephen Miller wants to make sure that outgoing Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen is only the first of a string of senior officials headed out the door...."

"... as he is given more authority over immigration policy. The President has also pushed in recent weeks to reinstate the family separation policy, which Nielsen resisted.... Miller's heightened influence within the West Wing has been aided by the President, who recently told aides in an Oval Office meeting that Miller was in charge of all immigration and border related issues in the White House, according to a person familiar with the meeting. Trump administration officials say that Miller, who played key a role in Nielsen's ouster, wants the President to dismiss the director of United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, Lee Cissna, and the department's general counsel, John Mitnick. United States Secret Service Director Randolph 'Tex' Alles, is also being removed from his position... 'There is a near-systematic purge happening at the nation's second-largest national security agency'...."

From "Stephen Miller wants Trump to oust more senior leaders at Homeland Security" (CNN).

What if your child's teacher thought this about your son: "He was a loner and isolated and off by himself all the time"?

Teachers want us to believe that they love children and care for and support them. They have — through the compulsion of the state — the opportunity to observe them and interact with them for long hours and many days in their formative years. To trust teachers in that role, we need to believe that if they saw that our child was a loner and isolated and off by himself all the time, their heart would go out to our poor little child, and they'd talk with us and try to help. Or maybe we would wonder whether the teacher understands psychological diversity. Why is she tagging our child as "a loner" rather than appreciating the introvert or trying to figure out if there's some unseen burden making the child withdrawn? The teacher shouldn't be like another one of the children, who decide that a kid is a weirdo and shun him. But imagine a teacher who remembers the children she thought about as a weirdo, waited decades, and when that fellow human being achieved some success in his adult life, she wrote a newspaper column to tell the world "He was a loner and isolated and off by himself all the time."

This is Nikki Fiske, Stephen Miller's Third-Grade Teacher. Stephen Miller is a Trump political adviser. Maybe Nikki Fiske was lured into "writing" this article. I put "writing" in quotes because the byline is "Nikki Fiske, as told to Benjamin Svetkey." I hope she's dreadfully sorry at her terrible breach of a teacher's moral responsibility toward a child. I was a teacher for more than 30 years, and my students were all adults, but I have never — in all the tens of thousands of blog posts I've dashed off and published impulsively — even considered naming one of my students and saying something negative I thought I observed about their personality.

I googled the line "He was a loner and isolated and off by himself all the time" and not everything that came up was about Nikki Fiske and Stephen Miller. There was also:

1. "The Badass Personalities of People Who Like Being Alone/Four studies shatter stereotypes of people who like to be alone" by Bella DePaulo (Psychology Today).

True loners are people who embrace their alone time.... If our stereotypes about people who like being alone were true, then we should find that they are neurotic and closed-minded. In fact, just the opposite is true: People who like spending time alone, and who are unafraid of being single, are especially unlikely to be neurotic. They are not the tense, moody, worrying types.

2. "The Lethality of Loneliness/We now know how it can ravage our body and brain" by Judith Shulevitz (New Republic).

“Real loneliness”... is not what the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard characterized as the “shut-upness” and solitariness of the civilized. Nor is “real loneliness” the happy solitude of the productive artist or the passing irritation of being cooped up with the flu while all your friends go off on some adventure. It’s not being dissatisfied with your companion of the moment—your friend or lover or even spouse— unless you chronically find yourself in that situation, in which case you may in fact be a lonely person.... Loneliness... is the want of intimacy.

3. "The Virtues of Isolation/Under the right circumstances, choosing to spend time alone can be a huge psychological boon" by Brent Crane (The Atlantic):

And even though many great thinkers have championed the intellectual and spiritual benefits of solitude–Lao Tzu, Moses, Nietzsche, Emerson, Woolf (“How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table”)– many modern humans seem hell-bent on avoiding it....

Generally, [Matthew Bowker, a psychoanalytic political theorist] contends that our “mistrust of solitude” has consequences. For one, “we’ve become a more groupish society,” he says.... “We’re drawn to identity-markers and to groups that help us define [ourselves]. In the simplest terms, this means using others to fill out our identities, rather than relying on something internal, something that comes from within,” Bowker says. “Separating from the group, I would argue, is one thing that universities should be facilitating more.”

4. "Why do some people become loners? What type of people become loners? What are the advantages of being a loner?" by Anonymous (Quora):

I don’t really have any big hopes for future. At least I am glad I live in North America where loners are somewhat accepted by the society. I used to blame my parents a lot for being this way. I used to be very angry, especially at my father. There is a saying “You become like the people you resent to”. I think it’s happening. My father is a loner too. The difference is that he belongs to a different generation. He was able to build a family and his own family is big. He is a loner at heart who never had a chance of actually becoming one. Now he is in his 60s and my mother complains that he has no friends to spend time with so he is bored all the time.

5. "Depression is a disease of loneliness/A lack of friends can suck someone into solitude – sharing the language of affection could help to ease the pain" by Andrew Solomon (The Guardian):

It would be arrogant for people with friends to pity those without. Some friendless people may be close to their parents or children rather than to extrafamilial friends, or they may be more interested in things or ideas than in other people....

Many people, however, are desperate for love, but don’t know how to go about finding it, disabled by depression’s tidal pull toward seclusion....

For some, friendship has become a vocabulary as obscure as Sanskrit. Lack of emotional fluency may cause depression; it may exacerbate it; it may cast a shadow over recovery. But there are ways to help people who want friendships to learn the language of affection. Parents and schools can teach children productive ways to engage....

Is shunning a "lost art"? That is, had we stopped doing it, and is it the sort of thing — an "art" — that we should want to revive?

I'm reading "Sarah Huckabee Sanders and the lost art of shunning" by Jennifer Rubin in The Washington Post, which riffs on something that happened on Friday: The owner of a restaurant (Red Hen in Lexington, Virginia), asked Sarah Huckabee Sanders (who'd already been seated and served) to leave. That came on top of 2 other restaurant shunnings last week: Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen left a restaurant when she "was heckled" (it was a Mexican restaurant, news reports stress, as if the type of food served creates a topic that conflicts with the border-control policy Nielsen defends and enforces). And, at another Mexican restaurant, somebody yelled at Stephen Miller ("Hey look guys, whoever thought we’d be in a restaurant with a real-life fascist begging [for] money for new cages?").

Rubin asks whether these are "reassuring and appropriate acts of social ostracism" or "a sign of our descent into incivility." Her answer is: "It depends on how you view the child-separation policy." So... incivility is okay as long as you feel strongly about the policy that's motivating you to engage in shunning?!

This is why I have the tag "civility bullshit." It stand for my hypothesis that people only push the civility issue against their antagonists and that they will put other values above civility when the time comes for anyone to demand that their side practice civility.

If the immigration policy is perceived as "a human rights crime, an inhumane policy for which the public was primed by efforts to dehumanize a group of people," then, Rubin reasons, "it is both natural and appropriate for decent human beings to shame and shun the practitioners of such a policy."

Natural!? How did that get in there with "appropriate"? Is it appropriate because it is natural? Xenophobia and racism are natural. I thought the moral challenge was to overcome natural urges like that. And Rubin is also saying that it's enough that one views the policy as inhumane or "a human rights crime." You don't have to have listened carefully to the evidence and the arguments, you can just close your eyes and intuit, and if your heart says that person is evil, then lean into your natural urges and shun.

Oh, but wait: "This exception to the rule of polite social action should be used sparingly (if for no other reason than we will never get through a restaurant meal without someone hollering at someone else)."

What kind of reason is that? Why should getting through restaurant meals get be placed on a higher level than the practice of the "lost art of shunning"? There's no effort at coherent moral reasoning here. I imagine Rubin eats in restaurants a lot and really did have to stop and think about whether her elite lifestyle is threatened.

She ends by ludicrously quibbling with herself:

Each to his own method of expressing disdain and fury, I suppose. 

You suppose?!

Nevertheless, it is not altogether a bad thing to show those who think they’re exempt from personal responsibility that their actions bring scorn, exclusion and rejection.

Not altogether a bad thing? What a weaselly ending!

I am tricked by a headline one more time. To call something "a lost art" is to say that it is "something usually requiring some skill that not many people do any more." Was shunning something — like letter writing — that through widespread practice, people knew how to do well? Rubin has little to say on the subject other than she understands the outrage Trump-haters feel called to express in public, but please don't let that ruin her nice dinners out. Could the Trump people really just know they are hated and eat at home?

ADDED: This has me thinking about how Meade and I were treated in Madison in 2011:

Get out, and stay out. Far out. Meade - You ain't no man for this city. We're out on the streets every day, all day. The 77 square is not for y'all. You say we're from out of state? Bullshit. You're from fucking out of state. We'll show you just how fucking Madison we are. Althouse, we will ruin your goddamn career, your comfort, your pocketbook, your sense of safety and wellbeing, and your life....

YOU CAN'T BAN MADISON FROM LIVING IN MADISON, BUT WE CAN SURE AS SHIT BAN YOU. WHO ARE YOU GONNA CALL? COPS FOR LABOR? THE CHICKENSHIT TEA ASSWIPES WHO ARE SCARED SHITLESS OF THE TEAMSTERS TRUCKS? THE NATIONAL GUARD? SCOTT WALKER? NO ONE IS GOING TO COME AND CRACK DOWN ON US FOR YOU. THERE IS NO CAVALRY. ITS US VS YOU ON THE STREETS OF THE CITY GOING AS FAR AS IT HAS TO GO UNTIL A) WE WIN OR B) DOOMSDAY.

For background, read "Exclusive Interview With... the Man Behind the Ann Althouse Threat" (Breitbart).

Stephen Miller defends Trump — in a hot Trump-like style — until Jake Tapper cuts him off.

On "State of the Union" this morning. Watch the whole thing. Both men struggle mightily for the upper hand. The subject is "Fire and Fury," and there's fire and fury galore.

"The Ugly History of Stephen Miller’s ‘Cosmopolitan’ Epithet/Surprise, surprise—the insult has its roots in Soviet anti-Semitism."

Writes Jeff Greenfield. This caught my eye because I'd just been reading Miller's Wikipedia page and noticed that he is Jewish.

Here's Greenfield:

So what is a “cosmopolitan”? It’s a cousin to “elitist,” but with a more sinister undertone. It’s a way of branding people or movements that are unmoored to the traditions and beliefs of a nation, and identify more with like-minded people regardless of their nationality....

One reason why “cosmopolitan” is an unnerving term is that it was the key to an attempt by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin to purge the culture of dissident voices. In a 1946 speech, he deplored works in which “the positive Soviet hero is derided and inferior before all things foreign and cosmopolitanism that we all fought against from the time of Lenin, characteristic of the political leftovers, is many times applauded.” It was part of a yearslong campaigned [sic] aimed at writers, theater critics, scientists and others who were connected with “bourgeois Western influences.” Not so incidentally, many of these “cosmopolitans” were Jewish, and official Soviet propaganda for a time devoted significant energy into “unmasking” the Jewish identities of writers who published under pseudonyms....

ADDED: I was curious about what Stalin actually said, speaking, of course, not in English, but Russian. I found this Wikipedia article, "Rootless Cosmopolitan":

Rootless cosmopolitan (Russian: безродный космополит, bezrodnyi kosmopolit) was a pejorative label used during the anti-Semitic campaign in the Soviet Union after World War II. Cosmopolitans were intellectuals who were accused of expressing pro-Western feelings and lack of patriotism. The term "rootless cosmopolitan" referred to Jewish intellectuals. It was popularized during the campaign in a Pravda article condemning a group of theatrical critics....

"Why do I find Stephen Miller completely compelling and want to write a novel about him? Why do I not want to write a novel about Jim Acosta?"

Tweets "American Psycho" author Bret Easton Ellis.

Should you want to be the guy Bret Easton Ellis wants to write a novel about?

If you don't know what he's talking about, here's the hilarious/painful interchange between Miller (the Trump adviser) and Acosta (of CNN):



Selected quotes:

Acosta: “What the president is proposing here does not sound like it’s in keeping with American tradition when it comes to immigration. The Statue of Liberty says, ‘Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.’”

Miller: “I don’t want to get off into a whole thing about history here, but the Statue of Liberty is a symbol of liberty and lighting the world. It’s a symbol of American liberty lighting the world. The poem that you’re referring to, that was added later, is not actually a part of the original Statue of Liberty.”

Aside from his suitability as a character in a novel, Miller is certainly right that Acosta is conflating the Emma Lazarus poem with the Statue and that the original historical meaning of the statue precedes and is not the same as those famous lines in the poem. WaPo points that out:

“New Colossus” was not part of the original statue built by the French and given to the American people as a gift to celebrate the country’s centennial. Poet Emma Lazarus was asked to compose the poem in 1883 as part of a fundraising effort to build the statue’s base.... In 1903, 16 years after Lazarus’ death, the poem was inscribed on the statue’s base, just as millions of immigrants were streaming into New York harbor....

Earlier this year Rush Limbaugh blamed Lazarus for the false connection. “The Statue of Liberty had absolutely nothing to do with immigration,” Limbaugh said on a January 31 broadcast. “So why do people think that it does? Well, there was a socialist poet.”...

From the Rush Limbaugh link:

It was originally intended to be delivered to celebrate the centennial of the Declaration, the American Revolution.... The statue was not intended to recognize immigration. It was intended to recognize liberty and freedom. If you think they’re intertwined, don’t be misled.

Rush proceeds to mock Madeleine Albright for saying that Trump's immigration policy is making the Statue of Liberty cry:

The statue doesn’t cry. The statue is a statue. It’s made out of bronze. It doesn’t cry. There aren’t any tears coming from the eyes of the Statue of Liberty ’cause there aren’t any eyes, and the Statue of Liberty is not welcoming immigrants. What it represents is the beacon of liberty and freedom!

Yeah, well, maybe, but it's not made out of bronze. It's pure copper. We're just all misreading everything. But there's a continuum from misreading to interpretation. I can say for a fact that the statue is made out of copper, but the meaning of the statue is cultural, and it means what it has come to mean in the hearts of Americans. What the French had specifically in mind when they sent it to us is relevant if that's what's in our hearts.

You know, it wasn't even green when it arrived. Being copper, it was copper-colored. Do original meaning fans deny that it's green?

IN THE COMMENTS: Fernandinande wrote:

"American Psycho"/I tried reading that a few months ago, and speaking of run-on sentences and that silly "grade" metric, I stopped reading after a two-page sentence which painfully detailed all the products and actions the guy used in his morning routine.

And yet, it you gave me 2 pages right now of Bret Easton Ellis's description of what he imagines Stephen Miller does and uses in his morning routine, I'd eagerly, happily read every word of it. I assume it would be... completely compelling.