Few people in Washington today have more power and influence than Stephen Miller.

He's the architect of the Trump administration's hardline immigration policy, and he's the president's enforcer, making sure that the mega elite and the cabinet stay true to Trump's vision.

Tonight, a close look at the beliefs and the record of Stephen Miller.

Next this is Washington Week with the Atlantic.

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Thank you Once again from the David M. Rubenstein studio at WETA in Washington, editor in chief of The Atlantic and Moderator, Jeffrey Goldberg.

Good evening and welcome to Washington Week.

We're going to do something a little bit different tonight.

We're going to try to understand some of the most important and disruptive Trump policies through the prism of one aide, Stephen Miller.

He's no ordinary aide, as you well know.

He's been with Trump since the beginning of his improbable run as the 21st century's most important political leader, and no one seems to understand the president and his impulses better than Miller.

He's also a revolutionary.

His ideas come from far outside what we used to think of as the Republican mainstream, and he's a vociferous, uncompromising advocate for policies that only a few years ago would have been deemed unworkable and extreme.

Joining me tonight are 4 reporters who have covered Miller for years and know him well.

Leanne Caldwell is the chief Washington correspondent at Puck.

McKay Coppins is a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Zoen Kao Youngs is a White House correspondent at The New York Times, and Ashley Parker is a staff writer, also at the Atlantic.

Thank you all for, for joining me.

All of you have covered Miller for years.

You've written a lot about Miller Ashley very recently landed very recently, but I want to just start at the beginning.

Um, McKay, why don't I go to you because you wrote of the sort of definitive early profile of Stephen Miller in 2018.

So where does he come from?

Like, what, where did his politics develop?

Give us a little sense of of of the forces that created the Stephen Miller.

We, we, we know of today.

But before he entered the general political consciousness.

Yes, I think the thing that most struck me in talking to him years ago when I was profiling him was how much of his political worldview was forged in opposition to his upbringing, right?

He grew up in Santa Monica, family of very well off, progressive, uh, uh, Jewish parents and was surrounded by, uh, you know, what he would describe as kind of a bubble of progressive affluence, right?

Uh, he went to a high school where they would have, uh, you know, multiracial uh retreats and, you know, multiculturalism festivals and his first exposure to conservative politics was actually reading on a lark guns and Ammo magazine, which then led him to people like Rush Limbaugh, Larry Elder, David Horowitz, the kind of prominent conservative talk radio hosts and polemicists of the time, and you can see from the very beginning as a teenager in a very liberal high school, him kind of mimicking the political style of those people.

Wait, wait, you mentioned the high school.

Just watch with me for one moment, a quick clip of this is Stephen Miller running for student government, student government.

Watch this.

Am I the only one who is sick and tired of being told to pick up my trash and we have plenty of janitors working for us So, so first of all, the Che Guevara look really is is I can't, doesn't do that anymore.

He's really into the silk suits now or something, but um, but, but you wrote part of your profile was focused on the fact that he's an expert troll, and so in your study of him in your conversations with him back then, was he, was he just trolling his liberal friends or liberal adversaries or, or was that something more serious?

Well, this was actually kind of the mystery of Stephen Miller to everybody who knew him at every stage of his life in high school, later at Duke when he went to college, he was, everyone was trying to figure out if this was performance art or if you really believed it.

And you know he would that was a classic example of teenage Stephen Miller, but he would write, you know, columns for the Duke campus newspaper, picking culture war fights on campus.

What I think, you know, where I landed because I asked him about this a bunch of times, and he at first would say, no, no, no, I believe everything that I say.

But then he at one point said, I do believe in constructive controversy for the sake of enlightenment.

Those were his words, and I think that that gets at something fundamental about him, which is he has always believed that there is a role for provocation and performance in politics.

So Ashley, let me ask you this.

Does he go further rhetorically than than he actually believes or when you're listening to him, especially in this second Trump term, is what he's saying, what he actually believes.

Is he trying to just provoke and kind of, then he'll bring it back a little bit.

I mean, again, I think with him at this point, both things are true, but, but we have sort of come full circle to where the caricature has become the character and it's really hard to differentiate.

You see in some of those early high school videos of Stephen Miller, him sort of occasionally breaking the fourth wall to kind of do a full face, toothy grin or kind of almost smirk at himself as if he can't believe he said what he's just said, but in reporting my profile, one of the people I spoke with was Ste ve Bannon, who recounted, I mean, early on, Stephen Miller would open for Donald Trump in 2015, 2016, that campaign, his rallies, and Stephen, Steve Bannon again, who loves all the incendiary stuff recalled saying to Stephen Miller, Look, the point of an opening act is so the main guy doesn't have to tap you, right?

You have to stop saying these things because Trump can't come out there and beat it.

And so people have told me in the White House, one of the things they like about him, perhaps counterintuitive ly is that he is incredibly dogmatic.

That intensity, maybe not the trolling, but that intensity and that passion is the same behind closed doors and in the Oval Office, as you see in front of the TV cameras and so whether you agree with them or not, you sort of always know where he stands, which is on the, the far extreme when it comes to immigration.

Zolin, you've watched this for a while as well.

Has his ideology shift and we'll talk about the the the the the the the linchpins of the ideology in a minute, but has he shift ed Has he become more extreme?

Because obviously the second Trump term is very much unlike the first Trump term.

I actually think from everyone I've talked to that Stephen's ideology has been rather consistent.

It's that he's more visible and more powerful in this second term.

You know, in the first term, he might have been limited in in many ways to being kind of the architect and overseeing immigration policy in the Department of Homeland Security.

And he was a speechwriter, of course, you know, getting involved in coms as well.

And now you have somebody who you know, is taking the the that ideology that was formed through his upbringing, through working with Michele Bachmann, now to uh uh imposing that on domestic policy, foreign policy as well.

Um, his role has expanded.

If I could also follow up on the previous subject, I think that the rhetoric and the provoking, Stephen also sees that as key to implementing his policy, right?

I mean, in the first term shelling the beach in advance of the actual policy and and.

he believes that America, as you often hear of America having a role as a sanctuary for immigrants being a pro-immigrant country.

He is trying to change um the perception in the nation towards immigrants.

2 basically make it so that the pendulum of politics shifts, and there's more of a tolerance for the policies he's trying to implement.

Leanne, talk about, so we know he was he was a expert at provocation.

He was a he was a serious conservative, more conservative than Republicans at the time as he was growing up.

He comes to Washington, talk about his course through Congress until he until he meets Trump.

Yes, well, yes, as you said, he worked for Michele Bachmann, who is a remind us, Michele Bachmann is someone who actually ran for president in 2008.

She was, she was a fringe candidate, an outlier, and she was also very provocative.

She crashed and burned very quickly.

He, she was a little bit ahead of her time in terms of she was kind of pre Lauren Boberg before Lauren.

Yeah, absolutely.

But then he found a home in Jeff Sessions.

Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, who was also very anti-immigrant.

um, and the ideologically they were on the same page.

Jeff Sessions was adamantly involved in comprehensive immigration reform during, you know, the Bush and early Obama years, Bush years really, and uh and trying to kill it.

And Jeff's and uh Stephen Miller was instrumental in that.

He had a reputation on the Hill.

He was a comms director at the time of being way outside the mainstream.

He would also an internal coms meetings with his fellow Republican coms directors would would provocate in the same way that he does publicly.

People used to just roll their eyes and dismiss him.

Now he has won probably the most powerful non-elected official in this country, and you still see actually that tension on Capitol Hill with Stephen Miller.

People remember Stephen Miller then and and there is a lot of, you know, grumbling on Capitol Hill, even among Republicans who think that Stephen Miller's policies are going too far and will hurt them.

It's hard just briefly to overstate.

I covered the Gang of Eight immigration bill for The New York Times is a congressional correspondent, and this was sort of the last time immigration bipartisan immigration, had any real momentum, right?

You had 4 Republicans, including Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio, um, 4 Democrats.

You had the tentative cautious, but you had the buy-in of the tech community, of the business community, of the labor community, of the activist community, of the Hispanic community, and the reason that bill essentially sank and did not come up for a vote in the House, was single-handedly because of Jeff Sessions and Stephen Miller working alongside Breit b ar t News to kill it.

And remember, just during the end of the Biden administration when James Lankford was working on a bipartisan bill to close the borders and then Trump came in as a potential candidate and killed it Stephen Miller had a role in that too, right?

Well, let's talk about Sessions and the jump from Sessions to to try.

Obviously Sessions, we don't have to rehearse this one at length, but was a Trump loyalist and Trump turned on him because Jeff Sessions appointed the special prosecutor, etc.

how did Miller make the move to the big man?

So so I mean it's a classic Washington story also.

It's not that unusual, but did he discard Jeff Sessions when not yet.

So what happened is in January of 2016, Miller was one of the very first people to come and just leave Jeff Sessions' office and go to to his campaign, and this is when Trump was still improbable.

Yes, very improbable, before the Iowa caucuses, a good month before then, but Jeff Sessions a month later was the very first person, first senator to endorse Donald Trump.

And so they were still very close working together to promote this this enigma of Donald Trump.

But then, you know, fast forward to Jeff Sessions being attorney General, Jeff Sessions recusing himself into the Russia investigation.

Jeff Sessions losing his job, being fired because of that, and the person left standing is Steven Miller, who who discarded Jeff Sessions at that moment.

When you say discarded, what do you mean?

There is, there is no public statement of Stephen Miller supporting or saying anything nice about Jeff Sessions in that moment and then a person close to Stephen Miller said that no one at that time was more furious at Jeff Sessions than Stephen Miller.

I mean this goes to another question about Stephen Miller and his view of a powerful executive.

I want to get to that, but let's stay on the immigration views.

There ' s a tweet, and he tweets a lot as we, we know, and he tweets very uh frankly about his views.

There's a tweet.

Someone should write an alternate historical novel where Americans are the first to master the automobile.

The first in flight, the first to harness the atom, the first to land on the moon, but just keep going and never open our borders to the entire third world for 60 years.

Basically, what he's saying is American innovation all happened because white men, I mean, that's the interpretation here.

Did all of these things and then the country lost focus because it started letting in the third world.

Mckay, come back to California.

I, I mean, because I do think that's crucial to understanding his immigration.

These are, this isn't first of all, it's it's ahistorical.

I mean, Americans invented plenty of things at the same time that immigrants were coming into the country.

In fact, many of the people who are immigrants invented those things as as new Americans.

But go into this the the the the visceral feeling against immigrants.

Yeah, I mean, look, obviously none of us can read his mind, but I think that to understand how these views formed, you have to understand the post 9/11 politics on the right in Southern California in particular, right?

Post 9/11 there was a general kind of rise in xenophobia, fear of, you know, Muslims outsiders, foreigners, we have been through this national trauma.

It's understandable to a certain extent, but Miller's particular fixation on immigration was really born of the right wing media ecosystem in California at the time, which was always rotating around immigration issues.

you know, I think that if he had been, you know, born in Cleveland or Montana or, you know, even, you know, Washington DC, I think it would have been a very different story, but the people that he idolized, that the local talk radio people on the right, the kind of group of conservatives he fell in with we're always talking about immigration and so that extremely negatively, of course but the only reason I say that is because Ronald Reagan, the big the the greatest Republican in the history of California.

it was not in that camp, right, that something had shifted in the decades after Reagan.

Some of it had to do with the right wing backlash to George W. Bush's attempt to find a a grand immigration compromise, but because he was always on the far right of the Republican Party, and because he came from California, immigration was kind of a natural wedge issue that he he latched on.

So what was it growing up in Southern California, he saw Hispanic s he saw the Latino population as just too big trying to dominate white America.

Well, there, there's sort of two things.

You're talking about the post 9/11 Republican sort of backlash, you know, against real efforts to actually have some sort of comprehensive immigration reform.

What you saw was sort of a xenophobic view where you generalized many immigrants coming from the Middle East as national security threats, and you've seen that rhetorrhetoric replicated by this administration.

But then when it comes to also immigrants coming from Central and Latin America, you've had, and this is still exists today, this real push by conservatives of these are, this is economic competition with people that are that are born in the states.

Now of course economic studies do do undercut that and show that immigrants broadly actually benefit the economy, but this is a prime example for the white grievance argument, right?

I want to stay on that for a second because Stephen Miller is Jewish and part of his family came over here 100 years ago as refugees from anti-Semitism in Europe.

When you're in your conversations with him, does that ever play in to uh to his understanding of the world and his own background as the grandchild, great grandchild of immigrants.

I'm gonna introduce one data point which, you know, may or may not be relevant, but he told me one of the the books that most shaped him was Wayne LaPierre's book, the head of the NRA.

In that book, Wayne LaPierre makes an argument that the Holocaust, and I think he said something like Auschwitz, our prime examples of the need for Second Amendment rights, that the, the, you know, to make what you will of that argument, but that if the Jewish people had been armed, they would have been able to stand up to this, you know, authoritarian genocidal regime.

I think that he found a way early on to to kind of meld his general right-wing worldview with his Jewish identity and background.

I think it became a little more strained as he got deeper into Trump era right wing politics and found himself kind of swimming in waters that were, let's say a little bit less friendly to yes, I mean, because there is a, there's an element of let's call it the racialist far right that doesn't have fond feelings about Jews.

Can I make just one brief editorial aside.

I'm sorry, this prompts this prompts this thought.

I wish that the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto had more guns back then, but I don't think that they still would not have been able to defeat the German army.

I mean, it sounds like a, it's just a kind of a anyway, put that aside for now.

We'll do a special episode.

Yes, I'll bring it up with Wayne LaPierre the next time he's on the show.

The thing I would just add to that too is when you look at Stephen's comments about immigration.

he does have a very narrow sort of view of who, which immigrants are justified to be in the United States, and it's not, it doesn't always track with the law.

Like if you go into a legal port of entry at the border, you have a legal process to come in the country.

He pushes back against that, right?

He pushes back against the parole system, the Biden administration started.

They've revamped their refugee program to focus on English-speaking, uh, refugees coming into the US and not from predomin ant ly African and also Muslim majority countries too.

So there's a through line there of who he thinks is deserving to be.

Well, this is why South African Afrikaners are given the only refugees are given privileges in that allowed in that system, you know, I want to talk a little bit about his power in the White House, and I came into direct contact with this question last year during the signal controversy when I was in that chat, JD Vance, everyone else, Marco Rubio are in that chat and arguing back and forth about the, the utility of striking Yemen, and then Miller comes into the chat, um, and writes, as I heard it, the president was clear green light, but we soon make clear to Egypt and Europe what we expect in return, and that shut down the debate.

It shut down JD Vance, kind of made me think, wow, Stephen Miller is worth a half hour on Washington Week if that's the that's the case that he's so powerful.

Talk about inside the White House, what kind of power you hard to overstate his power inside the Trump 2 term White House in part because his purview is so much broader than just immigration, although it certainly includes immigration, but it includes trade.

It includes foreign policy.

It includes national security.

It includes education.

The entire war on the quote unquote elite university system.

Stephen Miller in his free time when he's not dealing with immigration is the architect of that and also it's, you know, you were asking earlier if his views had become more extreme.

I think it is instructive to understand him in some of the same ways we understand President Trump himself, which is that his views haven't necessarily changed, but he used those even more than Trump in certain ways.

Stephen Miller used those 4 years out of power to basically get better, stronger, faster, more ruthless, and he understood the mistakes he made in the first term.

Why the travel ban EO, he wrote the first time, led to chaos in the executive order led to casts at the airports and got struck down in the courts.

This time he knows that if you care about being hardline on immigration, it's not just important to have your people at the Department of Homeland Security, although that is important, but there's certain positions at Health and Human Services where you want a strong ally with your point of view.

There are certain jobs in the State Department in the Western Hemisphere division, so he knows now all the levers of power, right?

But Leanne, let me ask you this Minneapolis, Tom Holman comes in and says, well, we're pulling out.

Obviously it did not go well from certainly from a public relations perspective.

ive for the administration in Minneapolis, largely because of the two deaths caused by ICE agents.

um uh of of protesters.

Did he go, did Stephen Miller go too far this time?

It seems that way.

Yeah, I think that a couple things on his standing in the White House, there was, he had a 40th birthday party that his wife Katie Miller hosted for him back in the fall or the summer actually, um, every people who attended told me that they have never seen so many people in the administration in one place.

It was every single cabinet member, official, Caroline Levitt, just everyone was there.

You needed like a designated survivor exactly, and it was um and it was show, it was, it was a, a show of how important he is in this administration.

It was also notable that there was no members of Congress there except for the Speaker, the Speaker of the House.

which gets back to your question, did he go too far?

This is something that the president has gotten a lot of pushback on.

Stephen Miller has been criticized, very publicly by Democrats and very privately by Republicans.

Although Senator Tillis, a prominent Republican, does not like him at all and has told the president that despises every single time he can publicly say how much he hates Stephen Miller.

He does it.

He will be talking about something totally different to a reporter, and he will bring up Stephen Miller.

He's also re ti ring He is also retiring, but he does, he does have a a line to the president, and he has told the president many times that Stephen Miller is doing him and the Republican Party, no justice.

We did see something rare after the Pretti shooting too.

On Miller, which was him also sort of try to clean it up and say, well, look, I was getting information from CBP agents.

There was a period there where they tried to soften that language.

That's, that's rare.

McKay, let me, let me ask you this.

What does he ultimately want?

And by the way, you have like 30 seconds to answer the question.

Um, well, I think that he wants a lot, but I think when it comes to immigration in particular, I, I, I, I think that you guys are right.

I, he, he has made it very clear and even in my conversations that he wants to entirely reframe our national understanding of our country as a nation.

He's basically in an argument with Emma Lazarus, right, in a kind of way, right?

I mean, I, there, there's a key moment in the first, uh, the first term where he was asked about the placard at the base of the Statue of Liberty.

That's, that's the poem, and he put, he completely dismisses it.

Like it would disdainfully dismisses it, and I think that that just, that is his ideological project.

If he leaves, if he can retire in a country that does not see immigrants as being welcomed into this country that does not see immigrants as part of the national story.

He will be happy.

It's a fascinating figure, obviously the most powerful non-elected official.

I think we can all agree on that, more powerful than cabinet officials.

We'll talk about him again and again, obviously, but it's all the time we have for now.

I want to thank our guests for joining me, and I thank you at home for watching us.

You can read Asher's profile of Stephen Miller by visiting theatlantic.com.

I'm Jeffrey Goldberg.

Good night from Washington.

Corporate funding for Washington Week with the Atlantic is provided by Consumer Cellular Additional funding is provided by Co and Patricia Ewens for the Ewan Foundation, committed to bridging cultural differences in our communities.

Sandra and Carl Delay Magnusson.

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Steve and Marilyn Kerman.

Leonard and Norma chlorifying.

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