Although photos of White House Senior Policy Adviser Stephen Miller tend to bend toward aging senior citizen, I assure you that the man is only 32. I researched this because I, too, had a hard time believing it, but he’s only 32 years old, and he grew up in Santa Monica, Calif.
What we already know is that Miller has always been a political asshole. He’s worked for some of the most divisive right-wing Congress members, including as a spokesperson for former Rep. Michele Bachmann, who believes that Donald Trump should deport people who won’t swear allegiance to the United States, and for former Rep. John Shadegg.
Before coming over to the White House, Miller worked as a policy adviser and communications director for conservative Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, who hates marijuana and black people, but not in that order.
A New York Times profile on Miller shows that in his short 32 years on this earth, Miller has been gearing up to be in this White House with this administration his whole life—because Miller has always been an asshole, dating as far back as when he was just 16.
From the New York Times piece on Miller, here is what he thought about janitors and being forced to pick up his own trash:
Standing behind the microphone before a hostile amphitheater crowd, Mr. Miller — then a 16-year-old candidate for a student government post, now a 32-year-old senior policy adviser to President Trump — steered quickly into an unlikely campaign plank: ensuring that the janitorial staff was really earning its money.
“Am I the only one,” he asked, “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?”
At his Santa Monica high school, Miller once did a patriotic striptease to reveal an American-flag T-shirt because that’s how the right-wingers do it; they also want to have sex with the flag.
“Mr. Miller set off on a patriotic semi-striptease before the editor of the student newspaper, according to the editor, Ari Rosmarin, theatrically removing a button-down to reveal an American flag T-shirt in protest of an article he found inconsistent with the national interest,” the New York Times reports.
And if that wasn’t proof that Miller was grooming himself to sit next to one of the most powerful assholes in America, get this from the New York Times profile:
[Miller] jumped, uninvited, into the final stretch of a girls’ track meet, apparently intent on proving his athletic supremacy over the opposite sex. (The White House, reaching for exculpatory context, noted that this was a girls’ team from another school, not his own.)
Miller also allegedly called Jason Islas, who is Latino and was a junior high school friend of Miller’s, to note why they could no longer be friends one year.
“He gives me this litany of reasons,” Islas told the Times. Miller noted that Islas was socially awkward and had acne. But his last reason was the most telling of who Miller would grow to become.
“He mentioned my Latino heritage as one of the reasons,” Islas said. “I remember coming away from the conversation being like, ‘OK, that’s that.’”
Sarah Huckabee Sanders, aka Suckabee, the White House press secretary—who didn’t go to school with Miller, so I’m not sure how she knows what the hell she’s talking about—claims that Islas’ version of events is “a completely inaccurate characterization of their relationship, or lack thereof,” disputing his recollection and suggesting that the two were more acquaintances than friends, the Times reports.
As a teen, Miller didn’t like that the school had morning announcements in both English and Spanish. He wrote an editorial pondering why there were “usually very few, if any, Hispanic students in my honors classes, despite the large number of Hispanic students that attend our school,” according to the Times.
He also confronted Latino classmates when he heard them speaking Spanish.
“He tended to make some of the Spanish-language stuff very personal,” Moises Castillo, a classmate, told the Times. “There was a ‘If you’re not speaking English, perhaps you should go somewhere else.’”
I think this is unequivocal proof that some assholes are made and others are born.
Read more at the New York Times.