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Stephen Miller: Vampire of the West Wing


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The picture accompanying this article made me nauseous. He is so creepy: "Stephen Miller: Immigration agitator and White House survivor"

Spoiler

Stephen Miller, one of the few remaining original advisers to President Trump, invited a small group of writers and editors from Breitbart News to the White House last fall for a conversation on immigration. The conservative news website — headed at the time by one of the former White House advisers, Stephen K. Bannon — has been a steadfast cheerleader for Trump and his nationalist anti-immigration agenda.

But Miller’s goal on this occasion was to sell the group on a compromise: a possible deal offering protections to the young undocumented immigrants known as “dreamers” in exchange for tougher immigration provisions, such as an end to family-sponsored migration. 

The discussion quickly turned into a shouting match — an expletive-laden “blowup,” according to one person familiar with the gathering. Another person described it as “just a fundamental disagreement within the movement.”

The combative conversation illustrates Miller’s influential yet delicate role within the administration — a true believer in restrictionist immigration policies attempting to broker a historic deal on behalf of a president with similarly hawkish, but far more flexible, positions. Miller also is a rare behind-the-scenes survivor in a White House roiled with firings and resignations over the past year.

Now the 32-year-old former Senate aide is at the center of the fiery Washington battle over what to do about the dreamers, whose protection under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program will soon be rescinded by Trump and whose cause has been taken up by Democrats. Miller was among those in the Oval Office this month when the president raged about accepting immigrants from “shithole countries” — an episode that set back bipartisan talks over the budget and immigration and helped propel the government to a partial shutdown this past weekend.

Miller has come to be widely viewed — unfairly, White House officials argue — as something of a puppeteer, helping to shape and scuttle deals for a president who doesn’t understand — or care to understand — the details.

On Sunday, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) — whose doomed immigration compromise with Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) was the target of that Trump tirade in the Oval Office — blasted Miller as a primary reason for the continuing standoff over border issues.

“As long as Stephen Miller is in charge of negotiating immigration, we are going nowhere. He’s been an outlier for years,” Graham told reporters at the Capitol. “I’ve talked with the president; his heart is right on this issue. He’s got a good understanding of what will sell. And every time we have a proposal, it is only yanked back by staff members.”

 The reality, though, is arguably more complicated.

Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, said Trump has hawkish immigration views on a gut level but doesn’t necessarily understand all of the policy details and implications. He said Miller and Chief of Staff John F. Kelly — who also plays a crucial role in immigration policy — are “not so much yanking the president’s leash” as doing “the proper job of staff” by steering the president to his goals. 

“There was a story line that people were developing in their own minds that Miller is the source of evil and without him everything would be great,” Krikorian said. “The truth is the president is committed to this general perspective on immigration, and Miller and Kelly are there to help him implement what he always wanted to do.”

Miller’s driving obsession is immigration, an area where he has long pushed hard-line positions going back to his days as a combative conservative activist at Duke University. In Washington, as an aide to then-Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), he was instrumental in helping to kill a bipartisan effort in 2013 for a broad immigration deal. He and Sessions helped galvanize House conservatives to block the bill passed by the Senate, including distributing a handbook of talking points aimed at undercutting the compromise. 

Now working in the White House, Miller — who is known for his natty attire, long-winded conversations and distinctive heavy-lidded appearance on television — has told colleagues that his “consuming focus is to make what I know the president wants in an immigration deal a legislative reality,” a senior White House official said. He has few hobbies outside of work, and his spacious second-floor West Wing office is sparsely decorated, with a stack of “Make America Great Again” hats and invitations to inauguration events framed on the wall. 

The official said Miller chats frequently with the president about immigration, both formally and informally, during scheduled meetings, on board Air Force One, after bill signings in the Oval Office and during rides in the presidential motorcade. He prizes loyalty to Trump above all else and speaks often of the president with reverence, a stark contrast with some eye-rolling aides.

 Miller — who declined requests for an on-the-record interview — tells others that Trump has two main goals when it comes to immigration policy: to move from a low-skilled or unskilled immigration system to a merit-based, high-skilled one and to ensure that the nation’s immigration laws are enforced, including tougher measures along the southern border. 

At times, he has also been forced to forgo his more restrictionist beliefs for Trump, whose declarations on the issue have veered from cheering a border wall to expressing occasional sympathy for dreamers.

In early November, Miller invited Krikorian and a group of like-minded conservative allies to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in an effort to garner support for a White House immigration bill. But Miller, whom many of the attendees considered an ideological peer, was not as warmly received as he would have liked, an administration official said.

Much like the Breitbart meeting, Miller found himself urging the group to allow the sorts of concessions for dreamers that they have been fighting against for years in return for systematic changes to the legal immigration system, like stronger enforcement measures and ending family preferences. 

“Be a possible ‘yes,’ be open to doing something that makes you very uncomfortable on DACA in exchange for substantive structural reforms that may have been out of reach,” a senior White House official said, summarizing Miller’s pitch on the condition of anonymity to share details of a private moment. “That’s the whole game.”

Outside the White House, he is viewed warily by many, particularly those on the left.

In September, Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) left the White House and announced with great fanfare that they had reached a DACA deal with Trump — protections for the dreamers in exchange for a border security package that did not include funding for a wall at the southern border. 

It fell to Miller to calm angry and anxious Republicans who reached out to him. Miller was also upset, according to a person who spoke to him, and even apologized for what happened — a claim that a White House official denied.

But he also told Capitol Hill aides to take a deep breath, assuring them that Trump had not changed his position, a senior White House official said. Trump later backed away from the agreement and claimed the Democratic leaders had misrepresented it.

After the incident, one Republican Hill aide said there was a sense that Miller was going “rogue.” At the time, he sent a “Stephen Miller wish list” of trade-offs for a DACA deal to Republican aides — largely requests that would be non-starters for Democrats — although the list got longer and more strident after the Homeland Security and Justice departments weighed in, a senior administration official said.

More recently, he was accused of helping persuade Trump to backtrack on the Durbin-Graham immigration proposal over a roughly two-hour period on Jan. 11, from when Graham and Durbin spoke with Trump in the morning to when the duo arrived at the White House at midday. They found Trump surrounded by conservatives such as Sens. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and David Perdue (R-Ga.), and so angry that he not only rejected their plan, but also dismissed immigrants from Haiti and African countries in profane terms.

Durbin and Graham blamed Miller for inviting the hawkish members of Congress, but the decision was Trump’s idea and Miller was not even in the Oval Office when Trump extended the invitations, two White House officials said. Several leadership aides who were previously critical of Miller also say he has been a more constructive force in the recent immigration talks.

“Stephen Miller is an impassioned advocate for President Trump and his agenda and he is respected by all at the White House,” White House communications director Hope Hicks said in a statement. “Stephen is equal parts talent and intellect, but he is also a person with great heart and an unparalleled work ethic.” 

Within the White House, Miller is especially close with Kelly, who is frequently aligned with both Trump and Miller’s views on immigration. Before moving to his current chief of staff role, Kelly served as the Department of Homeland Security secretary, when he and Miller spoke several times a week about immigration and border policy.

Miller also attempted to shift some portfolio items, such as refu­gee numbers, from the State Department to DHS because he trusted Kelly more than Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to handle them.

Kelly has told a number of other aides that he trusts Miller on immigration. White House officials say Miller — who hopes to work in the West Wing for the entirety of Trump’s presidency — has made a point of working within Kelly’s organizational structure.

Some in the administration also view Miller as an opportunist. At one point when he was still at the White House, Bannon, a frequent ideological ally of Miller, found himself on the outs with the president and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner. When Trump solicited Miller’s opinion on Bannon, Miller told the president that he believed Bannon was leaking to the media and that he would be doing much better without him, said two White House officials with knowledge of the incident.

And when Sessions, who is now Trump’s attorney general, got crossways with the president over his decision to recuse himself from the Russia probe, Miller did not defend his former boss and mentor. He did not believe it was his role or helpful for him to do so, a senior administration official said. 

The president, meanwhile, is fond of Miller’s combative style and sees him as a difficult person to replace because of his speechwriting abilities, current and former aides said. Trump has complimented Miller for standing his ground in a fight with Tillerson, two people with knowledge of the praise said. Trump also told aides that he prefers Miller’s approach over that of Johnny DeStefano, another West Wing aide who was more deferential to Tillerson in a fight over personnel, two White House officials said.

More recently, the president offered a tweet of support for Miller after he and CNN host Jake Tapper got into a heated debate on “State of the Union,” when Miller strongly defended Trump from allegations in a controversial new book by Michael Wolff. The appearance ended with Tapper cutting the segment short followed by an off-camera shouting match. Miller told colleagues that the show went well and that he wouldn’t have changed a thing. 

Miller frequently reads Breitbart and, early in the administration, was spotted carrying a pile of Breitbart articles into Bannon’s office. White House aides said Miller was a prime supplier of Breitbart clips to Trump. He also takes personal pride in successfully pitching stories to the site, associates say.

Late last year, he showed up at a Capitol Hill townhouse known as the “Breitbart Embassy” for a book party for conservative commentator Laura Ingraham, drawing murmurs from the crowd. After briefly talking with Bannon and Ingraham, Miller retreated to the kitchen, where he snacked on desserts away from the limelight — just as he prefers to be.

 

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A notable quote from the story in the above post:

It says a lot about Trump as a leader that he's happy that an aide fights it out with the Secretary of State.

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1 hour ago, AmazonGrace said:

It says a lot about Trump as a leader that he's happy that an aide fights it out with the Secretary of State.

That's probably a big appeal factor for him. I guess Miller is in with Kelly on the Tweet polishing. I think Hopey used to do it but now the better grammar and punctuation reflects Kelly and Miller.

This made a bell go off in my head with regard to Miller's hard line on immigration. He went to Duke. Hardly anyone who goes to Duke is local and the majority come from two groups. You have your rich kids from this country and you have a large number of foreign students. I wonder if he struggled while he was there and developed a resentment for these "immigrants" who might threaten any future jobs he might get.

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4 hours ago, GrumpyGran said:

That's probably a big appeal factor for him. I guess Miller is in with Kelly on the Tweet polishing. I think Hopey used to do it but now the better grammar and punctuation reflects Kelly and Miller.

This made a bell go off in my head with regard to Miller's hard line on immigration. He went to Duke. Hardly anyone who goes to Duke is local and the majority come from two groups. You have your rich kids from this country and you have a large number of foreign students. I wonder if he struggled while he was there and developed a resentment for these "immigrants" who might threaten any future jobs he might get.

I seem to vaguely remember reading somewhere (but for the life of me, I can't remember where) that at Duke he used to have a friend who was a Latino. They got along pretty well until Miller's mind got corrupted and he became hardline anti-immigration. When that happened, he told his friend: "I'm sorry but we can't be friends any more because you're a Latino." I also read that his parents were apparently appalled by his new stance, as they are (were?) Democrats and quite liberal.

I'll try to find out where I read that exactly, but it may take a while.

Well I found that faster than I thought I would. Here it is:

HOW STEPHEN MILLER RODE WHITE RAGE FROM DUKE’S CAMPUS TO TRUMP’S WEST WING

It's a very long article, so I'll just quote the parts I mentioned above. If you're interested in Miller's background, the article is quite interesting, and worth the read. (Fair warning though, it starts with a rather graphic description of the Duke lacrosse scandal.)

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When Miller celebrated his Bar Mitzvah at Beth Shir Shalom, Islas was a close enough friend to be invited. But Miller abruptly ended their friendship that summer, before they both went off to Santa Monica’s huge, 3,400-student public high school. According to Islas, one day Miller telephoned him and told him he didn’t want to be friends anymore. Not content to just let their interactions fade as they moved from one school to another, Miller wanted to make a point. “He gave me a whole list of reasons why we couldn’t be friends and almost all of them were personal, but the one that stuck out was because of my Latino heritage,” Islas recalls. “It was the one that wasn’t directly personal. It was very strange.”

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Despite Miller’s penchant for outrageous provocation, his family was very much like others in Santa Monica. His mother, Miriam, from Johnstown, Pennsylvania, came from a well-known Jewish family that had made a fortune in retailing. His father, Michael, a Stanford graduate, was a lawyer and real-estate mini-mogul.

[...] Miller’s evolving political views could not have been more at odds with those of progressive, inclusive Santa Monica, a fact in which he delighted. 

 

Edited by fraurosena
adding article
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1 hour ago, fraurosena said:

Miller's background,

Thanks, @fraurosena. I did not know he was such an outspoken ass during all of that.  What a little opportunist! There is a definite presence of white-boy racism at Duke, as I said rich boys with an entitlement attitude so I guess he found his tribe there.

I can see how he would find the foreign students there threatening as to actually be there as a foreign student you have to be pretty impressive.

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How can he get tossed from the WH he same as Bannon? He is not any near as volatile as Bannon who prone to spontaneous combustion on almost a daily basis. Maybe a #presidentMiller campaign.  That would stick in Trumps craw until he would, as with Bannon, not to even know Miller and how Miller had no effect on OrangeTurd's campaign.

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  • 1 month later...

Proof you shouldn't let vampire's out during the day.

 

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"The Outrage Over Family Separation Is Exactly What Stephen Miller Wants"

Spoiler

When the news stories began to surface last month of sobbing young migrant children being forcibly removed from their parents at the border, many close White House watchers instantly suspected Stephen Miller was behind it.

Though he keeps a relatively low profile compared to the cast of camera-muggers and Twitter warriors in President Donald Trump’s orbit, the 32-year-old speechwriter and senior adviser has cultivated a reputation as the most strident immigration hawk in the West Wing. So, it came as little surprise when The New York Times reported over the weekend that Miller had played a key behind-the-scenes role in advancing the new border policy:

“No nation can have the policy that whole classes of people are immune from immigration law or enforcement,” he said during an interview in his West Wing office this past week. “It was a simple decision by the administration to have a zero tolerance policy for illegal entry, period. The message is that no one is exempt from immigration law.”

… Privately, Mr. Miller argued that bringing back “zero tolerance” would be a potent tool in a severely limited arsenal of strategies for stopping migrants from flooding across the border … And in April, after the border numbers reached their zenith, Mr. Miller was instrumental in Mr. Trump’s decision to ratchet up the zero tolerance policy.

But while Miller’s influence on this issue is a matter of documented fact, his motives remain somewhat murkier. Why exactly is he using his perch to champion a measure that’s so unpopular that it’s opposed by fully two-thirds of Americans? Theories abound, of course—ranging from ideology to incompetence to xenophobia—but they are almost all products of distant speculation.

I spent a significant amount of time earlier this year reporting on Miller for a recent profile in The Atlantic. In addition to interviewing friends, allies, enemies, and associates, I sat down for a lengthy interview with him in late March. At the time, the forced family-separation policy had not yet been implemented. But our conversation illuminated the grim calculus that seems to underlie the border strategy Miller helped shape.

First, it should be understood that Miller’s hardline approach to immigration predates his work for Trump. In 2013, as an aide to then-Senator Jeff Sessions, Miller made his name on Capitol Hill fighting ferociously against a bipartisan immigration-reform bill alongside populist-right media allies like Breitbart News. The effort to sink the legislation prevailed, and his credentials as a true-believing ideologue were secure. He is, by all accounts, an avowed restrictionist, and he likely believes that separating children from their parents at the border will deter future illegal immigration.

But when we talked, Miller also made it clear to me that he sees immigration as a winning political issue for his boss.

“The American people were warned—let me [be] sarcastic when I remark on that—[they] were quote-unquote warned by Hillary Clinton that if they elected Donald Trump, he would enforce an extremely tough immigration policy, crack down on illegal immigration, deport people who were here illegally, improve our vetting and screening, and all these other things,” Miller told me. “And many people replied to that by voting for Donald Trump.”

Skeptics will note that most Americans did not, in fact, vote for Donald Trump, and that polls continue to show widespread disapproval of some of his signature immigration positions. But it doesn’t matter. In Miller’s view of the electoral landscape, the president is winning anytime the country is focused on immigration—polls and bad headlines be damned. (This explains why Miller is, according to Politico, leading an effort within the administration to plan additional crackdowns on immigrants in the months leading up to the midterm elections.)

Speaking to The New York Times, Miller framed his theory this way: “You have one party that’s in favor of open borders, and you have one party that wants to secure the border. And all day long the American people are going to side with the party that wants to secure the border. And not by a little bit. Not 55–45. 60–40. 70–30. 80–20. I’m talking 90–10 on that.”

Of course, if the goal were simply to draw voters’ attention to the border, there are plenty of ways to do it that are less controversial (not to mention, less cruel) than ripping young children from the arms of asylum seekers and sticking them in dystopian-looking detention centers. But for Miller, the public outrage and anger elicited by policies like forced family separation are a feature, not a bug.  

A seasoned conservative troll, Miller told me during our interview that he has often found value in generating what he calls “constructive controversy—with the purpose of enlightenment.” This belief traces back to the snowflake-melting and lib-triggering of his youth. As a conservative teen growing up in Santa Monica, he wrote op-eds comparing his liberal classmates to terrorists and musing that Osama bin Laden would fit in at his high school. In college, he coordinated an “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week.” These efforts were not calibrated for persuasion; they were designed to agitate. And now that he’s in the White House, he is deploying similar tactics.

Take the travel ban, for example. During Trump’s first week in office, Miller worked with Steve Bannon to craft an executive order banning travel to the United States from seven majority-Muslim countries. Trump signed the order on a Friday afternoon, unleashing chaos at airports across the country, complete with mass protests, wall-to-wall media coverage, and a slew of legal challenges. Afterward, Bannon reportedly boasted that they had enacted the measure on a weekend “so the snowflakes would show up at the airports and riot.”

As public backlash has intensified in recent days against the new border policy, Trump administration officials have predictably struggled to formulate a coherent, unified defense. Amid all the bumbling recriminations and shifting talking points, one can sense in some of these officials a natural response to the situation developing at the border—if not shame, then at least chagrin.

But for Miller, it seems, all is going according to plan—another “constructive controversy” unfolding with great potential for enlightenment. His bet appears to be that voters will witness this showdown between Trump and his angry antagonists, and ultimately side with the president. It’s a theory that will be put to the test in November. In the meantime, the heartrending orchestra on the border will play on.

What a nasty little troll.

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The Joseph Goebbels clone has an ancestor who flunked his citizenship test.

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A photo of Nison (aka Max) Miller stares out from the screen, sullen and stern, in faded black and white. “Order of Court Denying Petition” is the title of the government form dated “14th November 1932,” to which it is attached, the one in which Miller is applying for naturalization as an American citizen.

And beneath the photo, the reason given for his denial: Ignorance.

Nison Miller is the great-grandfather of White House adviser Stephen Miller, who has taken credit for being one of the chief architects of the administration’s family separation policy. And this 85-year-old document is just one bit of ammunition in a campaign being waged by the unofficial band that goes by the hashtag #Resistance Genealogy.

Believing that the past is prologue, they search online archives for nuggets about the ancestors of public figures and politicians who disparage today’s immigrants. They use tools they developed as a personal hobby to make the point that people like Miller are holding newcomers to a standard that their own forebears could not meet.

 

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Thanks for resurrecting this thread!  As I suspected with this latest round at the border, it had Miller's little paw prints all over it. This is from a Wednesday's (yesterday) article posted on Vanity Fair's Hive: 

“STEPHEN ACTUALLY ENJOYS SEEING THOSE PICTURES AT THE BORDER”: THE WEST WING IS FRACTURING OVER TRUMP’S CALLOUS MIGRANT-FAMILY POLICY   Miller gloats and Sanders sulks as the president—oblivious to the moral problem and political consequences—bulls ahead.

IMHO, it's becoming apparent the there is something structurally wrong with Stephen Miller's brain.  As noted in the Vanity Fair piece above, 

Quote

White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller has all but become the face of the issue, a development that even supporters of Trump’s “zero-tolerance” position say is damaging the White House. “Stephen actually enjoys seeing those pictures at the border,” an outside White House adviser said. “He’s a twisted guy, the way he was raised and picked on. There’s always been a way he’s gone about this. He’s Waffen-SS.”

My other wish is that this will fall squarely on Miller's head and tarnish his reputation with Trump.  He's made Trump look bad, real bad, awful, horrible, it's caused a YUGE crisis and the optics that can be used by Democrats in advertising for the mid term are literally limitless. 

Remember that Trump watches CNN, where he's being vilified crucified nonstop by Morning Joe, et al.. 

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  • 3 weeks later...

Miller's getting some blowback for going full on Nazi

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“Better be better!” a “stranger” told Miller, in a verbal attack that also mocked the First Lady’s inane campaign for children – launched just before it was revealed her husband was placing kids in concentration camps.

In addition to his face appearing on “Wanted” posters plastered to lampposts in his neighborhood, Miller recounted another protest against him and his boss by a local Washington, D.C. bartender.

“One night, after Miller ordered $80 of takeout sushi from a restaurant near his apartment, a bartender followed him into the street and shouted, ‘Stephen!’ When Miller turned around, the bartender raised both middle fingers and cursed at him, according to an account Miller has shared with White House colleagues,” The Post says. “Outraged, Miller threw the sushi away, he later told his colleagues.”

A New York Times TV critic responded to a tweet Monday morning about Miller’s sushi story with emojis of, yes, a box of sushi and a small violin.

Fuck you Miller.  You made this bed, now fucking lie in it.

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2 hours ago, 47of74 said:

"One night, after Miller ordered $80 of takeout sushi from a restaurant near his apartment, a bartender followed him into the street and shouted, ‘Stephen!’ When Miller turned around, the bartender raised both middle fingers and cursed at him, according to an account Miller has shared with White House colleagues,” The Post says. “Outraged, Miller threw the sushi away, he later told his colleagues"

 I think Stephen Miller should set everything he owns on fire to trigger the libs. :562479b0cbc9f_whistle1:

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 I think Stephen Miller should set everything he owns on fire to trigger the libs. :562479b0cbc9f_whistle1:


Yeah I’m down with that idea. Of course the brown shirts of the Trumpian Reich will probably buy him new stuff then.
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Losing one's hair sucks. If he wasn't such an abhorrent person, I'd actually have some sympathy for him.

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"How should we talk about Stephen Miller’s hair?"

Spoiler

How should we talk about Stephen Miller’s hair?

Mock it? Ignore it? Understand it as a metaphor for our own vanity and mortality? The smart thing would be to simply refuse to touch it with a 10-foot pole . . . but then how could we make sure it’s really dead?

Facile jokes aside, there are times when describing something accurately also means describing it grotesquely, and what we’re left with is this: On Sunday morning, the White House senior policy adviser appeared on “Face the Nation” with a thing affixed to his normally balding head that resembled a cross between the demoralized shavings of an Magna Doodle and a rapidly disintegrating anthill.

Toupee? Not exactly, a mob of viewers decided. What we were dealing with seemed to be something more spray-on in nature, the kind of hair-in-a-canister marketed to men in the wee hours of cable, sandwiched between catheter commercials and herbal testosterone.

It was pathetic and uncomfortable because of the naked irony it revealed. Here was a man who apparently craved more hair. And in his pursuit of it, he went on national television and did the one thing that would draw blatant attention to his baldness.

Publications from Men’s Health to Vanity Fair ran pictorials analyzing the architecture of the scalp situation. “The Daily Show” rang in as well. By Monday, the saga had closure: New York Times White House correspondent Katie Rogers announced on Twitter, “Stephen Miller came to work with regular hair today.”

This was a cultural moment, and I’m not sure whether it should have been, or shouldn’t have been, or how much the chatter had to do with the hair itself and how much had to do with the human underneath it.

Miller is a far-right conservative who shaped the Trump administration’s draconian policies on separating migrant families at the U.S.-Mexico border. If you care about our nation’s commitment to its bedrock principles, well, then, his hair is the least of your concerns. In fact, let’s just stipulate: His hair doesn’t really matter. There are bigger, more important issues to discuss. But here we are.

Those who mocked him Sunday were likely those who loathed him already; we’re always more forgiving of the physical appearances of people we love. Bill Murray has sported some truly unique hair choices in his lifetime, but if he’d shown up wearing Miller’s head garb, I’m fairly certain it would have been excused as kicky and playful.

But the other thing this saga highlights is that we don’t know how to talk about men’s appearances and cosmetic procedures.

We barely know how to talk about women’s. The answer we’re slowly landing on is that we shouldn’t. Celebrity magazines, after decades of using zoom lenses to highlight A-listers’ cellulite, are finally coming around to the idea that the only way to discuss a change in a woman’s physical appearance is from a supportive, body-positive perspective: Hillary Clinton chooses not to wear makeup for a major speech and it’s fabulous, enthuses Glamour. Rihanna chooses to put on some curves and it’s fabulous, says the Inquisitr.

When President Trump blasted out a nasty tweet alleging that Mika Brzezinski had a facelift, outraged individuals from both sides of the aisle came to her defense, calling the observation sexist. People’s personal choices are nobody’s business but their own, and all that.

This is all progress, long overdue. I don’t know if I’d be writing this column if, say, Kellyanne Conway had appeared on the Sunday showed with a drastic and bizarre hairstyle (though, it should be said, plenty of people noticed this week that Melania Trump’s hair went blond and then brown again). But I’m writing this one, and I still don’t know how to talk about Stephen Miller’s hair.

Stephen Miller chooses to wear a Chia Pet on his head and it’s — Stephen, you have never looked more lonely or despairing. And he does work for President Trump, the original proponent of weird hair, a man famously preoccupied by his own uncommon standards for personal appearance. Trump has been known to judge his staff by their TV-readiness, allegedly souring on former press secretary Sean Spicer after Spicer wore an ill-fitting suit to a televised press briefing.

Men, when it comes to appearances, are often trapped in a double bind. Society still does value handsomeness. Society also expects men who don’t fit into male beauty standards to accept ribbing with humor, perhaps even more than it expects women to. (See: Chris Christie, Pete Davidson.) Often, though, society tends to rib men who want to fit into those standards but are trying way too hard to do so. Or, at least, harder than we’ve deemed appropriate.

Slate’s Christina Cauterucci wrote a great essay last week on Sen Ted Cruz’s (R-Tex.) new beard. Great, in that it was caustic and smart and made me laugh, with lines like: “Back then, the beard was just a shadowy, patchy mess that . . . reeked of desperation, too feeble and thin to do anything but serve as a physical manifestation of Cruz’s personality.” She went on to say the beard now looked fantastic.

The essay was also great in that it made me think about how casually some among us (writers, comedians, late-night hosts) have mocked Ted Cruz’s face — describing it as “punchable” or “melting” — and how the standards for men are blurrier than those for women. I do know that if that essay had been written about, say, Cruz’s wife, Heidi, I wouldn’t have laughed. I do know that Donald Trump retweeting an unflattering Heidi Cruz meme during the campaign was widely seen as a moral low point.

I was thinking of all of that as I watched the saga of Stephen Miller’s hair unfold.

It was awful, awful hair.

It was awful both because it was ugly and because it reeked of desperation and unseemly vanity. And because the desperation was so loud that it eventually became the only thing visible on screen. It emanated from Miller’s head like a physical manifestation of his personality — a follicle’d inferiority complex that was suddenly in charge of creating the nation’s policies.

That’s what was terrifying about the hair. Not what it looked like, but the fact that hair like that can only come from a dark place.

Once it’s on our screens, we recoil from it for reasons we think are funny but are probably also sad.

 

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Oh. My. God.  Could Stephen have gone for spray-on hair in desperation because Trump was giving him shit for going bald? 

And now the ridicule over his spray-on head merkin might diminish Miller in Trump's mind and thus his standing in the West Wing?  Just putting this out there, but a girl can hope. 

Unfortunately, the Flynn sentencing drama has already eclipsed Miller's hirsutal pursuits. 

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40 minutes ago, Howl said:

Unfortunately, the Flynn sentencing drama has already eclipsed Miller's hirsutal pursuits. 

I remember in the good old days (basically everything before November 2016) when an issue or "scandal" would be the only thing on the news for days, if not weeks. Now, so much crap is happening, we have 10-12 breaking news stories on a slow day.

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1 hour ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Now, so much crap is happening, we have 10-12 breaking news stories on a slow day.

I know, right?  Miller's hair was only a brief distraction that lasted a fraction of a Scaramucci. 

 

Quote

Stephen Miller has been quietly gutting the U.S. refugee program. "His name hasn't been on anything," says an ex-official. "He is working behind the scenes, he has planted all of his people in all of these positions ... he is creating a side operation." https://bit.ly/2P1RIWY

This is one of the most depressing things I've ever read. 

Edited by Howl
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8 hours ago, Howl said:

Oh. My. God.  Could Stephen have gone for spray-on hair in desperation because Trump was giving him shit for going bald? 

We'll know better about this if Stephen grows the rest of his hair longer, then starts styling it in an elaborate combover like Trump.

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10 hours ago, Audrey2 said:

We'll know better about this if Stephen grows the rest of his hair longer, then starts styling it in an elaborate combover like Trump.

I'd rather he go for a Trump toupee.  Just google Trump Toupee.  Easy to get on Amazon.

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This will end with Trump and Miller huddling together, alone in the bunker... : Stephen, I am your father. 

 

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