‘A Servant Class, Not a Working Class’: Stephen Miller’s Biographer on What Comes Next

Last week, President Donald Trump named Stephen Miller, his longtime adviser and architect of the administration’s widely unpopular immigration agenda, his new chief of staff. With the midterm elections delivering a Democratic majority in both the Senate and the House of Representatives, Miller, whose titles until now were deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security adviser, will likely play a critical role in shaping the White House’s agenda over the next two years. There is probably no one who understands Miller better than journalist Jean Guerrero. During Trump’s first administration, Guerrero became fascinated by Miller, who, like her, had grown up in Southern California, surrounded by immigrants, in largely liberal (or at least not hard-line conservative) communities. How, she wondered, did this man, whose family came to the US fleeing antisemitic pogroms, who grew up in close proximity to immigrants, come to align himself with white supremacist and anti-immigrant views? Her research culminated in Hatemonger, her 2020 biography of Miller, in which she charted his rapid ascent to power in the first Trump administration and dove into the ideas, mentors, and experiences that formed the foundations of Miller’s beliefs. “Stephen Miller has been a key player in delivering on President Trump’s America First agenda including spearheading the administration’s crime crackdown including in DC and Memphis, record setting deregulation, unleashing American energy, dismantling drug cartels, and securing our border. In his new role, he will continue to deliver historic successes for the American people,” says White House spokesperson Lauren Bis. WIRED spoke to Guerrero about where Miller goes from here in his new role, and the ways in which her understanding of Miller has evolved during Trump’s second term. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. WIRED: Miller has now ascended to the most powerful role he has ever occupied. Is this something he has always been aiming for? Jean Guerrero: Stephen Miller has had a disproportionate amount of power for a very long time. He's been so instrumental in so much of what Trump has done, starting from the first campaign to today. So regardless of the role that Stephen Miller's had, he always somehow turns that role into something more than it has been historically. While I haven’t been necessarily talking to people in this administration, I suspected that this was coming, and when I heard the news I wasn't at all surprised. I remember thinking that Stephen Miller was going to, if not immediately then at some point, be named chief of staff because of the fact that he has been the most effective sycophant in Trump's orbit, and has been his longest-lasting and most trusted adviser. Miller’s appointment happened only a few days after a midterm election that some called an “extinction-level” event for Republicans. Why right now? I think Trump is hoping that Stephen Miller is going to somehow get him out of this mess. In the past, when he has been in trouble, he has turned to Stephen Miller and his expertise on anti-immigrant scapegoating to distract people and rally his base, and it has worked. But I suspect that this time it's not going to work, because the American people are so horrified by where Stephen Miller has already taken this war on immigrants. I think many people on the right are realizing that the violence we saw in ICE’s conduct—particularly the shooting of Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minneapolis earlier this year—is actually very unpopular. Do you think this will push Miller to change tack or to double down? I see it as an impetus for him to double down, absolutely. He's always been driven by a desire to inflame and antagonize and horrify, from the time that he was a teenager to today. If there's any restraint at all, it'll be on the performative nature of the cruelty and maybe shifting towards a more performative nature on the war on the allies of immigrants and trying to characterize anyone who fights for social justice, not just for immigrants, as domestic terrorists. I think that is the war that Stephen Miller has been dying to fight for a very long time. I think Miller is going to do this in collaboration with surveillance companies and the tech billionaires that he and Trump have decided to align themselves with. They're going to continue to attack the right to privacy and the right to free speech. He's always trying to find the most creative ways to target and terrorize and torture the communities that he despises. And among them are not only immigrants, but the allies, the citizen allies of immigrants and people who are marginalized. Stephen Miller was very influenced by the book The Camp of the Saints, the white supremacist, dystopian French novel. Reading that book was very illuminating for me, because the heroes are the characters who advocate for wiping out brown immigrants who are approaching by boat, who are cast as a threat to white civilization or Western civilization. In the book, the villains, in addition to the immigrants themselves, are the citizen allies of the immigrants. You wrote your book during the first Trump administration. Has your understanding of Stephen Miller evolved since then? My understanding of him has really changed. I used to see him fundamentally as a white nationalist, but now I see him more as a class supremacist and as a case study in oligarchic capture. I came to this conclusion because when I first saw what the administration was doing on the foreign policy front, I was confused. Why would they be interfering in Venezuela or the elections in Honduras, when we know those are the exact types of actions that cause instability and migration? But when he told Jake Tapper, “You can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else. But we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” I pulled out my book, and I read back through the sections where he's demanding that the custodial staff at his high school pick up his trash. This is something he did in college too, where he would leave out his trash and protest any requests that he clean up after himself. When he was a teenager, he was really motivated by a desire to keep everybody in what he saw as their place. He didn't mind having immigrants around so long as they stayed “in their place,” where they were quietly serving him and picking up the trash that he was throwing on the floor or leaving on the cafeteria tables. I realized that before Stephen Miller was a white nationalist, he was a class supremacist. He hated poor people. He hated people who were less well-off than him, because he thought they were inferior to him. Has this understanding changed the way you think about Miller’s focus on immigration now? By focusing all the attention on the war on immigrants, it distracts us from understanding that when you have one sector of the population that is being criminalized and forced to stay in the shadows, then they cannot link arms with other workers to demand to live with dignity. Under this new administration, he has reverted to his most authentic self. Stephen Miller wants a servant class, not a working class.