With Stephen Bannon gone, the foremost white supremacist in the White House—aside from Donald Trump himself—is Stephen Miller, the 32-year-old snotbag who, for instance, recycled white supremacist claims about the Statue of Liberty from behind the White House podium. But you wouldn’t quite know that if you read the New York Times’ take on Miller, which frames him as “the surviving watchman on the president’s right flank,” a man whose “journey to this point ... is a triumph of unbending convictions and at least occasional contrivance.” The article, by Matt Flegenheimer, is long on cliched descriptions of the liberal California town in which Miller grew up, and short on details about just how hard-right white supremacist Miller really is.
A few hints do sneak through, though:
Shortly before the start of ninth grade, Mr. Islas said, he received a call from Mr. Miller informing him that the two could no longer be friends.
“He gives me this litany of reasons,” Mr. Islas said.
Most were petty, if mean, he recalled: an insult about his social awkwardness, a dig at his acne-specked face. But one stuck out.
“He mentioned my Latino heritage as one of the reasons,” Mr. Islas said. “I remember coming away from the conversation being like, ‘O.K., that’s that.’”
As a measure of Miller’s power within the White House, Sarah Huckabee Sanders got tapped to play the expert on his ninth-grade friendships by denying that Islas and Miller were ever friends to begin with. Not that claiming they were never really friends addresses the question of whether Miller said he couldn’t be friends with Islas because he was Latino.
Other former classmates concur that Miller was just plain racist. But Flegenheimer and the Times persistently give Miller’s allies space to rebut the charges, and barely look at the evidence that would settle the he said-she said dispute: Miller’s behavior and the policies he champions. And given that we’re talking about the guy writing Donald Trump’s immigration policy, the answer is clear. White supremacy is the “unbending conviction” that has triumphed through Miller’s “journey.”