Miller, Once a White House Joke, is Now its Heart and Soul
…And we better listen to what he’s saying.
Steve Bannon and I were talking in an office hideaway he used in the Old Executive Office Building in the summer of 2017. As a point of amusement, he asked if I wanted to meet his young aide, Stephen Miller, who had an office a few doors down the hall, and who was then occasionally popping into the news as a genuinely weird figure, a kind of South Park version of a Trump dweeb, pre-programmed with daft and belligerent talking points. A joke.
Bannon, always jovial about the accusations that he was a fascist, said, “Now, this is a real fascist,” and rolled his eyes to indicate we were in some truly uncharted territory.
So, Bannon led me down the wide EOB hall and showed me into Miller’s office with a wink. I did my twenty minutes with him. His eyes focused over my shoulder while he, with a dead man fixed expression, and as though performing a finely self-aware parody, recited the details of the wreckage of American society and how pride, strength, and purity had to be restored.
“Was I right?” Bannon said.
