A flashy deep dive on Stephen Miller in the summer issue of Vanity Fair promises to reveal how the senior Trump adviser “rode white rage” from his alma mater to the White House, but what the piece actually delivers is little more than an ill-founded hit job.
The message of William Cohan’s piece is clear from the start: Miller is a racist white male with a dangerous worldview who now has the ear of the president, and this is very bad for the country. Vanity Fair promises an in-depth look at Miller’s “tumultuous past” and “shocking worldview” in the story. The teaser mentions his alleged connection to a white nationalist and alludes to his defense of the Duke lacrosse players who were exonerated in the 2006 rape scandal. And the headline all but blares racist: “How Stephen Miller Rode White Rage From Duke’s Campus To Trump’s West Wing.”
It’s a by now familiar caricature of Miller that fits nicely into the larger media narrative that angry white males put Trump in the White House.
But for all its promises, the piece delivers little in the way of new information about Miller, or an explanation of how he got from Duke to the White House, or any kind of serious thought to the actual content or rationale behind Miller’s worldview. What Cohan has done here is ground an accusation of “racist bigot” on a few anecdotes from people who knew Miller when he was a kid, an interview with a white nationalist Miller has disavowed, a lengthy rehash of the Duke rape scandal, and a few other uncharitable comments from detractors.
Let’s scrape away the pretty font, the cool graphics and the Trumpian buzzwords, and take a closer look.
After devoting the first 14 paragraphs of the story to a retelling of the Duke rape scandal — leaning heavily on the salacious allegations of a stripper who accused three lacrosse players of kidnapping and raping her at a party — Cohan brings Miller into the piece with a bang.
“Miller defended the lacrosse players in print, despite nearly universal condemnation of them by others on campus and in the media,” Cohan writes, choosing to make his first real characterization of Miller as a determined defender of rich white rapists, even when everyone around him saw them as guilty. What Cohan doesn’t mention until much, much later in the piece is that the players were exonerated of the charges, and that Miller was right to question the guilty verdict handed down by the press and his peers in this case.
Cohan is even more blunt a few sentences later. “His passion for American exceptionalism and racial superiority eventually led him to jobs in Washington, D.C.,” he writes of Miller, initially offering only a passing reference to his hawkish views on immigration (opposes pathway to citizenship for illegals, supports Trump’s travel ban) as grounds for the “racist” label.
Cohan doesn’t explain how opposing a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants or barring immigration from countries deemed a terror threat is racist, although that’s the clear implication in his opening salvo. At no point in the piece does he examine Miller’s worldview. Instead he offers the opinions of detractors and people who knew Miller many years ago, and a few quotes and anecdotes. He also devotes a large chunk of the text to comments from the press-friendly white nationalist advocate Richard Spencer, whose views Miller has explicitly disavowed.
When Cohan does finally mention the not guilty verdict in the Duke lacrosse case, he gives Miller no credit for rightly questioning the dubious groupthink surrounding the rape allegations, and actually comes closer to chastising him for refusing to take part in what amounted to a publicly sanctioned lynching of the players in the court of public opinion.
Miller did a “victory lap” after the ruling, Cohan writes, dismissing any possibility of a motive for Miller’s questioning of the accepted narrative other than a desire to defend white people and a desire for attention in the press. And he trots out a member of the Duke board of trustees during the trial, Robert Steel, to undercut the court’s verdict and reaffirm the boys must have been guilty of … something.
“[Steel] remains unsure of exactly what happened in that bathroom that night,” Cohan writes. “But he’s confident it was something of which none of us would be proud.”
So Miller questioned the verdict of the media and his peers in a court of public opinion, and doesn’t think illegal immigrants should be handed citizenship on a silver platter. Here are some other dubious reasons Cohan offers to support his characterization of Miller as a racist bent on some sort of world domination:
— A high school speech in which Miller said he’s tired of picking up his trash when there are janitors who are paid to do it for him, and said: “I will say and I will do things that no one else in their right mind would do.” A friend of Miller’s later said the speech was intended as satire.
— Miller said the president has “substantial power” that “will not be questioned” in February, when he did a series of TV hits to defend President Trump’s travel ban executive order. To add weight to this assertion, Cohan brings in MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, who has made it clear he despises Miller, and whose post-election shtick mainly boils down to overwrought assertions about whatever is the latest Trump news. Scarborough called Miller’s quote “horrendous” and “embarrassing,” Cohan notes, and he informed Miller the president’s power “will” be questioned.
— Miller was “obsessed” with Star Trek, according to someone who knew him in middle school, and was an admirer of the “macho alpha-male thing” that Captain Kirk “had going.” Also, Cohan notes, Miller is seen dressed up as a mobster in a yearbook photo.
— That same middle school friend says Miller called him before they went off to high school to end the friendship, reciting a list of reasons that included his Latino heritage. “It was very strange,” the friend recounts to Vanity Fair.
— The pizza incident, previously recounted in The Jewish Journal: “We’re all talking and talking about [how to fairly divide a pizza],” a girl who attended the same synagogue with Miller when he was a kid recounted. “In the middle of this discussion, Stephen slaps his open hand down on the middle of the slice of pizza. And of course nobody would touch this pizza slice after he put his greasy 13-year-old paw on it.”
— Miller chose a quote from Teddy Roosevelt extolling patriotism for his yearbook quote: “There can be no fifty-fifty Americanism in this country. There is room here for only 100 percent Americanism, only for those who are American and nothing else.” This is evidence, according to Cohan, that Miller was “embracing a white-nationalist agenda.”
— The opinion of a high school friend who is now a writer in Los Angeles: “I know this may come off as melodramatic, but Stephen’s views are very DANGEROUS. Do not take these anecdotes or stories about him lightly. They sound like exaggerations and embellishments. They are not. He is an extremist. He has been radicalized.”
The reader is left without much of a clue as to what this person mean by “extremist” or “radicalized,” because Cohan never takes a serious look at any of Miller’s well-documented policy views, or the stated rationale behind them. He never explicitly tackles how a hawkish stance on immigration makes someone racist, or why it is a dangerous worldview to prioritize the interests of the country you represent when crafting public policy.
Perhaps the one friendly voice quoted in this story (aside from the white nationalist Miller has disavowed) is on to something when he asserts Miller is not a maniacal racist, but a bright and driven person pushing the policies he believes are best for the country.
“He was incredibly bright, incredibly articulate, incredibly focused, and that started a friendship that continues to this day,” California talk show host Larry Elder told Vanity Fair. Elder has hosted Miller on his show more than 70 times. Elder added: “He’s trying to make the country work better, and trying to improve the lives of people and make them more productive.”
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