Yesterday, Stephen Miller delivered a eulogy for Charlie Kirk that served as a battle cry for the Trump administration’s state-sponsored war on his perceived the—a war of which Miller is the primary strategist. The speech was a jarring piece of rhetoric. It is a perfect encapsulation of the ethos of Trumpism, boiling away the president’s idiosyncratic habits of mixing insult comedy and weird digressions into his rhetoric and leaving, in Miller’s tongue, the residue of pure ideology and will to power.
Miller’s theme was that President Donald Trump’s side embodies pure good, his opponents pure evil, and the former is destined to utterly destroy the latter. Republicans have never stopped complaining that Hillary Clinton once described a portion of Trump’s base as “a basket of deplorables.” Yet over the weekend the president’s most powerful adviser depicted half the country as worthless, irredeemably wicked, and fated for destruction.
“We are the storm. And our enemies cannot comprehend our strength, our determination, our resolve, our passion,” he thundered. “Our lineage and our legacy hails back to Athens, to Rome, to Philadelphia, to Monticello. Our ancestors built the cities. They produced the art and architecture. They built the industry.”
I feel less confident than Miller does that future historians will laud Trump’s distinct additions of legalized bribery, casino-style decor, and Ultimate Fighting Championship matches on the White House lawn as cultural and philosophical advances. Yet Miller confidently conscripted the pillars of Western civilization into his domestic political war.
Miller’s peroration managed the difficult combination of being redundant and short. In place of uplift, he brought bludgeoning repetition. “The light will defeat the dark. We will prevail over the forces of wickedness and evil,” he said at one point. “We will defeat the forces of darkness and evil. And we will stand every day for what is true, what is beautiful, what is good.” he proclaimed shortly thereafter.
Miller directed much of his speech to the enemy camp. “And to those trying to incite violence against us, those trying to foment hatred against us,” he said, “what do you have? You have nothing. You are nothing. You are wickedness. You are jealousy. You are envy. You are hatred. You are nothing. You can build nothing. You can produce nothing. You can create nothing.” In case any member of the audience had dozed off, which seems unlikely given the volume at which he spoke, Miller reiterated the point a few sentences later: “And what will you leave behind? Nothing. Nothing. To our enemies, you have nothing to give. You have nothing to offer. You have nothing to share but bitterness.”
Having nothing to share but bitterness is a strange insult for Stephen Miller, of all people, to hurl. But part of the Miller worldview is an almost proud insistence on holding his enemies to standards he refuses to abide by. The Trump camp has insisted that the fault for last year’s attempts on Trump’s life lies with anybody who has attacked him as dangerous or authoritarian. Yet Trump himself attacks his enemies in such terms routinely, and Miller seems to be attempting to exceed his boss’s Manichean style by depicting their opponents as the literal embodiment of malevolence.
In some ways, Miller’s speech was the distilled antithesis of Barack Obama’s rhetorical style. Obama gained fame with a stirring 2004 speech arguing that America’s cultural divisions were surmountable—that red America and blue America had more in common that the pundits appreciated. Miller’s view, like that of his boss, is that America is even more divided than we think, and the only resolution to this state of affairs is for one side to subjugate the other.
Ten years ago, a white supremacist gunned down nine worshippers at one of the oldest Black churches in the South, including Clementa Pinckney, a pastor and member of the South Carolina state Senate. The horrific event provides a striking contrast to the aftermath of Kirk’s murder. In his eulogy, Obama did not scour the internet for conservatives making insensitive comments about the event—even though many such cases could be found, including on Fox News—let alone use the tragedy as a pretext to delegitimize the opposition.
Obama described the murderer in the singular and spoke of reconciliation. “The alleged killer could have never anticipated the way the families of the fallen would respond when they saw him in court—in the midst of unspeakable grief, with words of forgiveness,” Obama said. “He couldn’t imagine that.” Miller’s speech used the third person plural to describe Kirk’s assassination: “They cannot imagine what they have awakened. They cannot conceive of the army that they have arisen in all of us because we stand for what is good, what is virtuous, what is noble.”
Miller made no effort to distinguish the vaguely defined multitudes that he implicates in Kirk’s murder from Trump’s political opponents or the Democratic Party—which, at other times, he has said is “not a political party. It is a domestic extremist organization.”
Miller taunted his opponents, “You have no idea the dragon you have awakened.” To the contrary, his targets seem very aware of the administration’s instinct to take revenge. But given Miller’s past statements, I question the premise that Kirk’s murder “awakened” Miller’s desire to crush the right’s enemies. It seems to have merely provided a convenient pretext.
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