Deputy White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller knows how to maintain his influence in the Trump administration, the president’s biographer says.
Michael Wolff, on the Daily Beast podcast Inside Trump’s Head, explained what he’s heard from the inside: that Miller is “the most incredible suck-up.”
“I’ve gone around to several White House people and I said, ‘Explain Stephen Miller to me… explain this rise. How does he keep rising?’ And across the board, there’s one explanation, and everybody rushes to it,” Wolff told co-host Joanna Coles.
“They say he’s the most incredible suck up,” Wolff said. “Everybody is amazed because it gets more and more, and better and better. And they say that Trump, who never shuts up for anyone, shuts up for Stephen, because he likes to listen to this.”
Trump himself has said he’s drawn in by Miller’s often hyperbolic praise on Fox News.
“I love watching him on television,” the 79-year-old president said of one of the architects of his hardline immigration policies, before adding that Miller’s “truest feelings” may be better left unsaid.
Miller’s incessant fawning is why his career has flourished, Wolff said, in spite of how “everybody knows he’s a weirdo.”
“Even Trump acknowledges he’s a weirdo. He’s not really somebody anybody is comfortable with, who you really want to be around, and who you might trust on any matter because he’s so weird—looking at you with those weird eyes,“ Wolff said. ”But anyway, everybody responds the same way, and they rush to say it: he survives and thrives because he’s such an amazing suck-up.”
Miller’s sycophancy, which Wolff said outdoes Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s, is therefore linked to the administration’s immigration operations.
“ICE picking up people, masks, sweeping people off the street—this whole effort to remake the color of America really comes down to Stephen Miller’s ability to flatter the president,” Wolff said.
Gushing about the president is practically required to work in the administration, Wolff added.
“Everybody has to do this. This is the price. These are the table stakes: how much you can be absolutely prostrate in your flattery of the president,” he said. “Those are the table stakes, and then you have to raise them. Who can do it even more? And that, apparently, is Stephen Miller.”
There’s another word for what Miller, 40, is offering, Wolff said: “Shamelessness.”
Since Miller is able to put that characteristic above “objectivity” and “integrity,” Wolff said, he is able to produce something that shows people on the outside that “you have no inner self anymore, and it’s all directed to this goal of what you want, which then comes through this one man who needs to be flattered—not just flattered, but more than the last person who flattered him.”
The White House, when reached for comment, once again cast doubt on Wolff’s credibility.
“Michael Wolff is a lying sack of s–t and has been proven to be a fraud,” Communications Director Steven Cheung told the Daily Beast. “He routinely fabricates stories originating from his sick and warped imagination, only possible because he has a severe and debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome that has rotted his peanut-sized brain.”
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