The journalist who wrote the book on Stephen Miller says she misjudged what drives President Donald Trump’s new chief of staff, and she warns that his next war won’t stop at immigrants.
Jean Guerrero, author of the 2020 biography “Hatemonger,” told WIRED that her view of Miller has changed dramatically since Trump’s first term.
“I used to see him fundamentally as a white nationalist, but now I see him more as a class supremacist and as a case study in oligarchic capture,” Guerrero said.
What changed her mind, she said, was Miller’s foreign policy, and particularly his comment to CNN’s Jake Tapper that the world “is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.” After hearing it, she went back to passages in her book about Miller’s high school years, when he demanded that custodial staff pick up his trash. In college, she said, he left his trash out and objected to requests that he clean up after himself.
“He didn’t mind having immigrants around so long as they stayed ‘in their place,’ where they were quietly serving him and picking up the trash that he was throwing on the floor or leaving on the cafeteria tables,” Guerrero said.
“Before Stephen Miller was a white nationalist, he was a class supremacist,” she added. “He hated poor people.”
Guerrero argued that Miller’s focus on immigration keeps one group of workers criminalized and in the shadows, unable to “link arms with other workers to demand to live with dignity.”
“Stephen Miller wants a servant class, not a working class,” she said.
Guerrero expects Miller to double down despite the backlash over ICE’s violence, including the shootings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minneapolis, and she predicted his next target will be the Americans who stand with immigrants.
She said Miller is likely to try “to characterize anyone who fights for social justice, not just for immigrants, as domestic terrorists,” working with surveillance companies and tech billionaires to undermine privacy and free speech.
“I think that is the war that Stephen Miller has been dying to fight for a very long time,” she said.
Guerrero tied that to “The Camp of the Saints,” a French white supremacist novel that influenced Miller. In the book, citizens who help immigrants are villains.
She said Trump is betting that Miller’s anti-immigrant playbook can rescue him after the GOP’s midterm wipeout, but predicted it will fail because Americans are “so horrified” by how far it has already gone.
The White House praised Miller’s record. Spokesperson Lauren Bis credited him with “spearheading the administration’s crime crackdown,” deregulation and “securing our border.”
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