Jon Wiener: From The Nation magazine, this is Start Making Sense.  I’m Jon Wiener. Late in the show:
The man in charge of Trump’s plan to deport ten million undocumented people is Stephen Miller, who has a “seething, visceral, unquenchable hatred” for immigrants – that’s what Nation columnist David Klion says, as he examines a life that “defies any easy explanation.”

But First: Trump, the Universities, and the Courts: analysis from Erwin Chemerinsky — he’s dean of the law school at UC Berkeley.  That’s coming up – in a minute.
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The Supreme Court ruled against Trump last week in the first test of his refusal to release money appropriated by Congress. And more than a dozen more similar cases are likely to come before the court, perhaps including a challenge to his withholding hundreds of millions from research universities on the grounds that they’ve failed to protect Jewish students from anti-Semitism. But what if Trump defies court decisions that go against him? What then? Erwin Chemerinsky has been thinking about that. He’s Dean of the law school at UC, Berkeley, a contributor to The New York Times op-ed page and author most recently of the book, No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the Constitution Threatens the United States. We reached him today at his office on campus. Erwin, welcome back.

Erwin Chemerinsky: It’s always a pleasure to talk with you.

JW: The Trump administration is already facing at least 100 legal challenges. Federal judges have already issued more than a dozen temporary restraining orders and preliminary injunctions against his administration’s actions. The first case was last week when the Supreme Court voted against Trump and upheld the authority of a federal district court judge to lift a Trump freeze on nearly $2 billion in foreign aid appropriated by Congress. Please remind us about that case and about the significance of the court’s ruling against Trump.

EC: As you say, this was one of many cases filed against the Trump administration for freezing funds. This is money that had been appropriated by Congress under a federal statute that the President decided wasn’t going to be spent. Let’s be clear that what President Trump is doing in this regard is both unconstitutional and illegal. It’s unconstitutional because Congress has the spending power, and the president can’t take over this quintessential legislative power and decide for himself that money’s not going to be spent. Also, there’s a federal statute adopted in 1974, the Impoundment Control Act that says that the president can’t refuse to spend funds, can’t impound it. So the case that you mentioned was a federal district court judge in Washington who said that the Trump administration freezing $2 billion in foreign aid, violated the Constitution in federal law.
The D.C. circuit did not get involved and the matter went to the Supreme Court. Supreme Court, it was a five to four ruling, affirmed the district court and sent it back to the trial court to decide exactly what money must now be spent. It was not a signed opinion. We know who the five justices were. It was Chief Justice Roberts. Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, Barrett, and Jackson. And I think it’s very significant because it is the first case where the court has gotten the chance to be involved. And it was an affirming of the district court saying the district court can order the money to be spent. I think it’s particularly significant because Justice Alito wrote an angry vehement dissent joined by the other three justices in which he said, he was stunned by the majority’s ruling.
I think the fact that Alito wrote a dissent like that indicates that the majority knew exactly what was at stake here. Does the president have the ability to refuse to spend money approved by federal statute? And I hope this case indicates the Supreme Court is going to say the president has no such power.

JW: We’ve been worried because Vice President JD Vance argued, “Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive branch’s legitimate power,” and he’s publicly advised Trump, “When the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say, ‘The Chief Justice has made his ruling, now let him enforce it.'” What’s the story on this Andrew Jackson quote?

EC: It’s apocryphal. Andrew Jackson never said that. It was first attributed to Andrew Jackson 20 years after he died. In fact, in the case that was involved, Worcester versus Georgia, there was no order directed at Andrew Jackson for him to defy. It was an order directed at the state of Georgia, it was about whether a non-native person could be prosecuted for actions on Native American land. More generally though, what Vice President Vance says should be chilling to all of us.

Long ago in Marbury versus Madison, the Supreme Court said it’s emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is. The Supreme Court was clear in that case, in 1803, that the judiciary can issue orders to the president and expected the president will comply. The idea that the president can choose to ignore court orders would undermine the rule of law. Then a president could literally do anything, and no one could stop him.

JW: Didn’t JD Vance go to law school?

EC: JD Vance is a graduate of Yale Law School, and he should know that the core of the rule of law is that no one, not even the president is above the law, but if the president can violate the constitution or federal laws and he can ignore court orders, then there’s no one to stop the president. Then the president really is entirely above the law.

JW: Getting back to Trump here, in his first term, the Supreme Court ruled against Trump many times. He lost the first Muslim ban case. He lost the second Muslim ban case. He lost a case about putting a citizenship question on the census. He lost the effort to terminate DACA relief for the Dreamers. In any of those cases, did Trump defy the court?

EC: President Trump did not defy the court during his first term as president. I was certainly worried. Others were worried that there might be a point where court issues an order to President Trump and then he chooses not to follow it, but he didn’t defy court orders. He didn’t speak of defying court orders. A few weeks ago, President Trump said, “He who saves the country violates no law.” He never said anything like that in his first term. Vice President Mike Pence didn’t say in the first term, “The President doesn’t have to follow court orders.” We’re seeing something now different than we saw in the first term. We’re seeing something different now than we’ve ever seen from any president.

JW: Yeah, I want to talk about other presidents here. We spoke with David Cole about this on this program recently. He pointed out that of all the presidents, Trump has lost the second most cases before the Supreme Court. The president who lost the most was FDR. Because of course, the Supreme Court declared most of the initial New Deal legislation to be unconstitutional. Did FDR defy the court?

EC: No, FDR didn’t defy the court. There’s also a crucial difference between what FDR did and what Donald Trump has done. In one sense, they’re similar. Both came into office with an agenda, both came into office with a desire to act quickly and aggressively. Roosevelt did it by proposing legislation and that legislation became the New Deal. Trump has done it by executive orders. Roosevelt lost many cases in his first term as president. He was so angry it caused him to postpone expanding the size of the Supreme Court, what we call court packing, but never did he talk about ignoring court orders. President Trump, by contrast, has done this with a series of executive orders that far exceed what a president can do by executive orders. That violate federal laws in the Constitution. And I worry about the rumblings from President Trump, Vice President Vance and others that the president might defy those court orders.

JW: It’s striking that there is a legal way for Trump to cut foreign aid and that is to propose a bill to Congress and since he has a majority in the house, which originates funding bills and, in the Senate, he could eliminate all foreign aid funding in the budget that’s being debated right now. But as you say, he’s chosen not to do it that way. That’s disturbing.

EC: It’s very disturbing. Only one other president in American history tried this significant impoundment of federal funds. It was Richard Nixon and every court to rule, including the United States Supreme Court in a case called Train v. City of York said, that the president violates separation of powers when he usurps Congress spending power by impounding funds. Congress then passes in 1974, the Impoundment Control Act that says presidents, you can’t refuse to spend money appropriated by Congress.
We tend to forget that the first Trump impeachment was over impoundment of funds. Congress had appropriated military aid for Ukraine and President Trump said he was going to freeze that aid unless Ukraine helped him get dirt on Joe Biden. The House of Representatives for doing that, impeached Donald Trump. The Senate didn’t convict. Donald Trump has again frozen military aid to Ukraine, and given all else that’s happening, that hasn’t gotten the same degree of outrage during the first term.

JW: Great argument. Trump has said, just as recently as a couple of weeks ago, that he would abide by Supreme Court rulings at least in the funding of A.I.D.. His lawyers told the court that the administration, “takes seriously its constitutional duty to comply with the orders of federal courts. The government is undertaking substantial efforts to review payments, requests and release payments.” Do you think that’s an argument offered in good faith?

EC: We don’t know at this point. There have been conflicting signals from Donald Trump and the Trump administration. I quoted Donald Trump’s posting under X, on the platform X, where he said, “He who saves the country violates no law.” He had another unconstitutional executive order where there was a picture of him as a king, a caricature, and he said ‘God saved the king’ – which is certainly indicating how he was thinking himself. You have the JD Vance quotes. You have people who are nominated for positions in the Justice Department saying that they didn’t think the president had to follow court orders, but you have the statement from Donald Trump that he would appeal rather than defy. There was a footnote written and a brief filed in the Supreme Court by the Interim Solicitor General saying that the Trump administration would comply with court orders.

So we don’t know based on statements, but there’s something else that’s disquieting in terms of the practice so far. Let me give you examples. On January 17th, Supreme Court upheld the federal law banning TikTok. That law was to go into effect January 19th. President Trump issued an executive order suspending the law for 75 days. He had no authority to do that. He was in essence, ignoring what the Supreme Court and Congress had said.

Again, I think there’s so much happening and so much outrage that it’s just gotten lost. We have some federal district courts who have said that the Trump administration is not complying with their orders. President Trump issued a freeze as much as $3 trillion and a federal district court in Rhode Island ordered that the money be spent. But then the Federal District Court said his order isn’t being complied with. A good deal of the money isn’t being spent. On March 6th, the federal district court in Rhode Island reiterated that there’s a great deal of money not being spent even though there’s a court order to do so. So, one thing to look for is, is there open defiance or is there simply defiance without the Trump administration announcing it, just not complying with court orders?

JW: The case you’re referring to is the one brought by the State Attorneys General to fund federal grants to the states which administer billions of dollars. Yeah, I think it’s much more likely that Trump will formally accept Supreme Court rulings against him, not defy them, but then either slow walk them or find new arguments. In this USAID case, we know where he was ordered to disperse these funds, he could now conceivably say, they need to review the contracts granting this money, which apparently, they have the legal power to do to determine there isn’t misconduct by the grantees. And I guess they could say they’ve reviewed all the contracts and they’re all flawed in some way and that’s why they’re not spending the money. And then we’d be back in the district court, and we’d start all over again. It seems to me that sort of non-compliance is much more likely than open defiance.

EC: We’re just a month and a half into the Trump administration. I think it’s too soon to know will the Trump administration comply? Will there be open defiance? Will there simply be what you called slow walking, non-compliance?

If I had to predict, I would say we’re going to see some of each. I think we’re going to see instances where the Trump administration complies. I think we see some instances where the Trump administration defies the court order by slow walking. But I wouldn’t be surprised if we see the moment where the Trump administration quotes what Andrew Jackson never said and says, “The Supreme Court made its ruling now let them enforce it.” It’s just so hard to predict at this point. There’s over 100 lawsuits pending and again, we’re what? Six, seven weeks into the Trump presidency.

JW: Of course, there’s one other possibility – which is that Trump will win some of these cases.  And it’s interesting to think about where he’s very likely to lose, and where he has more of a chance of winning. Seems like his challenge to birthright citizenship is a sure loser at the court. Do you agree with that?

EC: I agree. I think he will lose the birthright citizenship case because the first sentence of section one of the 14th amendment is so clear. The Supreme Court in the 1890s held that anyone born in the United States is a citizen regardless of immigration status of their parents. That’s something the Supreme Court reaffirmed on many occasions. I think that Trump is likely to win some of the cases with regard to the ability to remove federal officials. There’s a 1935 Supreme Court case, Humphrey’s Executive versus United States that says that Congress can limit the removal of commissioners on federal agencies giving the agencies a degree of independence. The Trump administration has already said they believe that case is wrong and they’re not going to follow it.
I think the case that will come to the Supreme Court involves Gwynne Wilcox, a commissioner on the National Labor Relations Board who was fired by President Trump. The federal district court in Washington ruled that President Trump’s firing was illegal. The D.C. Circuit should have to follow the Supreme Court precedent from Humphrey’s Executor. But I think there’s a good chance that the Supreme Court will overrule Humphrey’s executor and Trump will win there. But then the question is, how far is the court willing to go? Is the court willing to say that the president can fire anyone who works in the executive branch? Is the Supreme Court willing to say that civil service laws that have existed since the 19th century are unconstitutional?

And finally, I think President Trump is going to lose the spending cases that we are talking about. I think the Supreme Court is going to say when Congress is appropriated money by statute, the president must spend it. And I think that’s why the case we were talking about at the beginning where the Supreme Court had its first chance to rule on this is so significant.

JW: Some of the other big cases that are currently subject to temporary restraining orders: There’s the big case challenging the authority of Elon Musk since his office has never been created by Congress and he’s never been confirmed by Congress. There’s the TRO right now blocking the dismantling of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. There’s the TRO blocking the freeze-on grants from the National Institutes of Health. There’s the TRO blocking immigration raids on houses of worship. These are all temporary. What does it take to get a permanent restraining order?

EC: The first step in federal court is to seek a temporary restraining order. It lasts for 14 days. The district court has to find that the party that’s seeking the temporary restraining order is likely to prevail on the merits. Generally, there can’t be an appeal of a temporary restraining order. Then the judge holds a hearing, and the judge can issue a preliminary injunction or a permanent injunction. They last through the litigation. The permanent injunction actually ends it in the trial court. And then there’s the possibility of an appeal. You mentioned so many examples that are important. Take for instance, the cutting of the funding to the National Institutes of Health. This, if it’s allowed to stand, is going to devastate medical research in the United States. It’s limiting the amount that people are able to recover from the money from the National Institutes of Health. It will be devastating on every university campus. It’ll be devastating to the cancer research and Alzheimer’s research and every kind of medical research. And again, it violates a clear federal statute that the president isn’t allowed to do this.

Another example of a temporary restraining order is President Trump issued an executive order preventing universities from having diversity equity inclusion programs. A federal district court in Maryland found it’s vague as to what this means, and it violates the First Amendment. Or the order that you mentioned that says that the Trump administration immigration authorities can’t go into houses of worship because that violates free exercise of religion. And we’re just touching on a few of the examples of challenge to executive orders pending in the courts.

JW: One last thing – a big one for you and me as employees of the University of California: Trump announced he was revoking $400 million in federal grants awards and contracts for Columbia University, accusing the school of continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students. He’s talking course about the Gaza protest movement and he says he’ll make similar cuts in funding for 10 other major research universities including Berkeley. We really need the universities to stand up to Trump on this one. But so far, all the news is that Columbia and other targets are knuckling under and saying they will submit to Trump’s requirements. Columbia’s interim president, whose name is Katrina Armstrong said in a university-wide email on Friday night, that the school is, “Committed to working with the federal government to restore the funding.” And let’s not forget that Columbia called the police to shut down the pro-Palestinian encampment and police in riot gear arrested 109 people, mostly students. What do you think about Trump’s cuts to major research institutions in the name of protecting Jewish students?

EC: What President Trump is doing here is unquestionably illegal and unconstitutional. It was done on Friday, March 7th. We’re having our conversation on Monday, March 10th. So the fact that a lawsuit hasn’t been filed yet doesn’t mean that one won’t be filed – or that one will be filed.

JW: Good point.

EC: It’s illegal and unconstitutional on so many levels. One is that Congress can set strings on grants, conditions on federal spending. The president can’t do so. The other is, if the government is going to cut off funding, it has to provide due process. It has to provide notice in a hearing. It wasn’t done here with any due process. It was done in a very arbitrary manner.

Also, the Supreme Court has said there can’t be conditions on grants that are unduly coercive. To cut $400 million from a university is certainly unduly coercive. And here, it was done for Columbia tolerating speech that’s protected by the First Amendment. The government can’t punish an institution for respecting the First Amendment. Individuals have the right to take a pro-Palestinian position. In fact, individuals have a First Amendment right to express an anti-Semitic view or an anti-Muslim view. The United States Supreme Court has made clear that even hate speech is generally protected by the First Amendment. So, for the Trump administration to punish a university for allowing speech that’s protected by the First Amendment clearly is unconstitutional.

JW: Erwin Chemerinsky – he wrote about what happens if Trump defies the courts for The New York Times op-ed page. Erwin, thanks for all your work, and thanks for talking with us today.

EC: Always my great pleasure, Jon.
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Jon Wiener: In Trump’s State of the Union speech last week, he asked Congress to fund what he called “the largest deportation operation in American history,” 10 or 11 million residents who are undocumented. The man Trump put in charge of the effort is Stephen Miller – officially, his Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Homeland Security Advisor. Stephen Miller is a man with “an authentic core of seething, visceral, unquenchable hatred” for immigrants, “a hatred that defies any easy explanation.” That’s what David Klion says. He’s a columnist for The Nation who wrote about Stephen Miller for the new issue of the magazine. David Klion is also a contributing editor of Jewish Currents, and he’s written, as he puts it, for “many leftist mags.” We reached him today at home in Brooklyn. David Klion, welcome to the program.

David Klion: Thanks so much for having me.

JW: Stephen Miller is a special case for some of us because he comes from a familiar middle-class Jewish family in Santa Monica. Pretty much everybody else in the world he grew up in is some liberal Democrat, but he’s never been a liberal Democrat, and you’ve been trying to figure out what happened to him to make him such a repellent and powerful person. Let’s start with his family. It’s the typical upwardly mobile Jewish family of 20th century America with his grandparents fleeing anti-Semitism in Russia at the turn of the century. How did his grandfather start out in America?

DK: One of them was rolling cigars in Pittsburgh, I believe. One of them owned a department store in I think Jonestown, Pennsylvania. Both sides of his family eventually make their way to LA. They kind of make their way into corporate real estate and law and Stanford and Columbia and all of that, but very LA-centric. His father co-founded a corporate law firm, but he also went into the family real estate business, which had a huge portfolio across Southern California. His father, I get the sense was kind of a jerk who just burned a lot of bridges, got into a lot of fights with people, and was eventually in an acrimonious breakup with the law firm he founded. I should talk about the book before I go any further actually, because although I wrote what amounts to a long essay profile piece on Miller, it’s in the format of a book review. I read this book called Hatemonger by Jean Guerrero, who’s a reporter, who deserves full credit for any information I’m working with here – published this book, it’s the most comprehensive biography of Miller that exists, five years ago, end of the first Trump presidency.

JW: The family did face a downward economic slide when he was a kid, which might be cited as a cause of his embrace of right-wing politics. That’s certainly true for millions of Americans, past and present. But you say there was something malevolent about Stephen Miller from the start, malevolent from the start.

DK: Well, it’s hard for me to say that, for sure. Guerrero, the author of the book, talked to over a hundred people who’ve known him at various parts of his life, but most of the direct quotes about what he’s like tend to start around middle school and certainly, by middle school, it’s clear that something is the matter with this guy and the timing of that would seem to line up with some of the short-term economic distress that his affluent family experienced. So, as I said, his father was a lawyer. He was having a falling out with his firm. There were a bunch of lawsuits. He ended up in debt and this came at a very terrible time for them because there was this huge earthquake in Southern California in, I think 1994, and it destroyed large number of properties managed by the family business. So, suddenly, the Millers are in trouble.

Suddenly, over the next few years in the mid to late ’90s, which most people remember as a boom period, the Millers are going through the worst economic time in their life. They’re selling their million-dollar house in the rich north of Montana neighborhood in Santa Monica. They’re moving to a more lower-middle-class part of Santa Monica by a freeway underpass in a neighborhood where there’s a large Hispanic population. This is a foreshadowing as Guerrero tells it, and as I read it, because growing up in north of Montana, Miller had Hispanic housekeepers, nannies, lawnmowers. She basically characterized it as like a wealthy white, I think heavily Jewish neighborhood served by a lot of mostly Mexican and Central American labor, and most people are liberal Democrats and that’s just the way it works. But then, his family gets knocked down a peg and suddenly, they’re living among Hispanic neighbors, in more modest circumstances, and this would’ve happened when Miller was about 12 or 13, so there’s a chilling story in the book where he had a friend who was actually Chicano, Mexican-American in middle school. They used to hang out. They were really into Star Trek. He went to Miller’s Bar Mitzvah. But then, at the end of middle school, Miller stopped talking to him, and when he finally got ahold of him and it was like, “Why aren’t we talking anymore?” Miller told him, “I can’t be friends with you. I can only be friends with real Americans. Also, you suck.” And the guy described him as speaking with quiet casual hatred. So by age 14, that’s who Stephen Miller is.

JW: He went to Santa Monica High School here in LA. We call it “Samo,” where he became notorious, in your words, as “a precocious teenage reactionary.”  Remind us about the trash thing.

DK: Miller loved to just bait people and troll people and get attention, and one of his favorite tricks was to just sort of litter. I think often when there was custodial staff present, he would toss trash on the floor and then insist they pick it up and he would go on these rants about how, “We pay you to be here.” And presumably, these were often immigrant custodians. “We pay you to be here to clean up our trash. Why should we have to pick up our own trash?” Other people would be like, “Hey, don’t litter,” and he would just ignore that or laugh in their faces. It’s antisocial behavior. There’s a lazy read you could make that this is a rich white kid and rich white people are all racists and he grew up around casual racism and that’s why he’s a racist. And of course, that is who large parts of the American elite are.

But no, he’s a product of this super liberal enclave where yes, there’s a lot of hypocrisy and tension and socioeconomic divides that have racial dimensions, none of which should be denied or minimized. But no, actually, most people Stephen Miller was growing up around were not like this. And in fact, the weakness of liberalism that I think he was hacking was I think people were morbidly fascinated by the guy. They didn’t like him. They thought he was a jerk, but he was pushing people’s buttons. He was controversial, he could debate people, and he was resourceful in it, too.

JW: So he’d already mastered the skills to become a right-wing provocateur in high school. He actually had active tutoring, training on how to do this. Let’s talk about the talk radio host Larry Elder, and David Horowitz, the notorious left-winger turned right-winger.

DK: It’s interesting how early the conservative pipeline starts for a guy like Miller. There are people looking out for guys like that. So, in Miller’s case, he first gained prominence by calling into the Larry Elder Show, which I’ve never listened to, but which I gather is a very popular right-wing shock show broadcast across Southern California. The host is Black, but he attacks political correctness and tells white racists what they want to hear, and Miller was fascinated by him. Miller also, as a middle schooler, was already reading Guns and Ammo magazine, which is an interesting way for an affluent suburban liberal kid to get into conservatism. He was reading Charlton Heston and Wayne LaPierre. So, he calls in to the Larry Elder Show and he’s this precocious kid and he asks if Larry Elder will come speak at his school, which he does, and it’s a huge spectacle, and he starts making a habit of calling in regularly and telling Larry Elder about all the, what we’d now call “woke excesses.”

Maybe it was the political correctness at the time that are going on–he could basically hold his school and its liberal administration hostage by constantly threatening to blow up their spot on the Larry Elder Show. And this got him some notoriety both within the school and within the region. It got him a profile in The Los Angeles Times while he was still a high school senior. It may have helped him get into Duke.

At Duke, Larry Elder followed him, but also, all these California conservatives like David Horowitz, and later, though this didn’t become clear until years later. Steve Bannon, who’s from Southern California, were paying attention to this young, shamelessly racist, reactionary high schooler from Santa Monica High. Horowitz, you’re right, was a child of the new left. He used to work with the Black Panthers in the late ’60s until a white friend of his died, and I think he thought the Panthers murdered them. I can’t comment on the actual facts of that case, but he did a hard right swing, and he became, for decades now, this reactionary provocateur.

JW: How did young Stephen Miller get into National Republican circles? How early did he get on board the Trump train?

DK: There’s an important step, which is Duke. He’s basically doing all the same things at Duke. Larry Elder’s being pulled in all the time. David Horowitz, he starts a chapter of his organization on the Duke campus. The big thing that catapults him to national media status before he’s even graduated is the Duke Lacrosse case, which was a huge story in 2006. Long story short, a group of white Duke Lacrosse players were accused of sexually assaulting a Black stripper who they’d invited to their frat house. I think in the end, it turned out they had been falsely accused, but the whole thing became a microcosm of all kinds of debates about race and class and sexual violence. And Stephen Miller, well, before, it was clear that the accuser had lied, championed their cause, and this got him on The O’Reilly Factor, got him on Nancy Grace.

He was the guy at Duke who was going to stand up for these guys. So, right out of Duke, he goes to DC. David Horowitz is steering him there. His first job is in Congresswoman Michele Bachmann’s office, if you remember her. But even she was a little out there for him, maybe not ideologically, but just because she seemed a bit nuts. He climbed quickly from that to Senator Jeff Sessions’ office. Sessions was a big immigration hawk during the Obama administration, and that’s when Miller becomes for right-wing media figures. People like Ann Coulter say he’s one of their favorite staffers basically, and he’s a pipeline to Breitbart and to Steve Bannon. And so, by the time Donald Trump runs for president, by which point Miller and Sessions are fresh off working to kill Obama’s attempted immigration reform, Trump is basically running on the platform Miller has always dreamed of, and he gets in right after he turned 30. He’s been there ever since.

JW: What were Stephen Miller’s contributions to Trumpism? Did he mainly just echo Trump’s own resentments and obsessions?

DK: I think he amplified them and in particular amplified the immigration obsession. He wrote at least part of Trump’s first inaugural address, and I strongly suspect the second one, too. And the most famous line in the first inaugural address where he said, “this American carnage stops right here and stops right now,” that’s Miller. So, that’s language that Miller is channeling from the right-wing message boards that he was following by then. And he was pretty immersed in that culture by the time he was in Washington. Anytime, when Trump really seemed to be channeling white nationalism, you can bet Miller had a hand in it. Everything involving the wall, child separation. He very cleverly cultivated alliances with Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump because they’re unfireable. He basically made himself a family member, whereas you probably recall just how many people lost jobs in the first Trump administration.

JW: All of them.

DK: All of them. But Miller was a true loyalist. He always conveyed that his loyalty was to Trump and not to building his own career, which is very credible if you think about it, because this is not a guy who would’ve ended up, I think in Marco Rubio or Jeb Bush or Chris Christie’s White House coming out of 2016 or Mitt Romney earlier than that. This is not a guy who was training for the Bush successor type White House. He was authentically cultivating a personality that was perfect if Donald Trump was going to run for president and win in 2016, but otherwise wasn’t going to get him beyond Jeff Sessions’ office probably.

JW: Getting up to the present, Stephen Miller’s big project is deporting 10 million residents over the next three years. Seems to me this is not possible, for several reasons. People who are detained for being undocumented have a right to a hearing in immigration court before they can be deported, and immigration courts right now have a backlog of 3.7 million cases. It’s going to take years for the people who are currently facing deportation to get their hearings. These were people who were detained by Joe Biden, so it’s going to be years before Trump’s detainees even get into immigration court, unless Republicans fund a huge expansion of immigration courts, which so far, they’ve refused to do.
In the meantime, they would like to detain the people they pick up. Right now, the country only holds 38,000 people in immigration detention. That’s a long way from 10 million. I don’t think there’s 10 million beds in GITMO or in tents in Texas.

And here’s another problem. More than a million people have already been ordered deported who have remained in the country. They’ve had their day in court, they lost their cases, but no country will take them. So, they stay here, not deported, and things are not going well for Trump. So far, in first month right now, they’re deporting about half as many people per week as Biden did, even though they claimed they were going to hit the ground running on day one. And that’s basically because it’s hard to round up undocumented people who are residents. It’s easier to detain people at the border, but they’ve been pretty good at closing off the border, so there aren’t as many people they can send back right away. Surely, Stephen Miller knows all this, knows that deporting 10 million people is basically impossible. And then this is just a cynical bit of rhetoric, and in fact, some of our friends say all of Stephen Miller’s act is totally cynical. He wanted attention. He found a foolproof way to get it. It’s all just egotism and careerism. Do you think that is true?

DK: I think that those are not mutually exclusive possibilities. I mean careerism I’m a little skeptical of, because as I was just saying, he had pretty incredible prescience if he understood that what he was doing through middle school and high school and college was going to put him in the position of power. Sure, there’s a lot of ego and a lot of just self-promotion going on. But no, I think he clearly cares a lot about deporting immigrants. It’s been a through line that as long as he’s been recorded saying anything. He cares about other things, too. He’s pretty holistically right-wing.
For instance, one thing he’s been involved in that has gotten a lot more traction is the attacks on DEI, and I believe it was Miller. I think The New York Times reported this, who called up maybe Mark Zuckerberg, maybe some other tech heads, and basically told them, “You guys were our enemies last time, but if you want to get in good with us this time, you need to scrap DEI at your companies,” and they listened.

As far as mass deportations go, it depends how creative they get. He certainly talked a big game in the run-up to the election about how much deporting they were going to do. And you’re absolutely right that they’ve actually been deporting, they’ve been arresting at a higher rate. ICE arrests are way up, but they’ve been deporting at a lower rate than Biden a year ago, which is really remarkable. And I think The Times also reported that Miller and Steve Bannon, who’s sometimes been an ally, are pretty disappointed in this.
This is a little amateur DC criminology, but it may very well be that Miller is on Team Bannon against Elon Musk, and there’s the real fissure within the administration right now that you could see, for instance, over the H-1B visa issue, even before Trump took office where the Silicon Valley oligarchs bankrolling him, essentially want at-will foreign employment for their companies. And Bannon and Miller have never met an immigrant they didn’t want to deport, skilled or not. So, there’s a real tension there, but there’s no question he has a lot of influence.

JW: Last question – Steven Miller relishes being hated by liberals and the left. Part of his plan is to provoke us into talking about him. He’d be delighted that he’s being talked about on The Nation podcast. So are we falling into a trap that he has laid for us here?

DK: I’ll say bluntly that I used to hear arguments like that a lot circa 2016, 2017. I think that was a pretty common way to talk about Donald Trump himself. I’ll never forget how The Huffington Post in 2015 and early 2016 covered Trump in their entertainment section to show their disdain for his campaign and the stunt they thought it represented. I think that this approach has failed. I think that people get attention and get platformed whether we want them to or not. Why are you giving these people attention, or The New York Times just profiled a fascist? Doesn’t that just make fascists more powerful?

I’m like, what more power do you think these guys can have? This is our country. This is what it is right now. You can stare it in the face, or you can’t. A Nation profile of Stephen Miller based on a five-year-old biography of him is the absolute least of his problems right now. And if it helps some like-minded or fair-minded readers get a better sense of the forces that produce this guy and what really makes him tick, then I think I’ve done my job.

JW: David Klion wrote about Stephen Miller for the new issue of The Nation Magazine. You can read him online at thenation.com. Dave, this was great– thanks for talking with us today.

DK: Thank you so much.