T**********e
发帖数: 29576 | 1 THE NEW YORKER ›
How Stephen Miller Manipulates Donald Trump to Further His Immigration
Obsession
JONATHAN BLITZER FEBRUARY 21, 2020
One afternoon in November, a half-dozen government officials sat at a
conference table in the White House, waiting for the arrival of Stephen
Miller, a senior adviser to Donald Trump. Miller had summoned officials from
the Departments of Homeland Security, State, and Justice to discuss a new
Administration policy initiative: a series of agreements with the
governments of Central America that would force asylum seekers to apply for
protection in that region instead of in the United States. Miller, who had
helped make the deals, wanted to know when their provisions could go into
effect. Typically, everyone rises when top White House officials enter a
room. But when Miller walked in, wearing a dark suit and an expression of
wry resolve, everyone remained seated, their eyes cast down. “You go into
meetings with Miller and try to get out with as little damage as possible,”
a former Administration official told me. Miller has a habit of berating
officials, especially lower-ranking ones, for an agency’s perceived
failures. Chad Wolf, now the acting head of D.H.S., used to advise
colleagues to placate Miller by picking one item from his long list of
demands, and vowing to execute it. “It’s a war of attrition,” Wolf told
them. “Maybe he forgets the rest for a while, and you buy yourself some
time.”
One participant in the November meeting pointed out that El Salvador didn’t
have a functioning asylum system. “They don’t need a system,” Miller
interrupted. He began speaking over people, asking questions, then cutting
off the answers.
As the meeting ended, Miller held up his hand to make a final comment. “I
didn’t mean to come across as harsh,” he said. His voice dropped. “It’s
just that this is all I care about. I don’t have a family. I don’t have
anything else. This is my life.”
Miller, who is thirty-four, with thinning hair and a sharp, narrow face, is
an anomaly in Washington: an adviser with total authority over a single
issue that has come to define an entire Administration. “We have never had
a President who ran, and won, on immigration,” Muzaffar Chishti, of the
Migration Policy Institute, told me. “And he’s kept his promise on
immigration.” Miller, who was a speechwriter during the campaign, is now
Trump’s longest-serving senior aide. He is also an Internet meme, a public
scourge, and a catch-all symbol of the racism and malice of the current
government. In a cast of exceptionally polarizing officials, he has embraced
the role of archvillain. Miller can be found shouting over interviewers on
the weekend news shows or berating reporters in the White House briefing
room; he has also vowed to quell a “deep state” conspiracy against Trump.
When he’s not accusing journalists of harboring a “cosmopolitan bias” or
denying that the Statue of Liberty symbolizes America’s identity as a
nation of immigrants, he is shaping policy and provoking the President’s
most combative impulses.
Jeh Johnson, who headed the Department of Homeland Security under Barack
Obama, told me, “D.H.S. was born of bipartisan parents in Congress, in the
aftermath of 9/11, when there was support for a large Cabinet-level
department to consolidate control of all the different ways someone can
enter this country.” D.H.S. is the third-largest federal department, with a
fifty-billion-dollar budget and a staff of some two hundred thousand
employees, spanning the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the
Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and Immigration and
Customs Enforcement. From its founding, in 2002, to the end of Obama’s
Presidency, the department had five secretaries; under Trump, it has had
five more. “Immigration is overheated and over-politicized, and it has
overwhelmed D.H.S.,” Johnson said.
“The massive changes Miller engineered in border and immigration policy
required that the policymaking process at D.H.S. be ignored,” Alan Bersin,
a former senior department official, told me. “Who do you think has filled
the vacuum?” Miller has cultivated lower-level officials in the department
who answer directly to him, providing information, policy updates, and data,
often behind the backs of their bosses. “At the beginning of 2017, none of
us could have foreseen that he would wield this kind of power,” a former
Trump Administration official told me. Of thirty current and former
officials I interviewed, not one could recall a White House adviser as
relentless as Miller, or as successful in imposing his will across agencies.
These officials resented him as an upstart and mocked his affectations—his
“arrogant monotonal voice” and tin-eared bombast—but few were
comfortable going on the record, even after leaving the government. Miller
is famously vindictive, and, as Trump runs for a second term, he is sure to
grow only more powerful. “Miller doesn’t have to get Trump to believe
everything he does,” one of the officials told me. “He just has to get
Trump to say it all.”
When Miller and I spoke by phone, it was off the record. Without an audience
, he gave the same message at half the volume—a litany of talking points
about all the ways in which the President had delivered on his campaign
promises. Afterward, the White House sent me a quote for attribution: “It
is the single greatest honor of my life to work for President Trump and to
support his incredible agenda.”
Miller’s obsession with restricting immigration and punishing immigrants
has become the defining characteristic of the Trump White House, to the
extent that campaigning and governing on the issue are no longer
distinguishable. In the past three and a half years, the Trump
Administration has dismantled immigration policies and precedents that took
shape in the course of decades, using current laws to intensify enforcement
against illegal immigration and pursuing new ones to reduce legal
immigration. Trump has slashed the refugee program; virtually ended asylum
at the southern border; and written a rule denying green cards to families
who might receive public benefits. Miller has choreographed these
initiatives, convincing Trump that his political future depends on them—and
on going even further. If Trump is not reëlected, Miller will never
again have such power. A D.H.S. official told me, “Going into 2020, Miller
is at a crossroads.”
The radicalism of Miller’s views tends to obscure how much he has evolved
as a tactician since he arrived in Washington. He grew up in Santa Monica,
California, the son of Jewish Democrats, but, by the time he entered high
school, he had become a strident conservative. “He was going to a very
liberal, diverse school,” Megan Healey, one of his classmates, told me. “
In a school where the nerds were considered cool, he was still the guy that
nobody liked.” The terrorist attacks of 9/11 took place when he was a
junior, cementing his persona. “Anti-Americanism had spread all over the
school like a rash,” he later wrote. “Osama Bin Laden would feel very
welcome at Santa Monica High School.” At Duke, where he studied political
science and wrote a column for the student newspaper, he became a familiar
presence on conservative television and radio programs. His hostility toward
immigrants formed part of his politics, but did not stand out. He opposed
left-wing bias in the classroom, invited controversial speakers to campus,
and organized “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week.” “America without her
culture is like a body without a soul,” he wrote in one column. “Yet many
of today’s youth see America as nothing but a meeting point for the
cultures of other nations.” His most notable cause was to defend a group of
white lacrosse players who had been falsely accused of raping a black woman
who was stripping at a party. The editor of his column later told The
Atlantic, “He picked the most contrarian of stances to articulate, wrote
the most hyperbolic prose he could . . . then sat back and waited for people
’s reactions.”
Continue...
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/03/02/how-stephen-miller-manipulates-donald-trump-to-further-his-immigration-obsession | h***e
发帖数: 2823 | | T**********e
发帖数: 29576 | 3
newyorker的人物特写都是长文，总结一句话就是Miller夜以继日地和官僚斗争，老头
打击非移的措施基本都是Miller整出来的。
【在 h***e 的大作中提到】
: 太长了，谁给个摘要吧
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