Stephen Miller and the Question of Character

The old-fashioned Republican slogan “Character Counts” still holds true in today’s politics, business competition, family relationships and other significant tests in the course of our crowded lives. Sure, plans, platforms, promises and ideological orientation should play a role in evaluating potential leaders, but the most important questions involve personality, mental health and the ability to work with others and respond calmly and effectively to the unexpected.

This means attention not only to what an individual has done but what he or she has said on the rise to power and prominence.

Consider the case of Stephen Miller, currently riding high as one of President Trump’s most influential White House advisors. A recent and often admiring profile in the New York Times featured two distinctive and revealing comments from his distant and recent past that raised relevant questions about his character and values.

First, the journalist behind the piece (Jason Zengerle, a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine) reached back to an episode in high school that Miller himself and many of his friends at the time recalled with vivid specificity. “Mr. Miller’s origin story is, by now, familiar,” Zengerle writes. “The son of wealthy Jewish Democrats, he grew up in the early aughts in the liberal enclave of Santa Monica, Calif., where he fashioned himself as a conservative provocateur. Running for student government in high school, he campaigned on the platform that the school’s janitors weren’t doing enough work. (‘Am I the only one who is sick and tired of being told to pick up my trash when we have plenty of janitors who are paid to do it for us?’ he asked in his campaign speech.)”

The arrogant sense of entitlement, with its indignant complaint about “being told to pick up my own trash,” apparently proved too much even for the privileged students of a comfortable beachside community; according to other descriptions of the episode in various biographical pieces about Stephen Miller, his point of view provoked resounding boos that forced him off the stage and doomed his eccentric campaign for student body office.

The other recent citation that raised questions about Miller’s personal make-up came 21 years later to a much larger and more significant audience. Having served as Donald Trump’s principal speechwriter during his first term as president, Miller naturally played a prominent role in the ultimately successful campaign of 2024. In that capacity, he gave frequent interviews in friendly venues like Fox News and conservative talk radio, working several times with the hardline hosts Clay Travis and Buck Sexton, a pair who sought to replace the late, lamented Rush Limbaugh.

Shortly before Trump’s election victory, Miller attempted to describe to the radio hosts the glorious vistas they would share when (not if!) Mr. Trump succeeded in recapturing the White House. “You will wake up every morning so excited to get out of bed to see what’s happening on the border, to see what’s happening with immigration enforcement, you’ll set your alarm clock two hours earlier every morning just to get two more hours of daylight to watch the deportation flights happen,” he said. “That’s how wonderful this will be.”

As with his attitude toward the school janitors as a teenager, when Miller angrily denounced their purportedly outrageous expectation that he should “pick up his own trash,” the now prominent political operator expressed no trace of sympathy or compassion for people on the other side of a political disagreement. Using language that suggests only joy, excitement, and exultation over the dawn-of-day spectacle of the arrest, detention, and deportation of millions of undocumented immigrants hardly grants these unfortunates human status.

The recent polling that consistently shows a growing majority of Americans now disapproving of President Trump’s handling of the immigration issue indicates that even Mr. Miller’s fellow MAGA minions fail to share his confidence that “deportation flights” offer a one-way passage to utopia, if not nirvana. If only individuals like Mr. Miller could express at least some modicum of respect or concern for the janitors who cleaned his high school, or for the target deportees who, in many cases, have lived in the United States for years, working hard and building families! Only then, perhaps, we might summon the national character to join in acknowledging “that’s how wonderful that would be.”