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Stephen Miller

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We live in a world...that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.

Stephen Miller (born August 23, 1985) is an American political advisor who has served as deputy chief of staff for policy and Homeland Security Advisor in President Donald Trump's second term since January 2025. Previously, he served as a senior advisor for policy and White House director of speechwriting to President Trump in his first term (2017–2021). Before then, he was communications director for then-Senator Jeff Sessions. He was also a press secretary for U.S. representatives Michele Bachmann and John Shadegg. Miller's politics have been described as far-right and anti-immigration.

Quotes

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2005–2015

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  • One way in which feminists try to remedy the disparity is to legally mandate paid leave for female employees who give birth, even if a company is struggling to stay afloat. Such laws provide powerful incentives for bosses-male or female-not to hire women to begin with. Of course, it's easy to support such legislation until you end up getting laid off because your boss was losing too much money by paying absent employees.
  • The one thing people crave above all else at this moment in history in the people they send to Washington is authenticity — people who are real, and in person, in private and in public the same person — people of character and integrity and dignity — people you can rely on to defend your interests and your values and to never be persuaded or influenced or manipulated by forces and interests and people who do not have the interests of America at heart...
    One of the things we’re missing from our political dialogue right now is the idea that the United States is a home. It is more than an accounting sheet. It is more than the sum of its GDP, its total tax collections or its total outlays. America is a family. America is the place that we love, to whom we give our loyalty and our allegiance and our devotion.
    But Washington has forgotten for too long that it owes its loyalty, dedication and devotion to the citizens of this country who call it home. Washington does not serve the interests of people living overseas or corporations headquartered all across this globe, but the real flesh and blood citizens who together create this nation, this home.

2016–2024

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  • Everybody who stands against Donald Trump are the people who’ve been running this country into the ground. They’re the people who’ve been controlling the levers of power. They’re the people who are responsible for our open border, for our shrinking middle class, for our terrible trade deals. Everything that is wrong with this country today, the people opposing Donald J. Trump are responsible for.
  • Acosta: What the President is proposing here does not sound like it's in keeping with American tradition when it comes to immigration. The Statue of Liberty says, "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free." It doesn't say anything about speaking English or being a computer programmer. Aren't you trying to change what it means to an immigrant coming into this country if you're telling them you have to speak English? Can't people learn to speak English when they get here?
    Miller: Well, first of all, right now it's a requirement to be naturalized; you have to speak English. So the notion that speaking English wouldn't be a part of the immigration system would actually be very ahistorical. Secondly, I don't want to get off into a whole thing about history here, but the Statue of Liberty is a symbol of liberty enlightening the world; it's a symbol of American liberty lighting the world. The poem that you're referring to was added later; is not actually part of the original Statue of Liberty.
  • Acosta: This whole notion of they have to learn English before they get to the United States: are we just going to bring in people from Great Britain and Australia?
    Miller: I am shocked at your statement, that you think only people from Great Britain and Australia would know English. It actually reveals your cosmopolitan, er, bias, to a shocking degree, that in your mind... No, this an amazing moment...
    Acosta: It sounds like you're trying to engineer the racial and ethnic flow of people into this country through this policy.
    Miller: Jim, that is one of the most outrageous, insulting, ignorant and foolish things you've ever said, and for you that's still a really... The notion that you think that this is a racist bill is so wrong and so insulting.
  • There are 7 billion people in the world. Most of them are good, hardworking, decent, honest, principled people. But the reality is there's a limit to how many people any country can bring in. And we as a country have a right to say we want to bring people based on their ability to contribute to our economy, to be safe, productive citizens, and to uplift the nation as a whole.
  • Far from the images of 1960s kids rebelling against power, most of my classmates who were upset by the things I was saying ... wanted to have a more disciplined administrative environment with stronger, tougher rules about what you can and can’t say—set by adult authority figures!
  • I've always been a nonconformist. I think that nonconformity is part of the American DNA. And in today's culture, the nonconformists are conservatives.
    • Interview by McKay Coppins, "Stephen Miller: Trump's Right-Hand Troll", The Atlantic (May 28, 2018)
  • The Democrats are fighting for illegal aliens. Donald Trump is fighting for American citizens. That's what this whole thing is about. You have covered this better than probably anybody for years. You understand this is about sovereignty. It's about working men and women. It's about safe communities. It's about wages, living conditions, quality of life. This is the battle right now right before our very eyes.

2025–present

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  • The People ask me what emotions I am feeling right now. There is incredible sadness, there is incredible anger. And the thing about anger is that unfocused anger or blind rage is not a productive emotion, but focused anger, righteous anger, directed for a just cause is one of the most important agents of change in human history. And we are gonna channel all of the anger that we have over the organized campaign that led to this assassination to uproot and dismantle these terrorist networks.

The Lead with Jake Tapper (5 January 2026)

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From the transcript of an interview on The Lead with Jake Tapper, CNN (5 January 2026)
The President has been clear for months now that the United States should be the nation that has Greenland as part of our overall security apparatus.
  • We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time. ... [W]e are in charge because we have the United States military stationed outside the country. We set the terms and conditions. We have a complete embargo on all of their oil and their ability to do commerce.
  • It wouldn't be military action against Greenland. The Greenland has a population of 30,000 people, Jake. The real question is, by what right does Denmark assert control over Greenland? What is the basis of their territorial claim? What is their basis of having Greenland as a colony of Denmark? The United States is the power of NATO, for the United States to secure the Arctic region, to protect and defend NATO and NATO interests. Obviously, Greenland should be part of the United States.
  • The United States should have Greenland as part of the United States. There's no need to even think or talk about this in the context that you're asking of a military operation. Nobody's going to fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland.

Quotes about Stephen Miller

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Stephen Miller (from that special category of American military-age males who nevertheless somehow Perpetually Evaded the GWOT, or PEG). ~ Duffel Blog
  • Trump adviser Stephen Miller, considered the administration’s “brains,” says that “the real world” is governed by “strength,” “by force,” and “by power.” “The United States,” he says, “is using its military to secure our interests unapologetically in our hemisphere. We’re a superpower.” The U.S. is supposed to be different, but Trump sees the world as an extension of himself — a place where bullies gain wealth and power by mistreating others and controlling them with fear.
  • Stephen Miller: policy advisor and vitamin-D-deficient Minion. You might well think that's unfair, anyone can find a photo of someone looking a bit like a Minion. But with Miller, it is genuinely hard to find a photo of him not looking like a Minion.
  • The ICE activity we are protesting is allegedly being directed by White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller. On Monday, The Wall Street Journal reported that Miller called a meeting of ICE officials last month and directed them to “just go out there and arrest illegal aliens.” Not to target “the worst of the worst,” as the president had indicated. Not even to target criminals or gang members at all. But to roll up to a Home Depot where day laborers gather. To post up outside of a grammar school graduation in a neighborhood with a high percentage of undocumented residents. Just go and grab them and pull them away from their homes and their babies and their lives. Just lock them up. Now that’s what they’re doing. That’s what we’re protesting. And if it turns out their papers actually are in order, which it has more than a few times, then tough shit.
He’s arguing for his right to leave his trash behind. And he seems to want to be cheered for it. ~ David Holmes
Miller could have been taking a surf lesson, eating some Dippin’ Dots, or watching a majestic sunset over the Pacific Ocean. Instead, he’s sneering to a crowd about his right as a white person to leave his mess behind for a brown person to clean up. ~ David Holmes
  • There’s a video that made the rounds in the early days of the first Trump administration, when Miller was a lower-level spokesghoul. It’s our boy as a Santa Monica High School student and worth taking a fresh look at now that we know he’s one of the architects of this ICE campaign of random terror.
    There he is. The sneer for which he’d come to be known is already fully formed. His beard is largely too embarrassed to have anything to do with his face. He’s got the general look of someone you’d see juggling outside of a Barenaked Ladies show because he’s afraid to go inside the Barenaked Ladies show because someone in there might be doing pot. He’s arguing for his right to leave his trash behind. And he seems to want to be cheered for it.
    Los Angeles is crazy vast. Santa Monica High School is 12 miles from where I sit writing. If I left right now, I’d be there in an hour. But do you know what’s one half of one mile, one ten-minute walk away, from Santa Monica High School? The beach. A really nice, clean, and well-maintained beach, as a matter of fact. Miller could have been taking a surf lesson, eating some Dippin’ Dots, or watching a majestic sunset over the Pacific Ocean. Instead, he’s sneering to a crowd about his right as a white person to leave his mess behind for a brown person to clean up.
  • The cousin of White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller accused him Thursday of being responsible for an ICE agent fatally shooting a woman in Minneapolis. “When I called out my cousin for being the ‘face of evil’ I DID NOT stutter,” Alisa Kasmer wrote on Threads, referencing a Facebook post she made last year. “Renee Nicole Good’s death is blood on YOUR hands, Stephen. I’m just glad our grandparents are no longer alive to witness the shame you have brought to our family,” Kasmer added. [...] Kasmer, who lives in Miller’s Los Angeles hometown, where there were major protests last summer over ICE raids, publicly blasted him on Facebook in July, recalling babysitting him as a child and describing him as once “lovable and harmless” but now someone she could no longer support or tolerate. “I grieve what you’ve become, Stephen… I will never knowingly let evil into my life, no matter whose blood it carries—including my own,” she wrote at the time.
  • Kasmer described a young Miller as an “awkward, funny, needy middle child who loved to chase attention” but was “always the sweetest with the littlest family members.” She added that he was “young, conservative, maybe misguided, but lovable and harmless.”
    “People always ask me, ‘What happened to you?’ I don't have a clear answer," Kasmer continued in July. “I can only surmise it was a perfect storm of ego, fear, hate, and ambition-all of it mangled into something cruel and hollow, masquerading as strength. You were born into privilege, into safety, and wealth. And somehow, you've weaponized all of it.”
    Kasmer has also accused Miller of hypocrisy, criticizing him for leading the Trump administration's harsh immigration policies that take away the very opportunities that once helped his own family come to the U.S. and build a life. “We’re Jewish—we grew up knowing how hated we were just for existing,” Kasmer told The New Republic in December. “Now he’s trying to take away the exact thing that his own family benefited from: that ability to create a life for themselves, to prosper, to build community, to have successful businesses—to live a rewarding life.”
  • Trump’s rhetoric in his speeches to the military has been awful—he has ridiculed former commanders in chief, castigated sitting elected officials, and told the members of America’s armed forces that other Americans are their enemies. But his actions are worse. In deploying troops to American cities, he has set up a confrontation in which military commanders may soon have to choose between obeying the president and obeying the law. “This is a nation of Constitutional law, not martial law,” Judge Karin Immergut—a conservative Trump appointee—wrote last week when she blocked Trump’s attempt to send troops to Portland. The White House aide Stephen Miller likely foreshadowed Trump’s next moves, including possibly ignoring such rulings, when he lashed out at Immergut’s decision. Miller, a man who hates being called a fascist, made the fascistic accusation that a “large and growing movement of leftwing terrorism in this country” is being “shielded by far-left Democrat judges, prosecutors and attorneys general.”
  • Among the results of the backlash against the family-separation policy was the decision by David Glosser to speak out against his nephew Stephen Miller, sharing the history of his family's difficult journey to the United States in order to disprove the premises of the White House's approach to immigration. In 2018, he wrote in Politico about having "watched with dismay and increasing horror as my nephew, an educated man who is well aware of his heritage, has become the architect of immigration policies that repudiate the very foundation of our family's life in this country." "I had a unique platform from which to speak," Glosser told me. "I had no choice other than to reveal the truth to the background of our family and how it relates to the background of the architect of this catastrophe." Miller, for his part, sees his family's ancestral home of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, as having been harmed by "globalists" and the "owners of capital."
  • It's our blood and bones
    And these whistles and phones
    Against Miller and Noem's dirty lies
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