Stephen Miller Embodies the Dark Fascist Heart of Trump’s White House

Trump's Goebbels

Arnold R. Isaacs for Common Dreams   

The video is not long, just 16 minutes and 25 seconds. But in that short time it provides a remarkable capsule of the Trump administration’s ongoing crusade against its critics. In one chilling moment after another, it captures the mentality of that campaign; its content, tone, and style; and its complete disregard for factual accuracy.

The video, taped on July 16, records the words of Stephen Miller, President Donald Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy and Homeland Security adviser, addressing a multinational audience assembled at the State Department for the opening session of meeting convened by Secretary of State Marco Rubio under the title “Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism.” In his welcoming address, Rubio defined the meeting’s focus: “far-left political terrorism” that he declared has been a “blind spot” in US counterterrorism doctrine, but would now be directly in the government’s sights.

Following Rubio to the podium, Miller delivered various—and sometimes unsettling—amplifications on that theme. 

After an opening passage declaring that under President Trump’s leadership, “We have taken the necessary and essential action of formally recognizing left-wing violence as a form of political terrorism that is a direct threat to our national security and the survival of our republican form of government,” Miller went on to proclaim that “for the first time in American history,” all US law enforcement and intelligence agencies are working together “to disrupt, identify, defund, debank, arrest, and prosecute these political terrorists that are operating in our country.” 

Then, in one of many questionable passages, he went on with an implied suggestion that the authorities should reject suspected terrorists’ claims of their legal rights. Miller put it this way:

One of the hallmarks of left-wing violence and terrorism is its completely pretextual and disingenuous appeal to civil liberties in an effort to shield its own violence. This is the tactic that the left always uses to try to protect itself from facing criminal punishment. It is essential that we are wise enough and strong enough to understand that these appeals must fall on deaf ears. When the leftist, who does not believe in freedom, who does not believe in civil rights, who does not believe in any ordered notion of justice, protests that we are violating his rights, understand that he is lying to try to persuade people who are not closely following the political scene that some injustice has been perpetrated against him.

That doesn’t quite say explicitly that a person accused of left-wing terror does not have the same rights that other criminal defendants have in US courts—but it is hard to read Miller’s words in any other way. (The following speaker, Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent, sounded a very different tone, declaring that “in the fight against domestic terrorism, we must respect the constitutional rights, freedom of speech, association, and assembly of all Americans... the Treasury will act based on suspected unlawful conduct by these terror organizations, not because of their beliefs or ideologies.” I have no way to know whether those words were in Bessent’s prepared text or if he was directly responding to Miller’s statement, but in either case they may have brought some relief to listeners who value the rule of law.)

At another point in his speech, Miller falsely told his listeners that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers have experienced an “8,000% increase in violent assaults,” adding that “these are not one-off episodes. This is repeat, systemic, organized, funded insurrection, an armed resistance against the federal government.” Miller’s figure is contradicted by the Homeland Security department’s own public statements. In January, the department reported that threats to ICE personnel, not actual assaults, had risen by 8,000% in the previous year, while violent attacks had gone up by “more than 1,300%”—less than one-sixth of Miller’s alleged increase. 

That lower figure may have been overstated too, as indicated by a Los Angeles Times investigation of court records in LA and four other cities (San Diego; Portland, Oregon; Chicago; and Washington, DC). More than a third of the cases they reviewed ended in dismissals or acquittals, the Times reporters found, and a majority of the alleged assaults had not caused any injury to the federal agents involved.

A few minutes later, Miller raised a quite different and somewhat peculiar issue: “When you look at these violent antifa demonstrations and you see any photograph of those who were assembled—to be blunt, not one of the people that is demonstrating looks like a normal person. Not one looks normal. They’re all deformed in some way—in their appearance, in their dress, in their mannerism... If you look at two photographs and you see a normal American in the street and you see an Antifa protest, why do the people that are violently demonstrating—why is there not one normal-looking person among them?” Miller did not explain exactly what he finds odd in the protesters’ appearance—and unlike most of his talking points, that one seems to be uniquely his, not one commonly heard from others in the Trump orbit.

In another questionable passage, Miller claimed that the phenomenon of “jury nullification” has regularly enabled leftist terrorists to escape conviction for their crimes. He explained the term this way: “This is when a person is obviously guilty of a crime but the juror, because they’re ideologically sympathetic to the perpetrator, will not sentence them to the crime which was obviously committed,” adding, “We’ve seen in the United States, again and again, individuals who are part of left-wing organizations who’ve committed assaults against ICE officers or federal law enforcement, who’ve been brought to court, where clear evidence has been presented against them, that the jury has refused to convict for purely political reasons.”

Miller gave no examples and cited no facts to support the implication that persuading jurors to acquit guilty defendants has been a deliberate tactic employed by leftist organizations. In past statements, he has explicitly cited at least one specific case: the acquittal last December of a Los Angeles tow-truck driver who was arrested after moving an ICE vehicle while the officers were arresting a suspected illegal immigrant. 

The defendant, Bobby Nunez, was charged with stealing federal government property, an offense punishable by up to 10 years in prison. At his trial, his lawyers argued that the ICE agents’ SUV was blocking a driveway, that Nunez towed it only one block away, and that it was out of the agents’ possession for just 13 minutes.

Without having heard their deliberations, we have no way to know how the jurors reasoned in reaching their not-guilty verdict, if that decision stemmed principally from opposition to ICE operations and Trump’s immigration policies, or if they based their conclusion on other grounds, perhaps that the charged offense was disproportionately severe and the possible penalty unfairly harsh. 

Stephen Miller wasn’t in the jury room either, but he showed no visible uncertainty when he denounced the verdict as “another example of blatant jury nullification in a blue city.” From there he went off in another direction: “The justice system depends on a jury of peers with a shared system of interests and values. Mass migration tribalizes the entire legal system”—a comment that it’s hard to see as anything but an argument that people with the wrong ethnic identity are not legitimate participants in America’s justice system.

Incidentally, nothing in any of the news stories I read about that trial gave any indication that Nunez was connected with any “left-wing organization.” Nor did photographs of him show anything obviously “not normal” or “deformed” in his appearance (unless those words apply to anyone who doesn’t look like a non-Hispanic white man).

Miller said nothing in his State Department speech about a different issue that has undermined far more cases than any real or imagined political bias in juries—findings by numerous judges that law enforcement agents and government lawyers prosecuting supposed antifa activists and other protesters have crossed legal or ethical boundaries, misrepresenting facts and exaggerating or completely fabricating criminal charges.

That pattern is documented in a recent report by the investigative journalism organization ProPublica. Their reporters reviewed hundreds of case records and found numerous comments from federal judges criticizing “unlawful,” “unethical,” and “unseemly” government actions. Specific abuses cited by judges included findings that “the government filed statements generated by artificial intelligence that referenced nonexistent case law, wrote briefs that ignored facts, and filed declarations with inaccurate dates.”

(One striking example is from a judge’s decision granting a petition from a man seeking release from ICE detention. In her opinion memorandum, the judge noted that ICE and Homeland Security department officials had submitted a document “purporting to show” that the man had a record of “minor convictions for marijuana possession in 2009.” 

The judge went on: “The Petitioner was four years old in 2009, and the Respondent indicated that the document was supplied by ICE and likely presumed to relate to the Petitioner because the individual in those records had the same name, despite the differences in birthdate, birthplace, parents’ names, and immigration status. This sloppiness further validates the Court’s concerns about the procedures utilized by the Respondents depriving people present in the United States of their liberty.”)

It was no surprise that Miller did not mention prosecutors’ failings in his speech, since that would have been inconsistent with the message he was delivering. Theoretically, it’s not categorically impossible that he has been more candid in private conversations with Trump—after all, presidential advisers, particularly on national security issues, are expected to provide unwelcome truths and not just say things their boss wants to hear. 

If we don’t know what was said or not said in meetings that were not disclosed to the public, we can’t judge with absolute certainty how straightforwardly Miller might have spoken in those discussions. But numerous reports of his public statements over the years reveal a consistent pattern of misrepresented facts and policy ideas even more virulent than Trump’s, making it virtually impossible to believe that his advice in private has been significantly more balanced or rational than what he has said in public over the years.

The “Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism” did not get much media attention, perhaps because it did not produce very much new information substantiating the premise that “left-wing terrorists” are linked in a far-reaching multinational conspiracy that is now the most urgent danger facing the United States and the international community. Stephen Miller’s 16-minute speech did not present any facts or ideas that have not been heard many times before, so it didn’t make many headlines either. 

But it is newsworthy for a different reason—an unintentionally revealing survey of the Trump team’s violation of basic legal principles, endangering the rule of law, and its consistent record of falsehoods, endangering public trust in the national leadership. Those two trends represent a clear and present threat to human rights and democratic government in this country, and should be spotlighted at every opportunity while we can still report and resist them.

Arnold R. Isaacs, a journalist, and writer based in Maryland has written widely on refugee and immigration issues. He is the author of "From Troubled Lands: Listening to Pakistani and Afghan Americans in post-9/11 America" and two books relating to the Vietnam war. His website is www.arnoldisaacs.net.