Saturday, March 2, 2019.
The servile weasel lurks in the background, waiting to whisper in the tyrant’s ear: “Senior adviser Stephen Miller with White House chief of staff Reince Priebus in the foreground.” Photo by Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via the Chicago Tribune.
[Note from your faithful correspondent: I was letting this one languish in my notebook, thinking I would get to it someday but also thinking I wouldn’t get to it before it became too old news. Events of the last week have given it renewed relevance. So here it is, at last…]
This is the third of a three part series. The first post, “Just Words” is here. The second, “Just words, except when they're not just HIS words” is here.
With Bannon out of the White House, Stephen Miller was the driving force behind the White House’s hardening DACA policy. Trump often still expressed sympathy for the young people in the DACA program, saying, a lot times these kids came here through no fault of their own. They’re sympathetic. He also pointed out the political appeal of the Dreamers.
Miller would inject the hard line. Look, everybody calls them the kids and the Dreamers but, he argued, they weren’t kids anymore. Many were 24 or 26 or 27. Miller’s position was absolute: in exchange for a compromise on DACA, we want full border wall funding for a decade---not just one year---plus and end to chain migration and the diversity lottery that dispersed up to 50,000 green cards per year to immigrants from nations that otherwise had low immigration rates to the U.S. We’re not accepting anything less than all three…
That’s from Bob Woodward’s “Fear: Trump in the White House”. Woodward’s following up on his report of the infamous shithole countries meeting which took place in January of 2018. But Miller hadn’t suddenly appeared in Bannon’s place by Trump’s side to whisper hateful nothings in his ear. He’d been there from the outset, writing Trump’s anti-immigrant script for him. Trump’s first address to Congress in January of 2017, his blood and soil paean to Western Civilization in Poland in July of that year in which he might as well have thundered “Kinder, Küche, und Kirche”---actually, he more or less did---
This morning in Warsaw, Poland, President Donald Trump issued a battle cry — for “family, for freedom, for country, and for God" — in a speech that often resorted to rhetorical conceits typically used by the European and American alt-right. ---Sarah Wildman. Vox. July 6, 2017.
---his in praise of isolationism address to the United Nations (the address that got him openly laughed at by members of the General Assembly) last fall, and his frequent valentines to Hungary’s white nationalist prime minister, the power hungry would-be dictator Viktor Orbán: these are all the work of Stephen Miller.
Miller and Trump are made for each other, a pair of small, weak, sadistic and self-loathing villains who want revenge on the world for knowing them for what they are.
The difference is that Miller has the courage of his convictions and the scheming sort of intelligence necessary to putting his hateful ideas into action.
And he’s good with words.
Relatively.
To recap: Trump’s use of language is careless, reckless, irresponsible, self-serving, self-aggrandizing, self-flattering, and, sometimes you can’t help concluding, deliberately self-destructive. He talks and tweets to express feelings not ideas, certainly not ideas that are thought through or that even began as thoughts. To the extent that anything he says represents his thinking it’s him thinking out loud.
He knows---more like senses; knowing, particularly knowing yourself, requires the kind of thought he’s incapable of or too mentally lazy to even try to achieve---he’s boring when he’s giving a prepared speech. He knows this because he bores himself. And he believes his devoted mobs of hideous men are just as bored. They don’t want to hear him sound presidential because Presidents are politicians and they hate politicians. They want to hear him sound like Donald Trump, the demagogue, boss of all bosses, and general annoyance. They want him to sound like them if they had the power to tell everybody off, boss people around, and annoy the people who annoy them. This is why he’s always “going off script.”
“Going off script” is pundit-speak for “We have no idea what he’s saying or where it came from or why he’s saying it or if he’s deliberately lying or just has no clue but we’re committed to the narrative that he’s some kind of genius at communicating with his base and changing the focus of the debate so we’ve adopted this somewhat complimentary term that makes him sound like a clever performance artist to describe what really seem like the rantings and maunderings of a lunatic old man losing his marbles because what the hell?”
His language is something else. His language---his personal idiom. Idiolect.---is the patter of a salesman That’s what he is at bottom. A salesman always selling. So his language is hyperbolic, figurative, cartoonish, clichéd, slang-ridden, jokey, hokey, empty of meaning but full of canned emotion, meant to excite interest and create earworms, and always in service of selling the product. The product’s defective. It won’t do what he promises. The pitch is a lie, the sale a con. The product’s himself. And he’s a living lie. This makes everything he says a lie in a general sense because everything he says he says to bamboozle the rubes. But it doesn’t mean that individual things he says under his umbrella of lies aren’t to some degree true or that he doesn’t believe they’re true. He just doesn’t care if they are or aren’t.
Then there’s his ignorance. He hears something that’s useful to him---it flatters his vanity, gives him something to boast about or provides him a line of attack, or serves his purpose of selling himself and suckering his base--he accepts it as fact and adds it to his routine without checking to find out what the truth is behind it or having an advisor or aide to check for him. He repeats it and repeats it carelessly, embellishing and revising and otherwise stretching, depending on his mood, the crowd, the strength of his memory, and how he thinks it’ll help him at the moment, turning it inside out and upside down and bending it out of recognizable shape. So it’s hard to know what he thinks he knows and harder to know how important it is to him and what he wants to do with it beyond closing the sale.
Finally, it’s always about him. Every word that comes out of his mouth or off his fingertips and onto a screen is either a boast or a whine. He’s either telling us why we should think he’s as wonderful as he thinks he is or complaining that it’s unfair that we don’t. Thing is, he doesn’t think he’s wonderful. Not at heart. He’s afraid he’s unloved and unlovable. He needs constant reassurance he’s wrong about that. So he’s always looking into his inner magic mirror and demanding it tell him he’s the fairest in the land.
From this conflicting and mutually contradicting jumble of words, moods, signals of intention, and expressions of passing fancies his baffled aides, advisors, cabinet secretaries and department heads are expected to discern and implement a consistent and cohesive plan for governing a country of 300 million people living in the world’s leading democracy, dependent on a global economy for its prosperity, sustenance, and survival. It’s maddening. Greg Miller sums up the situation in “The Apprentice”:
In the reality that commenced with his inauguration, Trump seemed incapable of basic aspects of the job. His White House was consumed by dysfunction, with warring factions waiting for direction---or at least a coherent decision-making process---from the president. His outbursts sent waves of panic through the West Wing, with aides scrambling to contain the president’s anger or divine some broader mandate from the latest 140-character blast.
This is why sometimes I almost feel sorry for Sarah Sanders. Her job isn’t to just to lie for him. It’s to try to turn his lies into sentences that sound as if they have an internal logic and and at least a passing acquaintance with coherent English. She has the additional task of framing his random blitherings as serious policy proposals, plans, arguments, and lines of debate while at the same time leaving open the possibility that they’re not.
“The President meant what he said,” she says, “but don’t hold him to it.”
No wonder she’s so irritable all the time. Being a mental contortionist for a living must give her chronic headaches.
Anywho…
Whenever his words are put together in sentences that parse, in ways that sound the least presidential and as if they’re based on serious political thought even if that thinking is rotten and obviously motivated by the basest and most cynical desires and aimed towards destructive ends, show at least a minimal understanding of the way the world works and how things get done, an even shallow and limited knowledge of history, economics, and policy, and are consistent with other things he’s said and with what is actually being done in his name, it’s a sure bet they were put into his mouth by someone else. And when “his” subject is immigration, the likeliest culprit is Stephen Miller.
Miller has been close to monomaniacal in his devotion to Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda. It’s as if in his mind Trump has no other job as president than to make America great again by making it white again. It’s not enough to keep brown and black would-be immigrants out. The ones who are already here must be thrown out. And whether they’re coming or going they have to be terrorized and punished along the way. Miller’s commitment to the xenophobic violence and hate is bitterly ironic considering his background.
He grew up in Santa Monica, in one of the bluer areas of blue California. He went to progressive schools with diverse student populations. One of his best friends in junior high was Hispanic. His family of Democrats is Jewish. His ancestors on his mother’s side came to America from Belarus to escape the pogroms. They were seeking asylum. His great-grandfather was the beneficiary of wasn’t yet called chain migration but was a given of the immigrant experience. His great-grandmother was a proto-Dreamer. The family had relatives and friends in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe. And then they didn’t.
But early in high school, he turned into a Right Wing ideologue. I’m not sure what turned him. He was sixteen on 9/11 and he might have been traumatized and radicalized by that. His thinking might have been warped by a book by the CEO of the NRA, Right Wing loon Wayne LaPierre he read at a too impressionable age. But his thinking might have already been warped, making him receptive to LaPierre’s paranoid ravings. Whatever did it, he appears to have thought that being conservative meant being obnoxious, belligerent, arrogant, nasty, and openly, swaggeringly racist.
He broke off his friendship with his Latino friend, telling him it was because he was Latino. He took pride and pleasure in infuriating his liberal classmates with his radical opinions and annoying his teachers with questions that he deliberately framed to provoke them and highjack discussions. He ran for student council on a platform of conservative white male entitlement and during a campaign speech he insulted the school janitorial staff. He was smart and a good student and got accepted at Duke University where he fell in with other ultra-conservative student activists, including the neo-Nazi Richard Spencer. Ann Coulter has called him brilliant and has praised him for not taking his high IQ into law school or onto Wall Street but instead putting it to work to serve his country by joining the staffs of various Right Wing Republican politicians including Michelle Bachman and Jeff Sessions whom he helped defeat the immigration reform bill pushed by Republicans in 2013.
When I first became aware of Miller and who and what he was and what he was determined to do and how it was a betrayal of his liberal upbringing and his family’s heritage, I wrote a post trying to explain him to myself by comparing him half-seriously to the villain of the Star Wars sequels Kylo Ren who rejected his heroic parents to worship the memory of his grandfather Darth Vader who in his adolescent mind was the true hero in the family.
But the comparison doesn’t work. There doesn’t seem to be a Vader in Miller’s personal mythology. Besides, Kylo Ren is heroic. Miller is merely servile. Kylo Ren wants power. Miller is content to serve it.
Lately I’ve been toying with the idea he’s like Shakespeare’s Richard III. His embrace of Right Wing villainy took hold when he was at the age to become aware that he was not “shap’d for sportive tricks, nor made to court an amorous looking-glass”, that he would not be one of the popular kids or an object of desire to the objects of the typical teenage objects of desire.
But I, — that am not shap'd for sportive tricks,
Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass;
I, that am rudely stamp'd, and want love’s majesty,
To strut before a wanton ambling nymph;
I, that am curtail'd of this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,
Deform'd, unfinish'd, sent before my time
Into this breathing world, scarce half made up,
And that so lamely and unfashionable,
That dogs bark at me, as I halt by them,—
Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace,
Have no delight to pass away the time,
Unless to spy my shadow in the sun
And descant on mine own deformity.
And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,
I am determined to prove a villain
And hate the idle pleasures of these days.
But again the problem is that Miller isn’t up to the comparison. Richard is heroic in his villainy. Miller is simply a weasel. Richard is a warrior-king. Miller is a courtier. Realizing that he didn’t have the charisma, physical strength or presence and grace to be a leader of men, he determined to prove a villain by lurking in the background and passing notes to the tyrant.
But I’m probably being too literary. The likeliest explanation is banal and prosaic. He just didn’t grow up.
At a certain moments in our lives we’re all tempted to harden our hearts. Selfishness and self-centeredness become attractive, even comforting points of view. Looking out for Number One looks like the surest path to success or happiness or at least a path away from sadness and despair. Or a path to them if that’s where we think we have to go. Young men are faced with the additional temptation to toughen up and many make the mistake of thinking tough means hard. Miller’s moment came at the worst time for his soul and he gave into it, freezing himself at the creepiest and most weaselly moment in his adolescence.
Or maybe being a weasel and creep just came naturally.
Doesn’t matter.
What matters is that there are children in cages, troops on the border, ICE is out of control, money intended to help victims of natural disasters in California, Houston, and Puerto Rico---American citizens, for Chrissake!---is in danger of being diverted to build the WALL, Trump’s monument to his own ego and his mobs of hideous men’s hatred and fear, and the words Miller’s putting into Trump’s mouth are growing increasingly more hateful and violent.
End of Part Three. Follow the links to read Parts One and Two: "Just Words" and "Just words, except when they're not just HIS words" .
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