Stephen Miller, American psycho

For the past month or so, Stancil’s been doing non-stop shifts as a “rapid-responder,” one of thousands of volunteers who’ve observed and disrupted “Operation Metro Surge” – the bloodless official name for the unprecedented assault on the city of Minneapolis by the US government. 

In January, more than three thousand masked and armed thugs representing several federal agencies under the aegis of the Department of Homeland Security, most notoriously Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Customs and Border Protection (CBP), descended on Minneapolis.

The crackdown has targeted undocumented immigrants, and thousands of Minnesotans – citizens and non-citizens alike, seemingly regardless of legal status – have been detained, denied due process, and in many cases shipped to detention centres in other states. Many of those have disappeared into the system entirely or died, in facilities that look awfully like concentration camps. Many of those detained are children.

In response, the people of Minneapolis mobilised. Thousands protested. To protect their neighbours, volunteers like Stancil follow, observe, and film the feds’ unmarked SUVs to warn neighbourhoods of their presence. Agents have responded with violence. Two activists – Renée Good and Alex Pretti – were shot dead in the street.

Barely anybody believes this crackdown is actually about immigration or law enforcement. It’s ideological. And, to many, the ideology behind it has a face and a name. “[Stephen] Miller is orchestrating this ethnic cleansing,” Jessica Zellers, another Minneapolis resident who also became a community volunteer tells me. We’re speaking over Signal while she’s out on observer-patrol. There’s been lots of ICE activity today, she says. “Trump is clearly delighted with the situation,” Zellers says. “But Stephen Miller is the brains behind the operation.”

Miller’s current position is deputy chief of staff for policy. But that title doesn’t come close to capturing the unparalleled influence he wields. Former chief strategist Steve Bannon describes him as Trump’s “prime minister.” Axios reported that, despite technically outranking him, Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem, whose department is orchestrating Minneapolis, answers to Miller. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt told the Atlantic that Miller “oversees every policy the administration touches.”

He is the president’s longest-serving adviser, having joined the first Trump campaign almost as soon as it launched in January 2016. In the decade since, he has been responsible for shaping Trump’s immigration policy. He authored the 2017 travel ban on Muslim countries, promoted the idea of family separations, and much more. 

Miller, in other words, has been at the centre of the overarching, gleeful cruelty that has come to define the entire Trump era. After Pretti’s murder in Minneapolis, which was filmed from multiple angles, Miller tweeted that the dead man was a “domestic terrorist” who was trying to “murder federal agents”, a lie so extraordinarily brazen in the face of the ubiquitous video evidence that not even Trump could defend it.

Operation Metro Surge “is about [Miller’s] idea that if he can apply enough authoritarian force to his opponents, we will break,” Stancil says. “And then his authoritarian project will surge forward, and the country will be reshaped in his image, whatever fantasy he has of how America will look – which I think, and the general consensus here is, is really nothing short of a fascist America.” 

Zellers agrees. “This is not just politics but passion for him,” she says. “He’s a vampire who walks by day.”

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Stephen Miller grew up in a well-off liberal Jewish household in the beachside Los Angeles enclave of Santa Monica. Often, some kind of moment shifts someone on the path to monstrosity. But even as a kid, Miller was… well, he was that guy. “ By all accounts, he’s always been this way,” says Marisa Kabas, an independent writer and investigative journalist who covers the Trump administration for The Handbasket. “High school classmates have talked about his general attitude towards minorities and foreigners as always having been one of disdain.”

Contemporaries from the Santa Monica days remember him berating students to “speak only English;” telling a classmate to “go back to your country,” and tormenting immigrant kids. In short, Stephen Miller was a classic 90s early internet-era edgelord, who got off on upsetting his peers. You know. That guy. Miller once ran as a candidate in a high school election. On that occasion, he was not successful. In a campaign speech to classmates he said: “I will say and I will do things that no one else in their right mind would say or do.”

He kept this up at Duke university. “ Stephen arrived at college basically fully ideologically-formed,” said David Graham, a writer for The Atlantic who was a student at Duke at the same time as Miller. “The way he talks, the way he writes, the kinds of issues he talks about are all things that he was talking about from the start.”

Studying political science, Miller met and befriended conservative rebel-rouser David Horowitz and the white supremacist Richard Spencer. He had a column in the student paper, for which Graham also worked. “ He would uncork these intentionally outrageous arguments, which ranged from insulting the town to complaining about how the university was cracking down on tobacco smoking. His profile was as a gadfly,” Graham told me.

But the moment that brought him fame was a 2006 scandal involving players on the (overwhelmingly white) lacrosse team who had been accused – it later turned out, falsely – of rape. For Miller, the story was perfect to push a narrative of widespread anti-white racism and misandry on college campuses. “ Quickly there was a lot of backlash, and Stephen was very much part of the backlash,” Graham says. “And he got on national television because he was one of the few people willing to say those things basically from the start.” 

After university, Miller went to work as press secretary for the right-wing congresswoman and future failed presidential candidate Michelle Bachman. In this post, he honed his talent for focusing on horrifying crime stories to stir up racial tensions for political gain, a strategy that would later become utterly invaluable to Trump.

The resentment that built against Obama during his first term made the game of inciting racial tensions easier and more rewarding, and Miller’s star continued to rise. Working for Alabama senator Jeff Sessions – later Trump’s first attorney-general – he met Bannon, who took Miller under his wing and, when Trump announced his candidacy in 2016, brought him on board.

He met his wife Katie during Trump’s first term when she was a public affairs officer for the DHS, and they married at the Trump hotel in Washington in 2020. But in Trump’s second term, Katie worked for Elon Musk at the short-lived Department of Government Efficiency, which would turn out to be an awkward choice: when Musk split publicly with Trump in June 2025, she found herself on the wrong side of the feud. 

There was gossip speculating that she and Musk were having an affair, though the evidence ultimately comes down to a post by Musk’s AI chatbot Grok and Musk has denied it. Outwardly, the Millers have given no sign of troubles; in September, Katie described her husband as a “sexual matador” in an interview on Fox News. Sorry: I had to read that, so you do too.

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One of the most important attributes Miller possesses is his apparent inability to experience self-doubt or self-reflection. He appears to luxuriate in his villainous public image. He takes a perverse enjoyment in upsetting, and being loathed by, normies. It seems that, given his appearance and whole general vibe seems to pulsate with evil, he decided to lean nihilistically in. 

The cruelty is the point: when nothing matters except winning, humiliating the opponent is the ideal strategy. In this, he is the ideal partner for Trump – nature’s perfect moral void, who cares about nothing but the appearance of victory. Maybe Stephen Miller’s story isn’t one with a moral. Unless it is simply: at all costs, don’t give that guy any political power.

But perhaps he has miscalculated. The limits of his approach are being tested right now – in Minneapolis. “ This was intended as a demonstration of Stephen Miller’s ideology, that he can come here and take our neighbors… and all the white people will be happier if all the brown people are gone,” Stancil, the activist, says. “ What we have done is disproven that spectacularly.” Miller’s signature approach – maximum attack, maximum intimidation, no quarter – turns out it may break at scale.

Right now, “the entire region, the entire city is basically united against them,” Stancil says. “It’s an ideological defeat for Miller and the people in his cohort. We have shown absurdly strong community bonds, social cohesiveness – across the exact lines that they thought were impossible.”

The loathed chief of Customs and Border Protection, Dan Bovino, who walked the streets tossing tear gas canisters around, was fired two days after Pretti’s death, and his replacement announced a coming “drawdown” of forces in Minnesota. But Kabas warns these moves are just for show. “ I don’t think it was a miscalculation. To use Silicon Valley parlance, [Miller] is moving fast and breaking things… he’s just seeing what works,” she says, noting that the announcement represents only a third of federal troops in the city.

Still, the signs are that Miller’s repugnant vision of the US isn’t as in sync with real America as he believes. And, in the public eye, he owns this now. Miller is the face of the ICE campaign. He has shown himself willing to ignore the law – regularly signaling to ICE agents that they have immunity against prosecution, which isn’t legal, and demonstrates how far Miller might go to try to escape future consequences. 

But the faster public sentiment plummets along with Miller’s own astonishing personal unpopularity, the more irresistible a scapegoat he may become. There’s a chance he will truly reap the whirlwind when the backlash comes, especially when the president is no longer there to protect him – or if Trump just throws him under the bus first.