In her compelling new book Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda (William Morrow) investigative journalist Jean Guerrero focuses on influential White House advisor Stephen Miller, architect of Trump’s nationalist agenda. In her portrait of Miller’s rise, Guerrero details how the descendant of Jewish immigrants in pre-Holocaust Eastern Europe aligned himself with tea party politicians who promoted an anti-immigrant, white Nationalist agenda and designed the administration’s Muslim ban and family separation policies.

Guerrero’s earlier book, Crux: A Cross-Border Memoir, won the PEN/FUSION Emerging Writers prize, and she contributes to public media, including NPR and PBS NewsHour.  She began her career at the Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires as a correspondent in Mexico City and now lives in San Diego.

Madeleine Blais, who taught Guerrero in the MFA in Nonfiction program at Goucher College spoke with her for The National.

Q:   What led you to choose Miller as a subject? How is this book personal for you?

A: I wanted to understand how a Jewish American boy and descendant of refugees who grew up in Southern California at the same time I did––in the 90s––came to craft Trump’s harshest attacks on people fleeing violence and poverty. I was familiar with the human cost of his decisions as an immigration reporter: I’d interviewed parents whose children were pulled from their arms, and seen the corpses piling up in the desert and Tijuana’s morgue. I felt compelled to examine the person behind them.

I’ve always been drawn to the stories of outcasts, outsiders, and others on the fringes. Miller now wields tremendous power, but for a long time he was an outlier: attacking multiculturalism at his diverse California high school; lambasting “indoctrination” at his liberal university; pushing an anti-immigrant agenda when the Republican Party was embracing immigration reform while he was working on Capitol Hill. I believe the stories of people on the fringes––the extremists, the refugees, the madmen and the marginalized––can reveal uncomfortable but necessary truths about our history.

My father, the subject of my first book, is a Mexican immigrant who was always crossing borders: between madness and sanity, between substance abuse and sobriety, science and spirituality. Miller is sort of his opposite: obsessed with hardening borders. But both embody extremes. Both are obsessive. Both of their stories are microcosms for macro truths in America that we have not yet faced––about white supremacy, about economic inequality, about our cultural fetish for “killers” and more.

Q: Can you cite some of the early cultural and geographical influences on Miller that fed what has become his philosophy of attacking migrants and advocating for white supremacist ideas?

A: Miller grew up in a conservative California that was very hostile toward immigrants, especially Mexicans. It may be surprising to people who didn’t grow up in California at that time. Even many Mexicans in the state were ashamed to be Mexican back then, insisting they were “Hispanics” and bragging about European ancestors. There was a lot of internalized racism––I remember my dad used to wash my hair with chamomile shampoo, trying to keep it blonde. All of that changed as younger generations of Latin-Americans in California mobilized politically and turned the state deep blue.

What’s happening nationally with the reawakening of white supremacy and vilification of liberals happened in California in the nineties as Miller was growing up, listening to his father rant about the “ridiculous liberal elite.” There was a lot of white fear and hatred tied to rapid demographic change (whites became a minority in the state that decade). Republican Governor Pete Wilson blamed the state’s fiscal problems on a migrant “invasion.” There were attacks on affirmative action, bilingual education and social services for the children of migrants who lacked U.S. documents. Talk radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh and Larry Elder started shaping white male identity politics out of the state. Miller was listening to them and read Elder’s The Ten Things You Can’t Say In America, a book that claims that black people are more racist than white people.

Miller became very close with Elder and another California right-wing provocateur, David Horowitz, an ex-Marxist and anti-Muslim radical who weaponized the language of the civil rights movement against it. For example, Horowitz defended conservatives accused of racism by claiming they were being discriminated against because of their minority status. Miller looked up to Horowitz and started a long-lasting relationship with him during a difficult period of his youth, which I document in the book. Horowitz played a key role in Trump’s campaign through Miller.

Q: What about familial or psycho/social influences? Put differently, is there a Mary Trump in his background who might someday shed light on how he became so driven in his quest to marginalize and belittle huge demographic categories?

I found hundreds of pages of court documents suggesting that Miller grew up in a family that was a lot like Trump’s: the same cutthroat approach to money and power, the same willingness to push people deemed weak out of the family. Miller’s paternal uncle William was a psychologist, like Mary Trump, who was deprived of most of the family inheritance after fighting with his brother, Miller’s dad. The parallels between the Miller and Trump families are eerie. I believe they explain why Miller gets along so well with the president, and part of how he’s managed to stick around so long.

Miller’s dad Michael, like Trump, is a real estate investor who was tangled up in numerous legal disputes and bankruptcies. Court documents describe him as “a masterpiece of evasion and manipulation.” At one point he lost a lot of money and the family had to move to a less affluent neighborhood. That’s when Miller began to express conservative and contrarian viewpoints––breaking up with one of his friends because of his “Mexican heritage,” for example. Some people who knew him say he was angry about the move and acting out for the approval of his father.

Q: Miller seems to target Mexico and Mexicans in particular. If you had the chance to tell him about your heritage on your father’s side, what would you say?

A: I don’t think I would say anything to him about my heritage because it would accomplish nothing. Miller has a passionate contempt for hyphenated identities and brown/Black pride, dating back to when he was going through puberty alongside bright Latin-American students who embraced their heritage. He believed they should consider themselves Americans, period, and that any complexity beyond that was a “divisive multiculturalism.” One of his mentors, Larry Elder, is a black man. Miller doesn’t appear to have a problem with people of color so long as they embrace his viewpoints and disown their unique non-white cultures and histories.

If I was going to tell him anything about my life, it would be that I know what it’s like to have an absent father––and to want his approval. I would tell him I know what it’s like to want to be seen as American, with all the rights that is supposed to guarantee. I’d say I relate to his obsessive work ethic and tunnel vision. And then I’d ask him a question that’s been on my mind lately: did you speak with your grandmother Ruth when she was on her death bed because of the Coronavirus, and what do you think of the lessons she recorded for you years ago about the dangers of demonization?

Q:  Your first book, Crux, is a memoir with a vivid haunting style. Hatemonger hews to a more factual approach. Was it hard to switch gears?

A: I was used to reporting in a more traditional style when covering the border for NPR and PBS.  The trickiest part about this book was trying to understand Miller without ever meeting him, as he did not respond to my repeated requests for interviews. My impulse is always to seek the humanity in people, and I was looking for it in every interview and document. I don’t believe in straight-up villains. I read every article Miller ever published; devoured all the books I learned inspired him; scrutinized every one of his recorded speeches until I was almost too familiar with his gestures and tics; and spoke with more than a hundred of his colleagues, relatives, mentors, friends and adversaries. What was surprising is that the more I got to know him, the less complex he became. I found humanity in stories about him as a little boy. But over time he became less and less dimensional. Usually the opposite happens. But it’s a case study in radicalization: what happens when someone is consumed by an ideology.

Q: Miller and his mentors are big fans of The Camp of the Saints. Can you explain why that they found this novel so inspiring?

A: The Camp of the Saints is a white supremacist novel that depicts the destruction of the white world by a refugee exodus. It promotes the conspiracy theory of white genocide that is popular with white terrorists. Non-white people are described in nightmarish terms, as “monsters,” “beasts” and “teeming ants.” The book’s heroes call for violence and hatred against non-whites. Miller promoted the book in 2015 through Breitbart. I see echoes of the novel in the Trump-Miller apocalyptic demonization of migrants, Black Lives Matter, and progressive allies as agents of evil intent on destroying the U.S. The book also helps explain why Miller’s agenda is hyper-focused on targeting non-criminal migrant families, mostly from non-white countries (the zero-tolerance policy, the Stay in Mexico policy, the public charge rule, the slashed refugee cap and so on). His goals aren’t about national security. They’re about race.

Q: Oscar de la Torre, a counselor at Miller’s high school, tried to engage him in meaningful exchanges but eventually he gave up. Can you explain why? (hint: page 62!)

A: Torre realized Miller was not interested in having a conversation or listening to anyone. He didn’t debate with an open heart or an open mind. He debated with an impulse to win. It was like a sport or a game. Miller memorized right-wing talking points and regurgitated them until he got an emotional reaction out of his classmates and school administrators. What he was after was the sense of conquest after leaving people speechless or stuttering with emotion. It was a very early form of trolling.

Q: “I’ve never met anyone quite like him…the sort of cockiness, the arrogance,” observed John F. Burness, a senior vice president at Duke where Miller went as an undergraduate. Is that fair? What was Miller like in those days?

A: Most people described him that way to me: never questioning himself. However, he also struck some people as down-to-earth. He had a few friends, even liberal ones who didn’t agree with him ideologically. He wasn’t the type of friend people leaned on in a crisis, but he was fully capable of civility. Over time, he became more obsessed with his culture war and less likeable to people who cared about him.

If you zoom in past the cocky facade, Miller was always insecure. He studied Robert DeNiro’s mobsters and tried to emulate their style. In many ways, he was a normal millennial American––he liked reality TV shows, had a fetish for white male “killers,” and craved attention. But unlike most people, he channeled those desires into crafting as much cruelty and combativeness as he could into a reality TV star’s presidency.

Q:  What does Miller mean when he used the term “cosmopolitan bias”?

A: “Cosmopolitan” is a term often used by white supremacists to refer antagonistically to Jewish people as a malicious elite. It was used frequently in Nazi Germany, and many who study far right extremists saw Miller’s use of the term during a press briefing (applied to CNN’s Jim Acosta) as a dog whistle to neo-Nazis. For me, it was early evidence of the white supremacist literature he consumes, leaking into his language. Emails shared with the Southern Poverty Law Center show he promoted white supremacist websites and other racist content, such as the Camp of the Saints book.

The idea of “cosmopolitan bias” is part of Miller’s effort to paint progressives as destructive elites. It proved effective with working class rural white voters in 2016, distracting from Trump’s and Miller’s elitism. Trump is increasingly leaning on this idea of Miller’s to deflect attention from his disastrous response to the pandemic.

Q:  Would it be fair to say that Miller in the most powerful person in the Trump administration?

A: Trump is the most powerful person in the Trump administration––but Miller is more disciplined and hardworking than him and ends up having an outsize influence. What makes Miller so effective is his obsessive work ethic and talent for mimicry. He’s not some kind of mastermind. He’s just obsessed with immigration and works harder than most people in the White House. And he gets Trump––emotionally, psychologically, spiritually. He encourages Trump’s most violent (and most ingrained) impulses rather than questioning them like other advisors. Trump digs it.

People in the White House told me they were often afraid to question or challenge Miller because it was obvious to them that he was channeling Trump. He was always invoking Trump’s desires and demands. Unlike Steve Bannon, who was obsessed with media attention and self-aggrandizement, Miller was careful to always defer to Trump in public and cast himself as a devoted vehicle for Trump’s agenda.

Q: Is there a through-line to Miller’s policies?

A: Miller narrowed the focus of the Department of Homeland Security to keep out the desperate (asylum seekers and refugees) and the destitute. He told Bannon in 2016 that he agreed with him that legal immigration was worse than illegal immigration, because in his view the U.S. was filling up with people who don’t assimilate. To me, that’s clear evidence that Trump’s crackdown on migrants was never about crime.

Several of my sources said Miller’s policies are about the performance of cruelty. I see it as a spectacle of cruelty with real collateral damage. I keep thinking of the Hunger Games, a real-life version. At first, the main victims were children deemed “other.” Now, victims include antiracists and other progressives characterized as an “unhinged left-wing mob.” A little known fact about the white supremacist book that inspired Miller is that it attacks allies of non-white people in eerily similar terms, referring to them as a “mob” of “militants with a cause, lay missionaries, apostate priests, idealist quacks, activist thinkers” tainted by the “cream of human kindness.” In the book, their allyship with non-white people and rejection of white supremacy results in the destruction of Western civilization.

The logical outcome of a presidency based on these delusional narratives is the destruction of democratic institutions using state violence against political opponents.

Q: You say that Trump and Miller are masters at messaging.  So, of course, is history.  How do you think they will be viewed in the fullness of time?

A: I see multiple possibilities, depending on how Americans react to this moment. One is that Trump and Miller will be scapegoated for a dark and divisive period in United States––and we will go through more periods of rupture, until we recognize that both were channeling hatred that is foundational to this nation. Another possibility is that the reckoning is happening right now. Trump and Miller will be remembered for the real damage they did––including tens of thousands of deaths––but also as the logical outcome of the American fiction of white male supremacy, which is in its last throes.

There are other, more troubling possibilities about how history will unfold and be written, involving a breakdown in the border between fact and fiction––in which Miller and Trump will be remembered (for a time) as gods who remade the world in the image of their fantasies. But I believe those are less likely. The United States is going through the same growing pains California did in the nineties. Whites are going to become an American minority in the next few decades. That doesn’t mean the U.S. is going to turn into the “Third World” as racists claim. People of color don’t pose an existential threat to civilization or to white people. It’s not that brown or Black people possess superior virtue and would never be oppressive. It’s just that future generations of Americans will be increasingly mixed. There will be less tribalism and a greater capacity for identification with multiple groups. There will be more hyphenated identities. We’re going to become a mestizo nation. It’s something Miller has always dreaded because he was radicalized at a young and vulnerable age. 

Madeleine Blais is working on a biography of Alice Marble, to be published by Grove Atlantic. As a reporter with the Miami Herald, Blais won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing. She is also the author of several other books, including the memoirs Uphill Walkers and most recently, To the New Owners.