Stephen Miller and the Amnesic Hypocrisy of His Ideology
Stephen Miller–Deputy Chief of Staff and Homeland Security Advisor in the second Trump administration and policy advisor in both Trump terms—responded in an interview on CNN’s “The Lead” with Jake Tapper that the “formal position of the U.S. government” is that “Greenland should be part of the United States.”
“We live in a world, in the real world, Jake,” he argued, “that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”
Miller claimed that Greenland—a Danish territory–rightfully belongs to the United States, and that we will claim it on the basis of our national security, as Trump has done on numerous occasions during both of his terms in office.
Throughout the interview, Miller also justified Trump’s actions in invading Venezuela, imprisoning its president and first lady, and taking the country’s oil reserves.
Miller has long been Trump’s ventriloquist standing besides, holding up, and not-so-imperceptibly putting the words in the moving lips of President Donald Trump. Miller is a major voice in Trump’s “America First” imperialist bullhorn to usher in a new world order in which the United State will conquer national governments, take their lands, and extract their resources on the specious justification of serving our country’s “national security interests.”
Responding to Jake Tapper on the question of Venezuela: “We set the terms and conditions,” Miller said. “We have a complete embargo on all of their oil and their ability to do commerce. So, for them to do commerce, they need our permission. For them to be able to run an economy, they need our permission. So, the United States is in charge. The United States is running the country.”
Stephen Miller has been simply echoing other tyrannical dictatorial rulers’ rationales for taking over other countries, quoting some of the core ideological points of the German Nazis during their so-called “Third Reich.”
These included the concept of Lebensraum (acquiring “living space” or breathing room for the German people, the “master race”), uniting ethnic Germans by taking over lands in which these other ethnic Germans resided, restoring national pride and (ironically) national sovereignty, resource acquisition of strategic and valuable materials, national security and defensive needs, and pretexts such as the persecution of people in other countries where residents need to be liberated.
A critical aspect of Stephen Miller’s overall imperialist project is his harsh crackdown on undocumented immigration and an extreme limitation on all legal immigration to the United States. Trump, through Miller’s policies, focuses on strict [southern] border enforcement and on mass deportations of primarily brown and black people and anyone who speaks Spanish as their first language.
“[T]his is a good chance to expose that ridiculous Statue of Liberty myth,” responded Miller on September 13, 2015, to two Republican senators who voiced their empathy and support for refugees. “The poem has nothing to do with it….” he continued. “Indeed, two decades after the poem was added, Coolidge shut down immigration.”
Miller’s immigration policy agenda includes:
- Setting daily arrest quotas from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials.
- Constructing more sections of Trump’s “big beautiful” border wall, which the U.S. taxpayer and not Mexico is paying for.
- Ending “birthright citizenship” guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.
- Opposing the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which removed the discriminatory “natural origins” as the basis of U.S. immigration legislation. Miller has argued that the law has damaged U.S. social cohesion—read as its European-heritage identity–and has resulted in the “failed” assimilation of immigrants from “third world countries.”
- Reducing the annual numbers of asylum seeking refugees who flee their native countries to escape violence and extreme economic distress.
- Developing the “zero tolerance” policy that forced the separation of thousands of undocumented immigrant children from their parents at the southern border.
- Supporting the discriminatory travel ban from several Muslim-majority countries.
Stephen Miller is remembered for his infamous statement at Donald Trump’s campaign rally at Madison Square Garden, October 27, 2024, that: “America is for Americans and Americans only!”
Obviously, Stephen Miller does not understand history. The only true “Americans” are First Nations peoples who were the first to settle these lands after traveling from Asia across the Bering Strait land bridge and along the Pacific coast as early as approximately 30,000 years ago, with widespread settlement coming between 14,000-15,000 years ago.
If the imperialist and immigration policies that Stephen Miller advocates had been in place within the United States at the beginning of the 20th century, Stephen Miller most likely would never have existed.
He was born to a politically progressive Ashkenazi Jewish family in Santa Monica, California. He and his family were practicing Jews in a Reform congregation where Stephen was confirmed and had his Bar Mitzvah. He later married Katie Waldman who is also Jewish. Stephen still considers himself a practicing Jew and has been the target of antisemitic critics, which the Trump administration has condemned.
His maternal great-grandparents, the Glosser family, fled the violence of antisemitic pogroms and the poverty of the Russian Empire in a town that is now known as Antopol, Belarus in the early 1900s. They immigrated to the United States where they were processed at Ellis Island in New York City harbor.
Stephen Miller’s uncle, his mother’s brother Dr. David Glosser, a retired neuropsychologist, has denounced his nephew’s beliefs and actions in an opinion article titled, “Stephen Miller is an Immigration Hypocrite. I Know Because I’m His Uncle,” for Politico on August 13, 2018.
The article begins with the sentence: “Let me tell you a story about Stephen Miller and chain migration.”
Glosser relates a narrative that has been repeated by literally millions of other families, Jewish and otherwise, over the centuries, including my own mishpokhe (family).
“It begins at the turn of the 20th century, in a dirt-floor shack in the village of Antopol,” continued Dr. Glosser, “a shtetl of subsistence farmers in what is now Belarus. Beset by violent anti-Jewish pogroms and forced childhood conscription in the Czar’s army, the patriarch of the shack, Wolf-Leib Glosser, fled a village where his forebears had lived for centuries and took his chances in America…. An elder son, Nathan, soon followed.”
My mishpokhe also suffered the violence of pogroms not in Russia, but rather in Poland in what was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Coincidentally, my maternal groys zeyde (great grandfather after whom I was named) also was called Wolf and whose last name was Mahler. My zeyde (grandfather) Shimon Mahler immigrated to the United States in 1913 through Ellis Island.
The Glossers, Wolf-Leib and Nathan, began working as street corner peddlers of common articles. They sent much of their savings home to bring other members of their immediate family to America, where they all later settled in the city of Johnstown in Pennsylvania, which was, according to Dr. David Glosser,
“a booming coal and steel town that was a magnet for other hardworking immigrants, [where] the Glosser family quickly progressed from selling goods from a horse and wagon to owning a haberdashery in Johnstown run by Nathan and Wolf-Leib to a chain of supermarkets and discount department stores run by my grandfather, Sam, and the next generation of Glossers, including my dad, Izzy,” Stephen Miller’s grandfather.
Though Jews were often prevented from entering some occupations, were denied housing in areas of the country, were refused admission to certain schools and universities, life generally for them was often much better and safer than what they were subjected to in much of Europe, especially during the 20th century in Central and Eastern Europe.
“[L]argely the Glosser family was left alone to live our lives and build the American dream,” wrote Dr. Glosser. “Children were born, synagogues founded, and we thrived. This was the miracle of America,” for the Glossers as it was for my own family.
Dr. David Glosser sums up my own disgust and that of so many others regarding Stephen Miller’s cruel and inhumane policies:
“I shudder at the thought of what would have become of the Glossers had the same policies Stephen so coolly espouses—the travel ban, the radical decrease in refugees, the separation of children from their parents, and even talk of limiting citizenship for legal immigrants—been in effect when Wolf-Leib made his desperate bid for freedom.”
Like my family, Dr. Glosser speculated that: “Had Wolf-Leib waited, his family likely would have been murdered by the Nazis along with all but seven of the 2,000 Jews who remained in Antopol.”
Stephen Miller has betrayed and has shamed his family and Jewish people and all people who look to the United States as that shining place upon a hill, as a beacon of light to “the huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”
Ironically, Miller and Trump himself have betrayed Trump’s own family whose grandfather was a German immigrant who also ran from his country to avoid military conscription and whose mother escaped the poverty of rural Scotland for better life in the United States. I suppose that Trump seems to have forgotten that he married two immigrants, so far, and has supported chain migration of his current wife Melania’s family.
How soon they forgot, for both Miller and Trump have slammed the door tightly shut once t