Stephen Miller, the Powerful Survivor on the President’s Right Flank
“Trump gets it,” Mr. Miller wrote to friends weeks later, forwarding a Breitbart interview with Mr. Trump, who concluded
that Mr. Cantor’s defeat owed to “his softness on immigration.”
“I wish he’d run for president,” Mr. Miller added of Mr. Trump.
“He just seemed really happy,” said Charles Gould, a classmate and friend at the time, “as if that’s how he planned it.”
In the years since, Mr. Miller has rocketed to the upper reaches of White House influence along a distinctly Trumpian arc — powered by a hyper-fluency in the politics of grievance, a gift for nationalist button-pushing after years on the Republican fringe
and a long history of being underestimated by liberal forces who dismissed him as a sideshow since his youth.
Standing behind the microphone before a hostile amphitheater crowd, Mr. Miller — then a 16-year-old candidate for a student government post, now a 32-year-old senior policy adviser to President Trump — steered quickly into an unlikely campaign plank: ensuring
that the janitorial staff was really earning its money.
“We did our best here,” said Mr. Miller’s rabbi, Jeff Marx, “to teach Jewish ethics
and talk about our need to reach out to the strangers, to those less fortunate than we are.”
By then, the Miller family had suffered its own notable reversal of fortunes.
These formative years supplied the template for the life Mr. Miller has carved out for himself in Washington, where he remains
the hard-line jouster many of Mr. Trump’s most zealous supporters trust most in the White House — and many former peers fear.