Jean Guerrero - Hatemonger

For Armando Mando Montao

Who died young, and lives on

Contents

STEPHEN MILLER WAS CENTER STAGE . He grinned at the sea of red baseball caps in the San Diego Convention Center on May 27, 2016. In a slim suit with a pocket square, he adjusted the podium microphone and told spectators that his bossthe man who would save the countrywas about to come out. The crowd erupted. Are you ready to secure that border? Miller asked, lifting a finger in the air. Are you ready to stop Islamic terrorism? And are you ready to make sure that American children are given their birthright in their own country?

Miller could hardly contain himself. He rocked back and forth on his heels. He swung side to side. Long dismissed as a sideshow, the svelte pale thirty-year-old was months from becoming one of the most powerful people in the US government. He coaxed cheers from thousands in his home state of California, where once he had faced hisses and boos. I want you to shout so loud that all the people who betrayed you can hear you! he cried. Every single person whos beaten you down, and ignored you, and said that you were wrong, and mocked and demeaned and scorned you, every person whos lectured you sanctimoniously while living the high life in DCshout so loud that their conference tables will shake!

Outside the convention center, more than a thousand people had gathered to protest Trumps campaign as xenophobic, racist and sexist. They waved signs exclaiming BULLY and BIGOT . They were upset about Trumps characterizations of Mexicans as rapists and criminals and his call for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States. Trumps fans confronted his critics, ready to brawl. A white man spat the N-word in a black mans face. Someone screamed Hitler! A paunchy Trump supporter with a bullhorn told black men they were going to Hell. You hate Trump! You despise God! he said. One responded: God is black! The white man replied, Gods not black! He continued, When God puts you in Hell, youre not gonna play the race card with him. He added, mockingly, Im just a minority member! Im just a minority member!

Trump took the stage. He called his rally a lovefest. He said people protesting were thugs. The magnate lamented all of the young children killed by illegal immigrants. He had hired Miller as a speechwriter and senior policy advisor a few months before. The California native helped craft Trumps attacks on Mexicans and Muslims, drawing from dubious sources, such as research bankrolled by eugenicists and white nationalist websites and texts. He was inspired in part by The Camp of the Saints, a virulently racist book by French author Jean Raspail that depicted the end of the white world after it was overrun by the Third World, with refugees described as a single, solid mass, like some gigantic beast with a million legs. The title of the novel comes from the Christian Bibles Book of Revelation, in which Satan and his armies marched up over the broad plain of the earth and surrounded the camp of the saints, Gods beloved city, but fire came down from heaven and consumed them.

Outside, the racially charged tension and vitriol reached fever pitch. People threw punches. They lit rags on fire. Objects flew. Police showed up in riot gear, wielding batons, and declared an unlawful assembly. If you refuse to move, chemical agents and other weapons will be used, authorities declared in Spanish and English. Helicopters buzzed overhead, the skies turned from blue to gray. People linked arms, determined to stay. By the time the sun set over the bay, dozens of people were handcuffed and jailed.

Its impossible to understand the Trump era, with its unparalleled polarization, without tracing Millers journey to the White House. Miller is the architect of Trumps border and immigration policies. Prematurely balding and with a penchant for bespoke suits, he has long, articulate fingers that fit a man often depicted as a behind-the-scenes puppeteer. Many are baffled at how someone so young, with little policy or legal expertise, gained so much poweroutlasting and overtaking his mentor, Stephen K. Bannon, Trumps former chief strategist. Before joining Trump, Miller was communications director for Senator Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III. He had little other work experience. But its no accident that a public relations flack guides Trumps central agenda. Trump has long derived power from mythmakers. Author Tony Schwartz made him an American business icon in The Art of the Deal. Producer Mark Burnett turned him into a reality TV star in The Apprentice . Bannon turned him into an alt-right hero on the blog Breitbart. Miller helped make him president.

In a White House where people are frequently forced out, Miller has survived. Revered by towering figures on the far rightsuch as radio host Rush Limbaughhe has been vilified by the left, compared to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels and the fictional cave-dwelling creature Gollum. Despite calls for his resignation, he has clung to his office in the West Wing.

He grasps Trumps grudges and goals. Both are showmen. Both enjoy Las Vegas casinos. They owe early affluence to fathers in real estate. Miller flexes loyalty to Trump on TV, attacking critics with a ferocious barrage of verbiage that emerges in complete paragraphs. Both have publicly relished the thought of causing pain and death to criminals. When five black and Latino youth were falsely accused of beating and raping a white woman in Central Park in 1989, Trump paid for full-page ads prior to their wrongful conviction, calling for the crazed misfits to be executed. I want to hate these muggers and murderers, he wrote. At Duke University in 2005, Miller wrote in favor of the death penalty, saying hed take rapists apart piece by piece by hand. Both men have a taste for the morbid.

From the campaign trail to the White House, Miller helped Trump conjure an invasion of animals come to steal American jobs and spill American blood. He repeatedly beat the drum about the gang Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13), casting the border crisis as a battle between good and evil. Many MS-13 members had tattoos of devil horns and the calling code for El Salvador, 503, on their biceps and backs. The gang formed in Millers home county of Los Angeles. They comprised less than one percent of gang members in America, but Miller was obsessed with them. The young men partook in the bloodshed of dark fairy tales, luring victims into the forest and using blunt weapons. Miller wrote them into his bosss speeches again and again. From Long Island to DC to the West Coast, Trump invoked their horror-movie crimes. He said, They butcher those little girls. They kidnap, they extort, they rape and they rob. They prey on children. They shouldnt be here. They stomp on their victims. They beat them with clubs. They slash them with machetes, and they stab them with knives... Theyre animals.

The demonization of migrants is to Miller what the border wall is to Trump: a tool with which to mobilize the base. With it, he sold cruelty and castigation toward brown youths: separating migrant children from parents; revoking protections for people brought to the US as children; incarcerating teenagers with tenuous ties to MS-13; and more. Trump said alien minors were a great cost to life. The nation stomached invisible barricades against families who broke no laws: the suspension of travel from Muslim-majority countries; slashing refugee admissions, mostly from African and Asian countries; cutting off Central American access to US asylum; restricting green cards to the poor. Collectively, those actions choked off legal entries of non-white people and torched Americas reputation as a haven for the persecuted. Miller narrowed the focus of the Department of Homeland Security, with its mandate to protect America from cyber threats and terrorism, to sift out the desperate and the destitute.