Stephen Miller, Descendant Of Refugees, Would Be ‘Happy’ With No New Refugees
White House senior advisor Stephen Miller said he would be “happy if not a single refugee foot ever again touched America’s soil,” a new tell-all book by a former Trump administration staffer claims.
“Team of Vipers,” by former White House communications advisor Cliff Sims, details the infighting and backstabbing that took place between administration officials. In his book, the contents of which were revealed Monday by The Atlantic, Sims, a devout Christian, expressed disappointment that Trump had promised to protect Christian refugees from the Middle East but never did so. Sims said Trump was pushed in that regard by Miller, the staunch immigration restrictionist who later advocated for the family separation policy at the Mexican border.
Miller’s family fled anti-Semitic persecution in the early 20th century, arriving in America before the modern refugee system was established. Miller has been condemned by his relatives and his childhood rabbi over his harsh anti-refugee stances, which they say would have prevented Miller’s family from arriving in America.
“I have watched with dismay and increasing horror as my nephew, who is an educated man and well aware of his heritage, has become the architect of immigration policies that repudiate the very foundation of our family’s life in this country,” David Glosser, the brother of Miller’s mother Miriam Glosser Miller, wrote in Politico last August.
According to The Atlantic, Sims claimed in his book that Miller helped overthrow his erstwhile ally and White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, “plung[ing] the knife” into Bannon’s back and “twisting it with relish” by telling Trump that Bannon was leaking to the press and undermining senior advisor/son-in-law Jared Kushner.
In one episode in Sims’ book, he recounts National Economic Council director Larry Kudlow acting befuddled after Trump ordered him to stop a “special deal” that the Postal Service supposedly had with Amazon. Kudlow asked his outgoing predecessor, Gary Cohn, what Trump was talking about. Sims wrote that Cohn laughed and said, “It’s total bulls—-…He’s just mad at [Jeff] Bezos for owning The Washington Post.”
Cohn recommended that Kudlow not try to do anything about the nonexistent Amazon deal. “But now you know why I’m so happy to be leaving,” he said.
Contact Aiden Pink at [email protected] or on Twitter, @aidenpink
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO