Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
News

5 Ways Stephen Miller Grew Up To Be Trump’s Inauguration Speechwriter — and Right-Wing Ideologue

At 31, Stephen Miller has reached a political stature few have matched – he is drafting president-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration speech, to be delivered Friday.

But the Santa Monica schoolmates of Trump’s top adviser were hardly surprised that the Jewish kid who insisted on standing and placing his hand on his heart during the pledge of allegiance, ended up alongside a politician like Trump.

The Los Angeles Times went back to Miller’s high school, where being an ultra conservative teenager in the otherwise liberal enclave taught him what it means to be an outsider.

Here are some of these school years intersections that may have shaped the views of Trump’s top adviser:

No one liked his politics — or him

Described as “the student body’s best-known and least-liked conservative activist,” Miller managed to get under the skin of many of his classmates and teachers. It wasn’t only for his tennis shorts and polo shirt attire, but rather Miller’s crusade against what he identified as a destructive culture of political correctness, long before his future boss would ever turn this argument into a political rallying call.

“This guy is 17 years old, and it’s like listening to someone who’s 70 years old —  in the 1930s,” said Oscar de la Torre who was a counselor at Santa Monica High School.

No habla Espanol por favor

He took special issue with the school’s multicultural outreach, bemoaning the Spanish language announcements and the school festivals celebrating minorities’ food and culture. Miller wrote articles describing the Spanish announcements as “a crutch … preventing Spanish speakers from standing on their own” and took his case to the school board, where he showed up in a suit and tie arguing against special treatment for immigrants. Latino students heard Miller lecture them on how they would be better served improving their English than creating clubs based on ethnicity.

Gun rights got Miller hooked on right wing politics

Miller grew up in a Jewish Democratic house and turned to conservatism, and then extreme conservatism, almost by chance. He began reading Guns and Ammo magazine where he found interest in the writings of Wayne LaPierre, leader of the National Rifle Association.

“The conservative ideas were like nothing he had ever heard,” the article stated, and by the time the terror attacks of 9/11 hit, Miller was fully on the conservative side, writing an article for the school paper titled “A Time to Kill” which supported the Iraq war.

David Horowitz gave him his first chance at punditry

Miller’s first steps on the national stage came thanks to David Horowitz who published his article in Frontpage Magazine. The article, “How I changed my Left Wing High School” argued that “anti-Americanism had spread all over the school like a rash.” He later invited Horowitz to speak at his school, despite many of his classmates’ reservations.

High school politics were Miller’s toughest challenge

Surviving as a lone voice of conservatism in a predominantly liberal school left an imprint on Miller. “These challenges were some of the toughest I faced in life,” he told the L.A. Times. “When we think of nonconformity, we tend to imagine kids in the ’60s rebelling against ‘the system.’ This was my system. My establishment was a dogmatic educational system that often uniformly expressed a single point of view.”

Contact Nathan Guttman at [email protected]

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.