It’s hardly a secret that Stephen Miller, President Donald Trump’s spray-haired, dick-voiced racist advisor, is an unrepentant bigot whose white nationalism is so extreme that his own family—and childhood rabbi—think he’s an embarrassment. Even with that in mind, however, it’s still shocking to see just how deep his MAGA racism really runs.
Take, for example, this anecdote from former White House staffer Cliff Sims, who recounts a conversation with Miller in his forthcoming memoir/tell-all/redemption attempt Team of Vipers, which is due to go on sale Tuesday. According to an excerpt provided to The Atlantic, Sims claimed he’d been having a hard time reconciling his Christianity with the fact that he worked for Donald Trump (something he should have perhaps considered before actually taking the job, but I digress).
So distraught by the fact that Donald Trump was, perhaps, not such a great human being, Sims says he went to Miller to discuss his moral dissonance. It was there, over the course of their conversation that Sims claims Miller told him the following:
I would be happy if not a single refugee foot ever again touched America’s soil.
Yikes.
It should be noted that Miller is himself the descendant of refugees who came to the United States fleeing pogroms in Eastern Europe at the turn of the 20th century.
As far as Sims’ horrifying anecdote goes, Miller’s declaration of ultra-extreme nativism seems pretty on the mark. As chief architect of the president’s ongoing assault on immigration as a whole, Miller has, in fact, worked to severely cripple legal immigration into the U.S.—an effort that, were he around in 1903 when his ancestors came to the U.S., would have likely resulted in their being shipped back to Russia to face waves of anti-Semitic violence. Refuge for me, but not for thee.