Stephen Miller, the Architect of Trump’s Immigration Plan
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
The New Yorker
4.3 • 3.9K Ratings
🗓️ 24 February 2020
⏱️ 26 minutes
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Summary
Donald Trump began his Presidential bid, in 2015, with an infamous speech, at Trump Tower, in which he said of Mexican immigrants, “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” But it was not until a former aide to Jeff Sessions joined Trump’s campaign that the nativist rhetoric coalesced into a policy platform—including the separation of children from their families at the border. Jonathan Blitzer, who writes about immigration for The New Yorker, has been reporting on Stephen Miller’s sway in the Trump Administration and his remarkable success in advancing an extremist agenda. “There has never been an American President who built his campaign around the issue of immigration and later won on that campaign on immigration. Trump was the first and only President really ever to do it,” Blitzer tells David Remnick. Despite this influence, Miller remains largely behind the scenes. Blitzer explains why: “He knows that the kiss of death in this Administration is to be identified as the brains behind the man. He can’t let on that he’s the one who effectively is manipulating Trump on these issues.”
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| 1:11.7 | I'm Dorothy Wickendon On today's Politics and More podcast, David Remnick talks with the New Yorker's |
| 1:18.1 | Jonathan Blitzer about Stephen Miller. Once the communications director for Senator Jeff |
| 1:23.8 | Sessions, Miller shaped many of the Trump administration's most hardline immigration |
| 1:28.8 | policies. |
| 1:32.6 | The United States is a nation of immigrants, but it also has a long history of hostility |
| 1:37.8 | to immigration. |
| 1:39.3 | In modern times, certainly, no precedent has taken on the anti-immigration mantle as assertively as Donald Trump. |
| 1:46.7 | During his first week in office, he signed three executive orders on immigration to begin building |
| 1:51.1 | the wall, to cut federal funding for sanctuary cities, and the order that became known as the Muslim |
| 1:57.0 | ban, which has just been expanded to prevent immigration from Nigeria and five other |
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