• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

Dedication For Armando “Mando” Montaño Who died young, and lives on Contents Cover Title Page Dedication Prologue Chapter One: “Brown Animals” Chapter Two: “Ridiculous Liberal Elite” Chapter Three: “Speak Only English” Chapter Four: “Pick Up My Trash” Chapter Five: “There Is No Palestine” Chapter Six: “Cut Their Skin” Chapter Seven: “Our Whole Country is Rotting” Chapter Eight: “I Want to Hate” Chapter Nine: “New Day in America” Chapter Ten: “We Love Defeating Those People” Chapter Eleven: “American Carnage” Chapter Twelve: “Cosmopolitan Bias” Chapter Thirteen: “White Lives Matter” Chapter Fourteen: “These are Animals” Chapter Fifteen: “Pandora’s Box” Chapter Sixteen: “Out of Love” Author’s Note Acknowledgments Notes Index Copyright About the Publisher Prologue 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 boss—the man who would “save” the country—was 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 who’s beaten you down, and ignored you, and said that you were wrong, and mocked and demeaned and scorned you, every person who’s lectured you sanctimoniously while living the high life in DC —shout so loud that their conference tables will shake!” Outside the convention center, more than a thousand people had gathered to protest Trump’s campaign as xenophobic, racist and sexist. They waved signs exclaiming BULLY and BIGOT. They were upset about Trump’s characterizations of Mexicans as “rapists” and “criminals” and his call for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” Trump’s fans confronted his critics, ready to brawl. A white man spat the N-word in a black man’s 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, “God’s not black!” He continued, “When God puts you in Hell, you’re not gonna play the race card with him.” He added, mockingly, “I’m just a minority member! I’m 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 Trump’s 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.”1 The title of the novel comes from the Christian Bible’s 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,” God’s 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. It’s impossible to understand the Trump era, with its unparalleled polarization, without tracing Miller’s journey to the White House. Miller is the architect of Trump’s 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 power—outlasting and overtaking his mentor, Stephen K. Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist. Before joining Trump, Miller was communications director for Senator Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III. He had little other work experience. But it’s no accident that a public relations flack guides Trump’s 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 right—such as radio host Rush Limbaugh—he 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 Trump’s 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 he’d take rapists apart “piece by piece” by hand.2 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 Miller’s 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 boss’s 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 shouldn’t be here. They stomp on their victims. They beat them with clubs. They slash them with machetes, and they stab them with knives . They’re 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 America’s 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. Miller and Trump are masters of messaging. But like sorcerers who lost control of their spells, they denied any role in the rising tide of white rage. They were not directing Patrick Crusius as he allegedly walked into a Walmart in El Paso with an assault rifle, imagining he was saving the United States from “a Hispanic invasion,” and massacred twenty-two people. They did not tell Robert Bowers to murder eleven people at a synagogue in Pittsburgh, one of the federal hate crimes a grand jury has accused him of committing. They did not suggest James Fields Jr. crash his Dodge Challenger into liberal protestors in Charlottesville, Virginia, killing an innocent woman, shattering bones and bloodying dozens of bystanders. But the duo packaged the hate that fuels white terrorism and sold it like cotton candy at an amusement park.

Load more

  292

Copy Link