Is Stephen Miller, Trump’s senior advisor on policy, actually just 10,000 spiders pretending to be a human being? Samantha Bee posed the question on Full Frontal, but frankly, it’s a little insulting to spiders. As Bee explained, long before Miller was crafting some of Trump’s worst policies, including the attempted Muslim ban and the refusal to work out a deal on DACA, he was just a young man running for class president on the totally normal platform of wanting to be able to throw his trash on the floor. And yes, that video of his campaign speech is completely real:
That vendetta against janitors lasted Miller through his time at Duke University, where he raged against feminism, Muslims, and immigrants, and still found time to complain about being asked to make a birthday card for one of his dorm’s janitors. “You know what, buddy?” asked Bee. “I’m getting the feeling that you think janitors are an ethnic group. They didn’t all float here in a dinghy from Janitoruguay.”
It makes a certain amount of sense, though, doesn’t it? Miller is the same guy who dismissed the Statue of Liberty’s famous poem (“Give me your tired, your poor/ Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”) because it was “added later.”* Maybe the fact that Miller wants to make it harder for non-native English speakers and low-skill workers to enter the United States isn’t just about racism and xenophobia—he also just really, really hates janitors.
*Correction, Jan. 26, 2018: This post originally misquoted Emma Lazarus’ poem “The New Colossus.” The line is “Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” not “break free.”
