Stephen Miller, a former Trump official, at a campaign rally in Lititz, Pennsylvania on Nov. 3, 2024. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
By Benyamin Cohen, Jacob KornbluhNovember 11, 2024
President-elect Donald Trump is expected to name Stephen Miller as the White House deputy chief of staff. Miller is one of Trump’s longtime Jewish advisers. Here’s a look at his background and how he got into politics.
Who is Stephen Miller?
Miller, 39, was born in Santa Monica, California, to a Jewish family. He grew up in a liberal home — his parents were both Democrats — but said he made a shift to the right after reading a book by Wayne LaPierre, the longtime head of the National Rifle Association.
While a junior in high school in 2002, after the Sept. 11 attacks in New York City, Miller began speaking out against his high school for what he perceived as its leftist ideologies. “During that dreadful time of national tragedy, anti-Americanism had spread all over the school like a rash,” he wrote in a column recalling that time.
Miller listened to Rush Limbaugh, the conservative talk radio host, and became a conservative student activist at Duke University.
How did he get into politics?
Miller worked for former GOP Reps. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, and John Shadegg of Arizona. Beginning in 2009, he worked for Sen. Jeff Sessions, a Republican from Alabama, where he served as communications director and helped Sessions defeat a 2013 immigration reform bill.
Miller was a senior policy advisor for Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and joined the administration along with Sessions, who became Trump’s first attorney general.
Miller, along with strategist Steve Bannon, co-wrote President Trump’s first inaugural address, remembered for its “America first” message and depictions of “American carnage.”
He is known for his anti-immigration views
Miller was influential in crafting tough immigration policies during Trump’s first term. He was seen as the architect behind the policy of separating young children from their undocumented parents, along with a whole host of other anti-immigration proposals.
Miller led the implementation of the so-called Muslim travel ban in 2017, which barred entry to the U.S. for individuals from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen, and pushed to further reduce a longtime refugee program. HIAS, the Jewish immigration aid and advocacy group, sued the Trump administration over the travel ban.
Miller reportedly also hoped to eliminate all refugee admissions to the United States, dismantling a policy put in place in the wake of the Holocaust.
During the 2024 campaign, at a rally held at Madison Square Garden, Miller declared: “America is for Americans and Americans only.” The Forward’s senior columnist, Rob Eshman, wrote that it echoed a slogan used by the Nazis — Germany for Germans only. “What’s scary is not that Miller, unleashed by Trump 2.0, would be like Josef Goebbels,” Eshman wrote. “It’s that he would be like Stephen Miller.” Democrats described the event as reminiscent of the infamous 1939 pro-Nazi rally at the same venue.
Writing in Vox in Oct. 2024, Andrew Prokop argued that mass deportation has been Miller’s “driving cause of his adult life.”
Miller has repeatedly attracted vocal opposition from Jewish organizational leaders and activists, many of them citing American Jews’ historical advocacy for immigrant rights. During Trump’s first term, an array of Jewish elected officials and groups, including the Conservative, Reform and Reconstructionist movements, called for Miller’s resignation owing to leaked emails in which he echoed white nationalist rhetoric.
The Republican Jewish Coalition posted to X on Monday, after news broke that Miller was likely to be appointed White House deputy chief of staff, “Stephen Miller is a warrior who fights tirelessly to put America first. RJC is excited to see President Trump continue to elevate and champion proud Jewish American voices.”
His family escaped pogroms
Miller’s mother’s family, the Glossers, escaped anti-Jewish pogroms in what is now Belarus in the early 20th century. They settled in Jonestown, Pennsylvania, where they eventually established Glosser’s, a leading department store in the area. “They survived because they emigrated,” said Stephen’s maternal grandmother, Ruth Glosser, who passed away in 2020 at age 97 from the coronavirus pandemic.
Miller’s uncle, Dr. David Glosser, a retired neuropsychologist, wrote in a 2018 opinion essay for Politico that if his family hadn’t fled, they would have been murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust. “I would encourage Stephen to ask himself if the chanting, torch-bearing Nazis of Charlottesville, whose support his boss seems to court so cavalierly, do not envision a similar fate for him,” Glosser wrote.
Miller’s great-grandfather, Nison “Max” Miller, failed his naturalization test the first time around in 1932. Eventually, he retook the test and passed.
His childhood rabbi is not a fan
Rabbi Neil Comess-Daniels, the spiritual leader of Beth Shir Shalom, a reform synagogue in Santa Monica, Calif., made headlines back in 2018 when he gave a High Holiday sermon in which he castigated Miller for his role in Trump’s family separation policy.
“I had hoped that I might help remind Miller of the humanitarian values that our synagogue teaches and I tried to teach him in Hebrew school, and perhaps reconsider his extremism,” Commes-Daniels recalled this month in opinion essay for the Forward, about why he was voting for Vice President Kamala Harris.
What about his personal life?
Miller married Katie Waldman, who is also Jewish, in Feb. 2020 at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. near the White House. They first met in 2018, when Waldman worked at the Department of Homeland Security and worked with Miller on communications on immigration issues. Waldman later served as press secretary for Vice President Mike Pence.
Rabbi Aryeh Lightstone officiated the ceremony. Lightstone was an advisor to David Friedman, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, during the first Trump administration and played a role in the Abraham Accords normalization agreements between Israel and several of its Arab neighbors.
The couple has three children: a daughter and two sons.
JTA contributed to this report.
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