Senior White House adviser Stephen Miller, author of President Donald Trump’s fiery screeds warning of the dangers of illegal immigration, is not known to be passionate about child care or family leave policies. According to a Friday report in Politico, however, the immigration hardliner has added “women’s issues” to his portfolio.
This new focus is a strategic move on Miller’s part, according to Politico. Chief Strategist Steve Bannon, a fellow immigration hardliner and “America First” nationalist, is being shunted aside as Trump tires of headlines proclaiming him the secret puppet-master of his White House. Power is shifting towards Trump’s son-in-law and top adviser, Jared Kushner, and his wife, Ivanka Trump, and Miller is apparently doing his best to ingratiate himself with the couple.
He is working with Kushner’s Office of American Innovation and assisting Ivanka Trump with her work on “women’s issues,” according to Politico.
This bolsters the Washington Post’s report earlier this week that Miller has “strategically aligned himself with Kushner” as Bannon’s star in the White House fades.
The 31-year-old adviser and speechwriter honed his anti-immigration bonafides as the communications director for Alabama senator-turned-U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions. He wrote both Trump’s speech at the Republican National Convention, which was criticized as overly dark and apocalyptic, and his inauguration address, in which the President heralded the end of an era of “American carnage.” Miller was also behind the first failed effort to impose a travel ban on residents of seven majority-Muslim countries.
His rhetoric made him a favorite of Breitbart News, the far-right site where Bannon once served as executive chairman.
Though Miller appears to have little record working on women’s issues, he once wrote an op-ed that would fit right in at Breitbart, where the editorial stance holds that the gender pay gap is a myth.
In “Sorry Feminists,” a 2005 column first flagged by the Huffington Post that he wrote while a junior at Duke University, Miller argued women earn less because men work longer hours and choose better-paid jobs.
“The truth is, even in modern-day America, there is a place for gender roles,” he wrote.
