Donald Trump has assured us that he only hires all of the best people. But with 16 other presidential campaigns competing against him in the Republican primary and a new poll showing that a majority of Republican voters would actually prefer any other nominee besides Trump, it comes as little surprise that the reality TV star turned White House contender is having some difficulty finding people, let alone the cream of the crop, to finally staff his general election campaign.
The blustery candidate has frequently boasted about his lean campaign operation, arguing that his staff of less than 80 is more agile than Hillary Clinton's 700 person behemoth, but after firing his embattled campaign manager Corey Lewandowski last week, Trump has made two key hires in recent days.
Stephen Miller, not to be confused with longtime Trump alias John Miller, was announced as Trump's newest policy advisor. The 30-year-old staffer of Republican Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions, ardent Trump supporter and anti-immigration activist, has a decades long history of fighting multiculturalism in the United States.
In a lengthy Politico Magazine profile, journalist Julia Ioffe describes Miller as "a behind-the-scenes architect of the successful effort to kill comprehensive immigration reform in 2014."
The Huffington Post dug up numerous examples of Miller's writing dating back to high school in which he describes the student group MEChA as a "radical national Hispanic group that believes in racial superiority" and accused poet Maya Angelou of “racial paranoia” as a student columnist at Duke University:
The first target of Miller’s political ire, at least in print, was Santa Monica High School, from which he graduated in 2003. The area, then as now, was liberal and had a large Latino community. Miller didn’t like the school’s leadership — they said the Pledge of Allegiance too infrequently, praised the U.S. too little and allowed too much Spanish to be spoken, according to various columns he later wrote.
He didn’t drop the issue even after he graduated. In 2005, when Miller was in college, he devoted most of a 1,600-word column at the conservative site FrontPage Magazine to attacking Oscar de la Torre, a member of the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District’s board.
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One of Miller’s biggest complaints when writing and talking about his high school back then was its approach to ethnicity, race and class. At age 16, he lamented in a letter to the editor of a local news site that the school did “nothing for American holidays but everything for Mexican holidays.” He also claimed that there were “very few, if any, Hispanic students” in his honors classes and that many students at the school lacked basic English skills (he did not specify a race). The school’s policy of making announcements in both English and Spanish exacerbated the problem, he argued.
“As politically correct as this may be, it demeans the immigrant population as incompetent, and makes a mockery of the American ideal of personal accomplishment,” Miller wrote then.
As a teen, Miller appeared repeatedly on the radio show of Larry Elder, a conservative commentator, and denounced what he called his high school’s liberal culture run amok. He told Elder that liberal students punished classmates who took positions they deemed politically incorrect, and that teachers were biased against conservative students.
The school was “an institution not of learning, but of indoctrination,” where one teacher had referred to the Mexican-American War as the “Northern-American invasion,” Miller wrote after graduating.
Trump's second hire, Jason Miller, was forced to delete a series of tweets attacking his new boss shortly after his hiring was announced Monday evening.
The former senior communications adviser for Ted Cruz apparently wasn't the biggest fan of Trump during the heat of the GOP primary which ended only weeks ago:
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