\n<\/p>\n
Yesterday, Stephen Miller delivered a eulogy for Charlie Kirk that served as a battle cry for the Trump administration\u2019s state-sponsored war on his perceived foes\u2014a war for which Miller is the primary strategist. The speech was a jarring piece of rhetoric. It is a perfect encapsulation of the ethos of Trumpism, boiling away the president\u2019s idiosyncratic habits of mixing insult comedy and weird digressions into his rhetoric and leaving, in Miller\u2019s tongue, the residue of pure ideology and will to power.<\/p>\n
Miller\u2019s theme was that President Donald Trump\u2019s side embodies pure good, his opponents pure evil, and the former is destined to utterly destroy the latter. Republicans have never stopped complaining that Hillary Clinton once described a portion of Trump\u2019s base as \u201ca basket of deplorables.\u201d Yet over the weekend the president\u2019s most powerful adviser depicted half the country as worthless, irredeemably wicked, and fated for destruction.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are the storm. And our enemies cannot comprehend our strength, our determination, our resolve, our passion,\u201d he thundered. \u201cOur lineage and our legacy hails back to Athens, to Rome, to Philadelphia, to Monticello. Our ancestors built the cities. They produced the art and architecture. They built the industry.\u201d<\/p>\n
I feel less confident than Miller does that future historians will laud Trump\u2019s distinct additions of legalized bribery, casino-style decor, and Ultimate Fighting Championship matches on the White House lawn as cultural and philosophical advances. Yet Miller confidently conscripted the pillars of Western civilization into his domestic political war.<\/p>\n
Miller\u2019s peroration managed the difficult combination of being redundant and short. In place of uplift, he brought bludgeoning repetition. \u201cThe light will defeat the dark. We will prevail over the forces of wickedness and evil,\u201d he said at one point. \u201cWe will defeat the forces of darkness and evil. And we will stand every day for what is true, what is beautiful, what is good.\u201d he proclaimed shortly thereafter.<\/p>\n
Miller directed much of his speech to the enemy camp. \u201cAnd to those trying to incite violence against us, those trying to foment hatred against us,\u201d he said, \u201cwhat do you have? You have nothing. You are nothing. You are wickedness. You are jealousy. You are envy. You are hatred. You are nothing. You can build nothing. You can produce nothing. You can create nothing.\u201d In case any member of the audience had dozed off, which seems unlikely given the volume at which he spoke, Miller reiterated the point a few sentences later: \u201cAnd what will you leave behind? Nothing. Nothing. To our enemies, you have nothing to give. You have nothing to offer. You have nothing to share but bitterness.\u201d<\/p>\n
Having nothing to share but bitterness is a strange insult for Stephen Miller, of all people, to hurl. But part of the Miller worldview is an almost proud insistence on holding his enemies to standards he refuses to abide by. The Trump camp has insisted that the fault for last year\u2019s attempts on Trump\u2019s life lies with anybody who has attacked him as dangerous or authoritarian. Yet Trump himself attacks his enemies in such terms routinely, and Miller seems to be attempting to exceed his boss\u2019s Manichean style by depicting their opponents as the literal embodiment of malevolence.<\/p>\n
In some ways, Miller\u2019s speech was the distilled antithesis of Barack Obama\u2019s rhetorical style. Obama gained fame with a stirring 2004 speech arguing that America\u2019s cultural divisions were surmountable\u2014that red America and blue America had more in common that the pundits appreciated. Miller\u2019s view, like that of his boss, is that America is even more divided than we think, and the only resolution to this state of affairs is for one side to subjugate the other.<\/p>\n
Ten years ago, a white supremacist gunned down nine worshippers at one of the oldest Black churches in the South, including Clementa Pinckney, a pastor and member of the South Carolina state Senate. The horrific event provides a striking contrast to the aftermath of Kirk\u2019s murder. In his eulogy, Obama did not scour the internet for conservatives making insensitive comments about the event\u2014even though many such cases could be found, including on Fox News\u2014let alone use the tragedy as a pretext to delegitimize the opposition.<\/p>\n
Obama described the murderer in the singular and spoke of reconciliation. \u201cThe alleged killer could have never anticipated the way the families of the fallen would respond when they saw him in court\u2014in the midst of unspeakable grief, with words of forgiveness,\u201d Obama said. \u201cHe couldn\u2019t imagine that.\u201d Miller\u2019s speech used the third person plural to describe Kirk\u2019s assassination: \u201cThey cannot imagine what they have awakened. They cannot conceive of the army that they have arisen in all of us because we stand for what is good, what is virtuous, what is noble.\u201d<\/p>\n
Miller made no effort to distinguish the vaguely defined multitudes that he implicates in Kirk\u2019s murder from Trump\u2019s political opponents or the Democratic Party\u2014which, at other times, he has said is \u201cnot a political party. It is a domestic extremist organization.\u201d<\/p>\n
Miller taunted his opponents, \u201cYou have no idea the dragon you have awakened.\u201d To the contrary, his targets seem very aware of the administration\u2019s instinct to take revenge. But given Miller\u2019s past statements, I question the premise that Kirk\u2019s murder \u201cawakened\u201d Miller\u2019s desire to crush the right\u2019s enemies. It seems to have merely provided a convenient pretext.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Yesterday, Stephen Miller delivered a eulogy for Charlie Kirk that served as a battle cry for the Trump administration\u2019s state-sponsored war on his perceived foes\u2014a war for which Miller is the primary strategist. The speech was a jarring piece of rhetoric. It is a perfect encapsulation of the ethos of Trumpism, boiling away the president\u2019s<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":23223,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[14179,2465,1053,2039],"class_list":{"0":"post-23222","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-hypocrisy","9":"tag-millers","10":"tag-speech","11":"tag-stephen"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23222","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23222"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23222\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/23223"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23222"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23222"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23222"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}