The Meanest Dork Is in Charge

Asawin Suebsaeng (@swin24.bsky.social on BlueSky) is in the midst of leaving Rolling Stone for Mehdi Hasan's Zeteo. 

His last piece for Rolling Stone, co-written with several other writers, is Inside Stephen Miller's Reign of Terror: How just about everything you loathe or love about Donald Trump’s America, you hate or cherish about Miller’s republic of fear. (The story is paywalled and it doesn't appear that a gift link exists, but when I first viewed it on my phone I could read the whole thing, so maybe give that a try.)

Swin said on BlueSky he wanted the headline to be "The Meanest Dork You’ve Ever Met Is Now Running the Country."

If you've been paying any attention to the past seven months, or know anything about Miller, there's not a lot in the article to surprise you. He's at the core of much of it.

Two things in the story were news to me. One is that Miller is not liked and is more or less ridiculed by many of his colleagues in the White House and previously on Capitol Hill, where he worked before 2017. (They thought he would go nowhere because he was too far right.) The details on this are worth reading.

The other thing is that the White House press office sent Rolling Stone positive quotes about Miller from multiple Republican members of Congress — Hawley, Scalise, Jordan, a few others. All of them ended with some form of "I'm proud to call Stephen Miller my friend." Almost like a hostage video. Please don't hurt me — I'm your friend!

After repeating these, the story said something like, The White House press office stated it assumed these statements would be included in the article.

Nice free press you've got there. Too bad if anything happens to it.

I haven't seen that part of the story about the MoC or press office mentioned anywhere, even though the article is being talked about a lot today (on BlueSky). It seems notable too. None of the MoC like him, either, I would be willing to bet. 

Who really could?

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Illustration by Victor Juhasz for Rolling Stone.