"He's the most sanctimonious student I think I ever encountered," said John Burness, Duke's former senior vice president of public affairs and government relations. "He seemed to be absolutely sure of his own views and the correctness of them, and seemed to assume that if you were in disagreement with him, there was something malevolent or stupid about your thinking. Incredibly intolerant."- Duke University Vice President on President Donald Trump's top policy advisor Stephen Miller. [New York Daily News February 13, 2017]
In other words the young man, now 31 years old, is a pompous jackass whose arrogance may portend a looming embarrassing disaster for the Trump Administration. And don't take my words for it. MSNBC's Joe Scarborough, host of the "Morning Joe" TV program recently blasted Miller as a "very young person in the White House on a power trip thinking that you can just write executive orders and tell all of your Cabinet agencies to go to hell."
Ah, yes, this guy who believes that Donald Trump is a resurrected reincarnation clone of Julius Caesar and Caligula, the new overlord of the American people and the world, only claim to fame is that he is a rabid, right wing blowhard, who wormed his way into Donald Trump's inner circle and toadied up to the mercurial United States President. As Trump's key policy advisor, bereft of any policy crafting experience or understanding of United States constitutional law, international diplomacy norms or relations between people, Miller is a square peg in round hole. A person breadth-takingly unqualified for this important position.
But he's loyal to Trump and is obviously prepared and well suited to be the president's mouthpiece as recent events proved so conclusively. On a recent Sunday edition of Face the Nation Stephen Miller got to loudly, and in a military-style voice, tell America and the world that, "the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned." Looking at Miller I immediately experienced mixed feelings of anger that "we the people" should be "talked down" to so bluntly, and a pang of genuine sorrow for so misguided and delusional a young man while still being surprised at his condescending tone and arrogance. The man's a supercilious jerk I concluded.
I quickly regained my composure and realized with some degree of alarm that Miller is just one of many of President Trump's White House staffers who lack both experience and education in quite a number of areas. From his education secretary who hates public education to his EPA pick who once wanted to abolish this department or could not remember that he wanted to kill it. Indeed, the most educated secretary in the Trump Cabinet is a man knows how to perform brain surgery. Incredibly, he's now the Secretary of Housing.
So understanding a young man at the very height of his short career in politics we might want to be charitable to both his ignorance and arrogance. But the danger here is that he's promoting President Trump's adversarial and troubling relationship with the United States Constitution and with the notion of truth telling itself. Miller's grandiloquent and pompous statement about Trump's powers is not only misleading but runs counter to the constitution and is patently untrue. It's a categorical lie, plain and simple.
But let me digress here a bit. Imagine, if you will, that someone in President Barack Obama's Administration would go on national television and ascribe to the former president the dictatorial powers that Miller gave to Trump, and the Republican outrage would have been swift and loud. Infact, Republicans and their supporters demonstrated all over the place when they were told that Obamacare was too much big government and that a government mandated insurance marketplace was way too much power for the federal government.
Yet there was hardly a whisper for a guy giving near monarchial powers to the President of the United States in DIRECT violation of the United States Constitution. And the same media has been almost apolegetic about a president who turned his dinner table in Florida into a Situation Room to discuss North Korea's rocket launch and its implications for United States and allied national security. Could you imagine the uproar had President Obama done that?
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