Stephen Miller stokes Trump's nationalist vision

It doesn’t matter whom they call the acting secretary of this or the senior adviser for that. Miller is the president’s chief prod and justifier, his minister of ideological cant.

I don’t know Miller personally, but if you’ve spent much time knocking around elite schools and Washington think tanks, you pretty much know what he’s about.

The brainy outcast at a sanctimonious Santa Monica high school, Miller went to the other extreme, embracing a kind of white aggrievement. He’s spent his entire adult life on campuses or working for extremists on Capitol Hill.

The throwback America he champions exists only in theory, without any of the complications one gets from actually living in it.

So what makes Miller the indispensable aide? Why does Trump eventually despair of every mercenary adviser but one?

In part, it’s probably because Miller, having spent so much of his young life battling academics and legislative staffs, is a better bureaucratic infighter than the rest of them (and far more adept at that game than his mentor, Steve Bannon, ever cared to be). He knows how to manage up, as they say.

Maybe it’s because Miller speaks to the part of the president that’s most deeply ingrained, the outer-borough kid who always felt mocked and rejected by Manhattan’s liberal elite.

But I’m guessing it’s mostly because Miller is the one guy who supplies Trump’s presidency with any sense of history, however twisted his reading of it may be.

Presidencies feed off a higher purpose. Bill Clinton saw himself as the boomer president sent to retool the industrial economy; George W. Bush was handed what he called a global war on terror; Barack Obama promised a new age of bipartisan reform, then walked into a historic financial crisis.

Here, as in so many other ways, Trump is sui generis. His campaign started as a marketing stunt, its meaningless message embroidered on cheap hats, its chief issue — the wall — a talking point. His appeal was emotional and nostalgic and meandering, based mainly on his own celebrity.

Only Miller, at least since Bannon departed, has consistently proffered a grander notion of what Trump’s presidency might actually be made to mean — the retrenchment of white culture into nativism and national identity, in line with similar reactionary movements sweeping through Europe.

It is the administration’s only recurrent theme, resentful and mean, and whenever it recedes for more than a few weeks, the presidency seems to drift toward a vacuous nowhere. It is the one pseudo-intellectual framework that gives Trump a firm sense of what he’s actually supposed to be doing here.

And so Miller remains and grows in power, filling a vacuum, as clever opportunists always do. In this presidency, the heart of the darkness is notably pale.