Stephen Miller, deputy chief of staff for policy for the Trump administration, has positioned himself as one of the most powerful men in the country. But before he was one of the president’s right-hand men, Miller was a Blue Devil. And while he was at Duke, he wrote an opinion column for The Chronicle.
Miller, Trinity ‘07, oversees much of the domestic policy coming out of the White House. He was previously a speechwriter during President Donald Trump’s 2016 bid for the Oval Office and later held a senior adviser role in the president’s first administration. There, he made a name for himself as the driving force behind the administration’s restrictive immigration agenda, earning the moniker “Trump’s brain.”
As Miller’s second season in the West Wing begins to take shape, The Chronicle looked back on the views he penned in our pages during his time as a student, exploring those which have held firm over the years and may now be steering the country’s future.
‘Miller Time’
Miller held his columnist position at The Chronicle for 19 months, publishing roughly biweekly commentary during his junior and senior years. In total, he boasts 25 Chronicle bylines.
Dubbed “Miller Time,” the column made waves on campus for its often-controversial takes. Miller’s local notoriety reached new heights in the fall of his senior year, when the Duke lacrosse scandal rocked the country, and he was given a national platform as one of the players’ fiercest defenders against rape allegations that were later proven false.
His pieces took on a thoughtful but commanding tone, displaying a reflective quality fitting of the then-young philosophy major. Miller touched on themes of a declining American social culture and institutional structures that failed to operate in their constituents’ best interests, writing from a self-described embattled conservative perspective that has remained a cornerstone of his strategic advising approach to this day.
Tight borders
Among the most illuminating of Miller’s columns is “9.11.01,” which was published Sept. 11, 2006.
He opens the piece with a series of vignettes from the morning of the terrorist attack five years prior, familiarizing his audience with the stories of Betty Ong, an American Airlines attendant on Flight 11 who first informed authorities of the hijackings; of Melissa Doi, a financial manager who called emergency services from the South Tower and asked them if she was going to die; and of Mychal Judge, a chaplain for the New York City Fire Department who rushed to the scene to provide comfort and perform last rites for dying first responders before being killed himself.
“America never saw what really happened on Sept. 11,” Miller wrote. “… They know the numbers, but not the stories. They know the tragedy but not the horror.”
He reports having spent weeks “immersing [him]self in Sept. 11,” a task he believes “every one of us ought to force ourselves to do.” After diving into that research, Miller emerged on the other side with strong convictions about the nation’s domestic security priorities.
“Why aren't our airports, borders or ports secure? … Why are there 3,000,000 people in the United States who have overstayed their visas? Why isn't the murder of 3,000 people enough to shake us out of our apathy?” he wrote. “… Maybe, if more people researched the true story of Sept. 11, in all its horror, it won't take another attack, and more untold devastation, to motivate us to fix the perilous status quo.”
Miller felt sufficiently motivated himself, and he would put those beliefs — which materialized in the form of strong xenophobic sentiment and an affinity for strict border security — into practice throughout his ensuing career in the policy space.
After graduating from Duke, he worked as a press secretary for Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., and Rep. John Shadegg, R-Ariz., before joining the staff of Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala. There, Miller drafted an “immigration handbook” filled with talking points for Republican officials that would be instrumental in bringing down a bipartisan immigration reform bill known as the “Gang of Eight” plan, which sought to establish a path to citizenship for some immigrants residing illegally in the country while still strengthening border control measures.
Miller’s role in successfully killing the bill became the first major step toward fixing what he saw in 2006 as the nation’s “porous, undermanned, politically-correct domestic security” system.
Miller left Sessions’ office in 2016 for the Trump campaign. After the Republican ticket won the White House in November, Miller developed into one of the administration’s leading voices on immigration. He has been widely credited with leading the effort to implement the controversial 2017 travel ban directed at several Muslim-majority countries, as well as the 2018 move to separate immigrant families at the U.S.-Mexico border as a deterrence strategy.
Now as a key figure behind Trump’s return to the Oval Office, Miller has been referred to as a “lead architect” of the administration’s immigration agenda, which has so far been characterized by mass deportations and tighter border security. The first steps of this plan are already in motion, with the Laken Riley Act signed into law by Trump Jan. 29 — the first legislation to come out of his second term — and several early executive orders intended to crack down on illegal immigration.
Miller’s preference for heavily restrictive immigration policy didn’t materialize at Duke — he published op-eds of a similar “America First” sentiment while in high school and is remembered by former California classmates for his strong “exclusionary ideology” and often “condescending” tone.
Still, Miller’s opinions on the matter seem to ring just as true in the 39-year-old’s policies as they did when chronicled at age 21.
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“This has nothing to do with Republican or Democrat, right or left. This shouldn't be political,” Miller wrote in 2006. “… [L]et those tragic deaths be all the motivation we ever need to fight terrorism and keep our nation safe. God help us if we don't.”
Diversity of views …
Miller served for a time as president of Duke’s Chapter of Students for Academic Freedom and sometimes wrote as a representative of the organization. As such, many of his columns featured an undercurrent of advocacy for greater ideological diversity on campus.
His first piece, released in September 2005 and titled “Welcome to Leftist University,” kicked off the running theme. There, he accused Duke of coming up short in diversity of thought, a “shameful deficiency” Miller ascribed to the University and its peer institutions.
“Our academia is terribly and undeniably one-sided,” he wrote. “Like countless other schools across the nation, we too are a leftist university.”
Miller pointed to a survey of faculty in humanities and liberal arts fields conducted by the Duke Conservative Union in 2004, which found that Democrats outweighed Republicans more than six to one. He returned to this imbalance in several of his columns to argue that professors’ personal political views influenced their approach to instruction — to the detriment of their students.
He opens a piece from February 2006: “A large number of Duke professors have disregarded the basic tenets of academic freedom and abandoned their professional obligations. They indoctrinate students in their personal ideologies and prejudices and in so doing betray the very people who are supposed to be their paramount concern.”
Miller wrote that faculty hiring practices were undermined by committee members’ personal biases, “leading to a monolithic academic environment that severely compromises students' education.” He also included a list of student testimonials alleging that various faculty members were not amenable to hearing views different than their own in the classroom.
In his infamous two-part “Making Duke Perfect” series, in which Miller laid out a list of suggestions to improve the University’s policies and student experience, he advocated for a “students’ bill of rights that would guarantee every student learning on this campus an education free of political discrimination, partisan indoctrination and politically motivated grading” to discourage professors from “engag[ing] in activism instead of instruction” at the lectern. Along those lines, he called on the University to “[s]top hiring and tenuring radicals whose first cause is politics and not education, who humiliate our school and call into question how seriously we take our academic mission.”
The Trump administration today has espoused much of the same rhetoric, with the now-president vowing during his 2024 campaign to end “wokeness” and “left-wing indoctrination” in classrooms around the country. Since taking office, Trump has signed executive orders mandating funding cuts for schools at the K-12 and collegiate levels that have diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, promoting “patriotic education” instead. His vice president, JD Vance, once invoked former president Richard Nixon, Law School ‘37, to assert that “professors are the enemy.”
… But only for the few
Even as future presidential adviser Miller promoted a greater push for ideological diversity on campus as a solution to what he saw as a politically siloed higher education system, the columnist dedicated a considerable amount of space on his pages to critiquing those who expressed views in strong opposition to his own.
In his inaugural column, he condemned then-President Richard Brodhead’s “appalling” decision to allow the Palestine Solidarity Movement to host a conference on campus, alleging that the group had connections to terrorist organizations. The Trump administration today has staked out a similar position, denouncing contemporary pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses as part of a “radical revolution” and pledging to deport international student participants.
Miller opposed other decisions by the University’s administration that he felt belied a liberal bias, such as hosting Maya Angelou for a convocation address or not celebrating Christmas ardently enough, a subject to which he devoted two pieces (Miller is Jewish but argued that “Christianity is embedded in the very soul of our nation,” and thus the holiday deserved more recognition on campus).
Notably, he repeatedly criticized administrators, faculty, fellow students and the press for jumping to conclude that three Duke lacrosse players were guilty of rape, despite what he outlined as inadequate evidentiary support and a politically motivated district attorney with a loose approach to due process. Miller was vindicated first in 2007 by a verdict of innocence, and again in 2024 when accuser Crystal Mangum confessed to fabricating the allegations.
Miller singled out Hollywood as another target of his disdain, but these grievances were more consistent with the recurring petition for viewpoint diversity. Similar to the charges he leveled against Duke’s faculty, Miller accused the entertainment industry of serving as a “propaganda machine,” spreading liberal-leaning messages and fomenting cultural division.
“There is a huge ideological war being waged for the future of the country, and after the education system, the entertainment industry is the left's most influential resource,” he wrote in January 2006.
One nation, indivisible
Still, Miller’s views as represented throughout his column are not inherently anti-institutional. While he delivered frequent criticism of so-called liberal elites in American cultural institutions and throughout the higher education industry, he consistently affirmed a great love for his alma mater and desire to see it grow and improve.
“If we truly love Duke, and truly support its students, then we will take action to repair the University we love and to protect all its students present and future,” Miller wrote in February 2007. “If we truly love Duke, then we will demand that it live up to its ideals.”
Framing criticism as a means to better institutional systems was an approach Miller applied to his commentary on the nation as a whole, whose “greatness” he often extolled. Despite all the division he saw in the country across ideological, racial and cultural lines, in his final column for The Chronicle, Miller left readers with a message of unity.
“Just as it was in our earliest days as 13 colonies, only united can we shoulder the burden. Only united, will our beloved republic endure,” he signed off on April 23, 2007.
The soon-to-be Duke graduate — and eventual speechwriter for the president — wrote then of themes that would come to be espoused by the nation’s commander-in-chief, preaching a vision of American exceptionalism and calling for a show of unity worthy of the nation’s guiding maxim: “E Pluribus Unum.”
But as Trump’s critics pointed out this year when he made unity a central part of his campaign message — echoing Miller’s opposition at the time — this emphasis runs in contrast to a long record of divisive rhetoric.
Miller is certainly not the first political operative to display signs of contradiction in messaging. But at least through the snapshot given by The Chronicle’s pages, the approach to pursuing a more perfect union taken by one of the president’s favorite voices seems to be characterized by a tendency to conflate cultural harmony with cultural homogeneity.
Editor’s note: The Chronicle reached out to Miller for comment on how he views his student column in relation to his policy views today. He did not respond in time for publication.
Zoe Kolenovsky is a Trinity junior and news editor of The Chronicle's 120th volume.