When Donald Trump launched his first campaign for the presidency by suggesting that many Mexican immigrants were criminals and rapists, the remarks prompted uproar and the television network that had helped make him a household name, NBC, announced that it was cutting all ties with him.
But at least one young man in Washington listened with rapt attention. The speech delivered a “jolt of electricity to my soul”, Stephen Miller told The Washington Post years later. It was “as though everything that I felt at the deepest levels of my heart were for now being expressed by a candidate for our nation’s highest office before a watching world”.
Miller was 28. Soon, at the recommendation of his friend Steve Bannon, the founder of the