Stephen Miller, President Donald Trump’s muse and adviser, told Jake Tapper of CNN, “We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.”
Miller is a modern version of a character found in Plato’s Gorgias: Callicles. Miller’s rhetoric smells like a decrepit boxing club on 88th Avenue — sweaty, testosterone-laced, hypermasculine braggadocio with subdued violence pouring from every sentence.
Callicles is the paradigm of a playground bully. He is the origin of the philosophy espoused by Miller.
Rodney Kennedy
Callicles maintains that pleasure is good, that might is right and law is nothing but the combination of the many weak against the few strong. He believes in the right to do as he pleases with no restraints. Miller serves the desires of a leader who has no interest in having his impulses checked. Trump’s impulses shine brightly in his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein and his power politics against other nations. Both are violent and unrestrained.
Miller has repeated Trump’s intent to rule Venezuela and exploit its vast oil reserves after U.S. forces launched a raid on the Venezuelan capital and seized President Nicolás Maduro and his wife. And he said no one would fight back if the United States were to decide to use its military to annex Greenland by force.
There is no denying the meaning Miller gives to what Trump clumsily calls his Donroe Doctrine.
Because Trump wants it, taking over Greenland “is the formal position of the U.S. government,” Miller says.
He ignores a basic lesson: When the strong attack the weak, the weak attempt to become strong. They align with enemies like Russia and China. This could provoke global rearmament and nuclear proliferation. It also could mean the foolish have forgotten the horrors of two world wars and seem ready to plunge the world into apocalypse.
Socrates asks Callicles: Did you say, “The superior should take the property of the inferior by force; that the better should rule the worse, the noble have more than the mean? Am I not right in my recollection?”
Callicles responds, “Yes.”
Callicles sees no reason for restraint: “I plainly assert that he who would truly live ought to allow his desires to wax to the uttermost, and not to chastise them; but when they have grown to their greatest he should have courage and intelligence to minister to them and to satisfy all his longings. And this I affirm to be natural justice and nobility.”
“When you have seen one Stephen Miller, you have seen them all.”
Callicles believes a man “is to have all his desires about him and to be able to live happily in the gratification of them.”
Miller is a stock character in the world’s political theater. He is but a cipher of imperial presidential power. His gendered performance undergirds the right-wing populism he evokes. When you have seen one Stephen Miller, you have seen them all. They all act the same way — certain, uncaring, power-hungry. He represents raw, masculine, absolute power.
No one likes a bully, and how a world-class bully has been elected president twice remains a mystery.
A bully pushed me down during recess when I was in the sixth grade. I got up, brushed off the red clay dust and hit him in the mouth. The duty teacher intervened. At home my mother grounded me for a week. My Southern Baptist deacon dad came home from work, heard the story and hugged me and whispered, “That’s my boy.”
Mixed messages even among the godly.
For Miller, strength, force and power are “the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.” He sounds like he has read Hitler’s Battle rather than Michel Foucault’s Power. He acts as if he believes Prussian military writer Carl von Clausewitz was being definitive rather than descriptive when he said, “War is a mere continuation of policy by other means.”
Miller seems especially ignorant of the witness of the one book MAGA evangelicals swear is the literal truth of God — the Bible. Scripture is clear: If you are a Christian who embraces raw political power to “lord it over” others, you have a problem.
The Bible parades tyrants across its pages and leaves them discounted and destroyed.
“Miller seems especially ignorant of the witness of the one book MAGA evangelicals swear is the literal truth of God.”
Ironically, MAGA supports Miller’s “iron laws” of the world instead of Zechariah’s “not by power nor by might.” Doing so puts MAGA evangelicals at odds with Jesus. Jesus would not have supported the imperial policies of the Trump administration.
Jesus, the Suffering Servant of God, offers the opposite mode of salvation: The Cross. Christians supporting an aggressive, expansionist American campaign offer salvation through violence.
Miller’s announcement of the “iron laws” makes war and conquest moral necessities. MAGA demands posting the Ten Commandments on school walls but follows the law of power in practice.
In Miller’s eyes, America is better than other countries. Exceptionalism in this sense may become a trap door leading to a war beyond the scope of Trump’s expectations.
The most insidious idols of America are on display: Wealth and unrestrained power. American companies that produce guns are worth $91.7 billion. Lockheed Martin, the largest maker of military weapons, had 2023 revenue of $61.4 billion and Raytheon was second at $24.1 billion.
The frustration with this high-level hypocrisy makes me wish America as a nation were more secular and the Christianity of America less American.
Trump and Miller finally have given definition to the nebulous slogan, “Make America Great Again.” Trump has often referred to the Gilded Age as the period when America was the greatest. Trump’s affection for the Gilded Age celebrates unrestrained economic growth, but that’s only part of the equation. What Trump really desires is a return to the worst impulses of the Monroe Doctrine — American exceptionalism, expansionism and empire. The USA dominating Central and South America seems exactly right to Trump.
Thus, after invading Venezuela, he has threatened Colombia, Cuba and other countries.
He also threatened Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodriguez: “If she doesn’t do what’s right, she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro.” Trump’s arrogance bursts rational bounds when he claims Rodriquez will do “what we think is necessary to make Venezuela great again.”
Men like Miller and Trump trash every Christian understanding of ethics among nations. Their insidious and degrading rhetoric does enrage me to a more determined opposition.
I confess my sixth-grade self would like to punch Miller in the face. My 76-year-old self says, “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways.”
Rodney W. Kennedy is a pastor and writer. He is the author of 11 books, including his latest, Dancing with Metaphors in the Pulpit.