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🌊 Inside “Trump’s Brain”
The story of Stephen Miller, the key figure who’s been dubbed “Trump’s Brain”
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By Max Towey
In 2006, a black stripper accused three members of the Duke men’s lacrosse team of raping her. The public verdict was immediate: The players were guilty.
The media pilloried them, presuming their guiltiness. It too easily fit their worldview: They were privileged white lax bros and she was a “single mom with two kids,” as the NYT described her. Newsweek ran a cover story titled “Sex, Lies, & Duke” with the players’ mugshots on the front; a local columnist called on the lacrosse team to “turn in” their guilty teammates; an anchor joked, “I'm so glad they didn't miss a lacrosse game over a little thing like gang rape!”; and NYT sports columnist Selena Roberts decried the “Lord of the Flies ethos” that kept the team from turning in the rapists. One NYT columnist who refused to presume their guilt later revealed that his editors had pressured him to take more of a pro-prosecution angle.
Students protested daily, and so did the faculty. 88 Duke professors signed a full-page ad in the local newspaper that called the situation a “social disaster” and thanked the student protesters for “turning up the volume.” Some of those student protesters held up “wanted posters” with the entire lacrosse team’s names and signs that read, “It’s Sunday morning, time to confess.” In a public letter, one professor condemned the “abhorrent sexual assault, verbal racial violence, and drunken white male privilege loosed amongst us." Duke’s president suspended the lacrosse team and fired their coach.
It went beyond the media, students, faculty, and president; even local law enforcement sided against them. Durham County police violated protocol to vilify the players, while Durham County district attorney Mike Nifong – whom we later learned hid DNA evidence that would’ve exonerated the accused – made 70 media appearances, promising “justice” in each.
Yet amid the public lashing of the players in the media and the Duke community, one Duke student stood up for the team. His public defense of the soon-to-be-exonerated players – both in his “Miller Time” newspaper column at Duke and on Fox News – launched his career. That student’s name was Stephen Miller, and 19 years later, he is one of the most powerful men in America.
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Editor’s Note
Thanks for reading. We hope you found today’s reporting interesting. As always, send in your thoughts and reactions — we’d love to hear from you.
Interested in catching up on this past week’s stories? Find them here:
Thanks to those who wrote in to yesterday’s story on the fate of habeas corpus. One email caught our eye:
Deb wrote:
I sincerely mean this respectfully. But if you are trying to maintain an unbiased news source I think that you should share to the public an equal number of replies from both sides. I do not know how I feel about this yet but I can tell you that in your recent articles I have been getting the feeling that you are attempting to garner more readership by leaning a bit left of the controversial divide.
Here’s Roca’s response:
We receive a lot of email replies and try to select the most interesting ones that represent the sentiment of our audience. If a majority of the responses indicate the audience feels one way about a story, the replies will likely reflect that.
That’s all. Hope you all have a fantastic long weekend. See you tomorrow.
–Max and Max