White House adviser Stephen Miller’s third-grade teacher mocked his childhood idiosyncracies and introverted nature in an article for the Hollywood Reporter published Wednesday.
In the article, an excerpt of which was published online, Miller’s former teacher, Nikki Fiske, refers to the brash immigration hawk as a “strange dude” and recounts his penchant for “eating glue.”
“Do you remember that character in Peanuts, the one called Pig Pen, with the dust cloud and crumbs flying all around him? That was Stephen Miller at 8,” Fisk writes. “I was always trying to get him to clean up his desk — he always had stuff mashed up in there. He was a strange dude. I remember he would take a bottle of glue — we didn’t have glue sticks in those days — and he would pour the glue on his arm, let it dry, peel it off and then eat it.”
Fiske writes that she compiled a disturbing report at the end of the academic year that was redacted by school administrators at the behest of Miller’s “horrified” parents.
“At the end of the year, I wrote all my concerns — and I had a lot of them — in his school record,” she writes. “When the school principal had a conference with Stephen’s parents, the parents were horrified. So the principal took some white-out and blanked out all my comments.”
Miller, 33, is a staunch immigration restrictionist who reportedly wielded his considerable influence to advocate the Trump administration’s controversial “zero tolerance” immigration-enforcement policy, which led to the separation of some 2,000 immigrant children from their parents at the border. Miller has since embraced his role as the architect of the administration’s immigration policy, defending the hard-line approach against accusations of racism levied by liberal pundits and lawmakers.
“It just sounds like you’re trying to engineer the racial and ethnic flow of people into this country,” CNN’s Jim Acosta said to Miller during a memorable press briefing in August.
“That is one of the most outrageous, insulting, ignorant, and foolish things you’ve ever said,” Miller responded angrily. “The notion that you think that this is a racist bill is so wrong and so insulting.”