While Trump has hated certain immigrants for a very long time–he is a New Yorker of an age and a type who uses ‘Puerto Rican’ as a pejorative to describe any Latino (IYKYK). But his helpmeet, if you will, is advisor Stephen Miller. Miller is from a background that one would think would predispose him towards, well, not being Stephen Miller; in fact, much of his family has publicly repudiated him.

But there was this episode in his life that sent him down the path of darkness (boldface mine):

On the Miller side, one generation’s success selling groceries and rolling cigars in Pittsburgh led to the next generation’s success in law and real estate in Los Angeles; on the Glosser side, a family-owned department store served as a community pillar in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, until it was acquired and liquidated in a leveraged buyout in the 1980s.

Stephen’s father, Michael Miller, a Stanford-educated lawyer, cofounded a firm focused on corporate and real estate law; he also became deeply involved in his father’s real estate business and helped to reconstruct the world-famous Santa Monica Pier. Stephen’s mother, Miriam Glosser, graduated from the Columbia University School of Social Work and worked with troubled teens before eventually pivoting to the family real estate business as well. As a child, Stephen grew up in a $1 million, five-bedroom home in the North of Montana section of Santa Monica, one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Greater Los Angeles. He had Latin American–born housekeepers who cooked family meals and cleaned up after him and his siblings.

This comfortable lifestyle was disrupted in 1994, when the Millers had a run of terrible luck: A major earthquake inflicted $20 billion in property damage in Southern California, including on a number of properties managed by the family firm. This came at a particularly inopportune moment, as Michael Miller was in the midst of an acrimonious legal battle with his former partners in the law firm he’d started, the upshot of which was that he found himself hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt.

In 1998, when Stephen was 13, the family sold its imposing home and moved to a smaller house by a freeway underpass near the working-class Hispanic neighborhood of Pico, though still in a majority-white middle school district. The area was beginning to gentrify, and the Millers would refinance the house three times over the next four years as their fortunes gradually recovered.

…Miller’s brush with downward mobility came much earlier, with his affluent boomer parents experiencing the shock of material insecurity during the 1990s, a decade that is more typically remembered as a period of unprecedented economic prosperity. Though Miller was never anywhere close to working-class, and his family’s finances rebounded in time for him to enjoy the benefits of an elite university education and a parentally subsidized down payment on a DC condo (though recently his parents had another bit of bad luck, as their home was destroyed in the Los Angeles wildfires in January), he did pass through a period of acute economic and status anxiety during a very impressionable age.

He then spent his downward mobility stretch acting out and also embracing edgy, racist ideas, which were very prevalent back then: this was the period where Pete Wilson won the governor’s office through anti-Latino animus. It’s not hard to see how someone who sees the bottom drop out of their family’s finances, especially if they have to do things like switch schools (and watch their parents lose many of their friends–or ‘friends’), could turn out like Miller.

Mind you, many people have something like this happen to them, and don’t turn into racist assholes. There are clearly other things at work (and are discussed at the link). But we are suffering in no small part because Miller does not seem to have ever gotten over this episode, even if political pundits aren’t ‘allowed’ to tell us this.