Stephen Miller earned himself an awkward college nickname with a bizarre introduction at his freshman orientation for Duke University.
The White House deputy chief of staff, who is the architect of some of President Donald Trump’s most hardline policies, attended Duke from 2003 to 2007, earning a bachelor’s degree in political science.
While there, he struck his classmates as odd and combative, focused more on building his personal brand than socializing—even with other conservatives.
At freshman orientation, Miller, 40, introduced himself by saying, “Hi, I’m Stephen Miller. I’m from Santa Monica, California, and I like guns,” according to a new report in the Duke Chronicle.
The line, which appeared designed to attract attention, quickly earned him the nickname “Guns,” sources told the Chronicle.
He also liked to carry around a metal sword, according to the paper.
Miller “looked and acted like an old man,” according to a woman who lived in his freshman dorm.
He walked around in a “weird, brown bathrobe,” drinking scotch and smoking cigarettes, former classmate Amy Terwilleger told the Chronicle.
“In some ways, he was just a normal 18-year-old kid,” she said. “He just did these things and said these things that were just so odd, so off the wall, that you didn’t take it seriously… like typical kids trying to get attention—they say kind of outrageous things.”
Miller didn’t respond to the Chronicle’s request for comment. The Daily Beast has reached out as well.
In 2005, Miller began writing a column for the Duke Chronicle called Miller Time in which he apparently delighted in defending seemingly indefensible positions, including rallying behind a radio show host who said that one way to reduce crime was to “abort Black babies.”
Miller’s column was widely hate-read, a fellow conservative columnist told the Chronicle, and helped establish him as a known presence on campus.
“He cultivated this personality where he didn’t want to be close with anybody,” his editor Seyward Darby said. “He wanted to have really extreme positions and upset people, provoke people and just really set himself apart.”
At the time he was chosen to be a columnist, the paper was trying to offer a “diversity of viewpoints,” including at least one more conservative perspective, but in retrospect the paper probably shouldn’t have published his pieces, Darby told the Chronicle.
Even his fellow conservatives at the Duke Conservative Union, where Miller was the executive director during his senior year, were put off by his “unnecessarily over-the-top, provocative” rhetoric, which many viewed as counterproductive, according to a former student government leader.
Most of his classmates “were sick of him in college, and they’re definitely sick of him now,” Darby told the Chronicle.
“There’s still a sort of persistent feeling that he likes the attention, so I think people are like, ‘Don’t give him oxygen,’” she said, adding that for that reason, she declines most interview requests involving Miller.
