Trump henchman Stephen Miller was the most image-conscious of all the president’s inner circle during a Vanity Fair photo shoot that rocked Washington, D.C., the photographer has revealed.
Miller, President Donald Trump’s deputy chief of staff under loose-lipped Susie Wiles and the brains behind the president’s most controversial immigration policies, was particularly nervous about the portrait session, Christopher Anderson said. “I’ll give you a little anecdote: Stephen Miller was perhaps the most concerned about the portrait session,” he said.
He told The Washington Post that hardliner Miller, described by his wife as a “sexual matador,” even asked whether he should crack a smile. “He asked me, ‘Should I smile or not smile?’ and I said, ‘How would you want to be portrayed?’ We agreed that we would do a bit of both.”
In the end, Miller was apparently satisfied by Anderson’s approach. The photographer also managed to get in a sly dig by revealing Miller’s parting words. “And then when we were finished, he comes up to me to shake my hand and say goodbye.
“And he says to me, ‘You know, you have a lot of power in the discretion you use to be kind to people.’ And I looked at him, and I said, ‘You know, you do, too.’”
The resulting portrait showed Miller as the public is used to seeing him: with no smile. In the image, he displays an underbite reminiscent of Winston Churchill’s, his lower lip jutting out like an open cash register as he reclines in a chair.
Miller, who turned 40 in August, also featured in other images, like the cover shot, where he awkwardly sits on the edge of a table in the White House with the faint whiff of a smile on his face.
Miller’s wife, meanwhile, has insisted he “is a different person at home.” On an episode of “Next Up with Mark Halperin and Megyn Kelly” earlier this month, Katie Miller said her husband is markedly more upbeat away from the cameras.
“I think you know this well, but he is a different person at home and off-camera than he is on TV,” she told Halperin, adding that he gets vexed when he speaks because he believes in his message.
“I don’t want to say it’s an act, but he so passionately believes in what he says,” she added.
