Fun fact: Stephen Miller likes Mexican food.

You’d think that an unhinged xenophobe like Stevie would want to prevent burritos and tacos from taking jobs away from hamburgers and hot dogs. But apparently that’s not the case.

On June 17, 2018, Miller, a tireless cheerleader for wrenching migrant children from their parents, was dining at Espita Mezcaleria, a Mexican restaurant in Washington. Recognizing him from his sweaty performances at the White House podium, a fellow diner called out, “Hey look guys, whoever thought we’d be in a restaurant with a real-life fascist begging [for] money for new cages?”

Surprisingly, Miller didn’t take this opportunity to defend his beloved policy of family separation. According to a witness, he scurried away.

But it’s hard to imagine he took offense at being called a fascist. In the years since the incident at Espita Mezcaleria, he’s only burnished his neo-Nazi cred.

His performance last October at the now-legendary Trump rally at Madison Square Garden, for example, called to mind Molly Ivins’s famous joke about Pat Buchanan’s hate-filled screed at the 1992 Republican Convention: “It probably sounded better in the original German.”

In Miller’s case, Molly’s crack was literally true: His declaration at MSG—“America is for Americans and Americans only”—was a close translation of the slogan “Germany for the Germans—foreigners out” favored by Adolf Hitler.

Miller’s repurposing of Nazi IP shows a keen awareness of his patron’s literary preferences. According to his late wife Ivana, the only book Donald J. Trump owned was a collection of Hitler’s speeches, which—perhaps because he considered it perfect bedtime reading—he kept on his nightstand.

I won’t attempt to explain why Miller, a Jew whose ancestors fled Russian pogroms, has become such a fanboy of history’s most famous antisemite. I’m not a licensed psychotherapist like George Santos.

But thanks to performances like his MSG tirade—which have earned Miller the exceedingly apt sobriquet “Peewee German”—he has landed not one but two jobs in the Fourth Reich: Deputy White House Chief of Staff for Policy and United States homeland security advisor.

With everything seemingly going his way, it might seem petty of me to rain on his parade. But I have some very bad news for Stephen Miller.

It’s about his love of Mexican food.

Espita Mezcaleria, alas, is now out of business—it couldn’t have helped when word got out that Stephen Miller dined there—but its dinner menu is still available online. And it features this item first: guacamole.

The avocado-based favorite dates back to at least the fourteenth century, during the Aztec Empire. The Aztecs, apparently, loved guacamole as much as Miller loves mass deportation. And, in another eerie coincidence, both the Aztecs and Miller are known for worshipping a serpent.

I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that guacamole has played some role in Stevie’s enjoyment of Mexican food. It’s certainly become a major player in American snacking, especially on Super Bowl Sunday, when reportedly 139.4 million pounds of avocado are pulverized to prepare it.

But, thanks to Miller and his boss, Americans’ access to affordable guacamole could soon be in jeopardy. That’s according to economist Rebecca Peterson, who wrote a guest essay for the New York Times entitled Prepare for Guacamole to Become a Luxury Item.

“American farmers and ranchers, many of whom have supported Mr. Trump, will struggle to find enough workers if he delivers on his vow to deport millions of undocumented immigrants,” Peterson writes. This graph from the Department of Agriculture shows the extent to which farmers depend on foreign workers—especially undocumented ones, who make up 44 percent of that group:

Unharvested produce will lead to higher supermarket prices—as will Trump’s just-announced 25 percent tariff on Mexico, which, alas, supplies 90 percent of the US’s avocados. All this will be bad news for those Trump voters who swear they voted for him because of rising food costs, and not because his opponent was a Black woman.

Of course, I don’t expect anything I say about the potentially ruinous cost of avocados to change Stephen Miller’s mind, such as it is, about immigration. And Trump’s response to graphs like the one above would most likely be an executive order banning graphs.

But if I had to choose who gets to stay in the country—a guy who picks avocados or a guy who rioted at the Capitol—I’m going to go with the avocado guy.
#politics #satire #stevemiller