Senior policy adviser Stephen Miller, with White House chief of staff Reince Priebus in the foreground, has been at President Trump’s side for more than a year. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post) 
 
 As a young conservative in liberal Santa Monica, Calif., Stephen Miller clashed frequently with his high school, often calling in to a national radio show to lambaste administrators for promoting multiculturalism, allowing Spanish-language morning announcements and failing to require recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance. 
 
 Miller’s outrage did not appear to subside after he graduated. As a Duke University sophomore, Miller penned a column, titled “Santa Monica High’s Multicultural Fistfights,” in which he ripped his alma mater as a “center for political indoctrination.” 
 
 “The social experiment that Santa Monica High School has become is yet one more example of the dismal failure of leftism and the delusions and paranoia of its architects,” Miller wrote in the 2005 article for the conservative magazine FrontPage. 
 
 In the years before he became a top adviser to President Trump and a leading West Wing advocate for the executive order temporarily halting entry into the United States from seven majority-Muslim countries, Miller was developing his skills as a culture warrior and conservative provocateur eager to condemn liberal orthodoxy — particularly on matters of race and identity. Like Trump, Miller forged that identity while immersed in liberal communities, giving him cachet with fellow conservatives for waging his battles on opposition turf. 
 
 Starting as a teenager, with his frequent calls to the nationally syndicated “Larry Elder Show,” Miller made a name for himself in conservative media circles for his willingness to take controversial stands and act as a champion for those on the right who felt maligned by a culture of political correctness. 
 
 (Bastien Inzaurralde/The Washington Post) 
 
 He produced a canon of searing columns on race, gender and other hot-button issues and, at Duke, became known to Fox News viewers as a leading defender of the white lacrosse players wrongfully accused of raping a black stripper. By his late 20s, Miller was a key aide to then-Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), helping to torpedo a long-sought goal of immigrant advocacy groups to put millions of unauthorized Hispanic immigrants on a path to citizenship. 
 
 Today, at 31, he has emerged alongside former Breitbart News chief Stephen K. Bannon as a chief engineer of Trump’s populist “America first” agenda that has roiled the Washington debate over immigration and trade and sparked alarm among traditional U.S. allies abroad. 
 
 Miller, whose White House title is senior adviser to the president for policy, has been at Trump’s side for more than a year, joining his campaign in January 2016 when Sessions, who was sworn in Thursday as attorney general, was one of the only Republican officials to endorse the businessman’s candidacy. 
 
 While Trump at times revamped his campaign leadership, with Bannon joining relatively late in August 2016, Miller remained a steady presence whose profile and influence grew over time. 
 
 He wrote some of Trump’s most strident speeches during the campaign, including his Republican National Convention acceptance address in which Trump declared that “nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it.” 
 
 And Miller sometimes served as the warm-up act for Trump at his large campaign rallies, including a rip-roaring speech in Wisconsin during the Republican primary when Miller thrashed Trump’s chief rival, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), for supporting increases in legal immigration that would result in more Muslims entering the country — a position Miller charged that Cruz held with “no regard, no concern” for how it would “affect the security of you and your family.” 
 
 After reports of Miller’s central role crafting the order imposing a 90-day ban on citizens of Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen from entering the United States, the young aide has drawn uncomfortable new scrutiny. MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, host of the “Morning Joe” program that is a Trump favorite, recently blasted Miller as a “very young person in the White House on a power trip thinking that you can just write executive orders and tell all of your Cabinet agencies to go to hell.” 
 
 View Graphic Who is affected by Trump’s travel ban 
 
 For Miller, though, working in the Trump White House is a natural culmination of his young career — a chance to work for a president who appears to share his zeal for getting under the skin of political opponents. 
 
 “The way that people on the left abuse and slam people on the right — that’s probably the thing that’s most concerned Stephen,” said Elder, the Los Angeles-based conservative talk-show host who Miller describes as a mentor. “The lack of fairness. The left wing dominance in academia. The left wing dominance in the media. The left wing dominance in Hollywood.” 
 
 Miller’s ideological awakening found its roots in a left-leaning high school where he has written that social life and academics were badly segregated, despite what he saw as a devotion among teachers and administrators to multiculturalism. 
 
 “My best judgment at the time was that the educational answer that had been provided, which was to reject the melting-pot formula in favor of an educational formula that focused on all the things that made us different, was not working,” he told The Washington Post in an interview. 
 
 Miller said he rejects the “provocateur” label, saying it suggests that his intentions are to seek attention rather than what he says is his true goal — “to battle against slim odds, a stacked deck and powerful entrenched forces, in pursuit of justice.” 
 
 Miller said he turned away from the more liberal politics of his parents as he grew up in Santa Monica after buying a subscription to Guns & Ammo magazine and becoming familiar with the writings of actor Charlton Heston, a longtime president of the National Rifle Association. 
 
 Miller began appearing on Elder’s show, a local broadcast that is aired in 300 markets, after the 9/11 attacks, when he felt his home town lacked sufficient patriotism. 
 
 Elder said that Miller called in the first time to voice objections to his school’s failure to recite the Pledge of Allegiance daily as required by state law. 
 
 In writings at the time and later, Miller said he lobbied for the pledge recitation against a recalcitrant administration that refused to put the practice in place even after he had flagged the legal violation. “Osama Bin Laden would feel very welcome at Santa Monica High School,” he wrote in a letter to the editor at the time. 
 
 “It’s difficult to overstate the extent to which the instructional environment on campus was breathtakingly PC,” Miller said in an interview. 
 
 Mark Kelly, who was the principal at the time, said he did not recall the episode as a major fight. When Miller flagged the issue, Kelly said he researched the law and realized that the school, indeed, needed to change its policy and institute the recitation of the pledge. Miller was invited to lead the pledge after it was reinstated. 
 
 “Stephen was right,” Kelly recalled. 
 
 The victory was a validation for Miller of the necessity to fight powerful figures who opposed his views. 
 
 Miller pushed the school administration over his desire to host an on-campus speech by David Horowitz — a onetime Marxist, then controversial far-right conservative — who became an early mentor and would later introduce Miller to Sessions. 
 
 Horowitz recalls being immediately impressed with Miller. “One of the things that struck me when I became a conservative was that conservatives don’t have any fight,” Horowitz said. “They don’t have any stomach for it. . . . Stephen Miller had that from the get-go.” 
 
 Cultural-identity issues appeared to particularly animate Miller. In a column in his high school newspaper, titled “A Time to Kill,” he urged violent response to radical Islamists. 
 
 “We have all heard about how peaceful and benign the Islamic religion is, but no matter how many times you say that, it cannot change the fact that millions of radical Muslims would celebrate your death for the simple reason that you are Christian, Jewish or American,” Miller wrote. 
 
 Ari Rosmarin, a civil rights lawyer who edited the student newspaper at time, recalled that Miller was especially critical of a Mexican American student group. 
 
 “I think he’s got a very sharp understanding of what words and issues will poke and provoke progressives, because he came up around it and really cut his teeth picking these fights that had low stakes but high offense,” Rosmarin said. 
 
 That skill led Miller to become a mini-celebrity in conservative intellectual circles because of his passion, age and home town. He appeared 70 times on Elder’s show before his high school graduation, according to the host. 
 
 “He found a really unique role to play that was deeply attractive to national conservatives,” Rosmarin said. “He was like a lonely warrior behind enemy lines.” 
 
 In the halls of Santa Monica High School, though, where students and teachers took pride in their ethnic diversity and liberal values, Miller was becoming something of a pariah. That environment prompted Miller to become even more assertive, recalled one of his former teachers. 
 
 “He had to come on a little strong as a defense mechanism — just to survive,” said the teacher, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear for how colleagues would react to the defense of an alumnus so closely associated with Trump. “He came under a lot of fire, even from teachers.” 
 
 At Duke, Miller wrote a biweekly column for the student newspaper that regularly aroused the ire of classmates. 
 
 “Men and women are in many ways the same, but they’re also innately and magnificently different,” he wrote in one column that argued laws requiring men and women to be paid equally would hurt businesses and that the pay gap largely resulted from women taking time off for childbirth, being less willing to ask for raises and being less likely to take part in hazardous work. 
 
 “The point is that the pay gap has virtually nothing to do with gender discrimination,” he wrote. “Sorry, feminists. Hate to break this good news to you.” 
 
 In a column titled “The Case for Christmas,” Miller, who is Jewish, argued that the holiday should be more widely recognized as a “crucial American holiday.” 
 
 “Christianity is embedded in the very soul of our nation,” he wrote. 
 
 Miller stepped into the national spotlight after three white lacrosse players were falsely accused of rape in a case rife with racial tension. The players were eventually cleared and the local district attorney was disbarred for prosecutorial misconduct in the case. Miller wrote a series of columns about the case and appeared on national television to discuss it. 
 
 “This travesty has been allowed to continue because we live in a nation paralyzed by racial paranoia,” he wrote in November 2006, writing that professors and others were frightened to speak in defense of the students because the district attorney had turned the case into a racial crusade and opposition “would be perceived negatively by the black community and that there would be a political price to pay.” 
 
 Speaking years later about his role as an advocate for the players, Miller told The Post: “The one takeaway I have from it is that in a difficult moment, I took a stand on principle — and I was correct.” 
 
 Reflecting more broadly on his college-era columns, Miller said his writings were a good reflection of his views at the time. But, he said, “I would surely hope that any person who was a writer about political and controversial topics in college would find that their thoughts had matured on a variety of issues.” He declined to outline where his own views had changed over time. 
 
 Miller’s outspokenness in the lacrosse case first brought him to the attention of Richard Spencer, a white nationalist who was a Duke graduate student at the time. Spencer said he became friendly with Miller through the Duke Conservative Union in fall 2006. 
 
 “He was very out in front, very bold and strong,” Spencer said in an interview. 
 
 Spencer last year told the Daily Beast that he was a “mentor” to Miller, which Miller has angrily denied. 
 
 “I condemn him. I condemn his views. I have no relationship with him. He was not my friend,” Miller said. 
 
 Miller noted that he served on campus as the executive director of the leading conservative group, which put him in contact with Spencer. “Our interaction was limited to the activities of the organization, of which he was a member, and thus ceased upon graduation,” Miller said. 
 
 But Spencer said that the two met frequently during their Duke days. As first reported by Mother Jones magazine, they both helped organize an immigration debate between Peter Brimelow, an anti-immigration activist whose website has been labeled a hate site by the Southern Poverty Law Center, and Peter Laufer, who advocated for opening the southern U.S. border. Spencer praised Miller’s media savvy and organizational skills in advance of that event. 
 
 David Bitner, a friend of Miller’s who also belonged to the conservative club at Duke, said the two did interact in the small group. But Bitner called it “scurrilous libel” for Spencer to claim he was Miller’s mentor. 
 
 “Richard Spencer believes in white identity politics. Stephen Miller disavows identity politics,” he said. 
 
 Nevertheless, Miller’s role in the White House has been greeted with enthusiasm by Spencer and other white nationalist figures. 
 
 “He is not a white nationalist,” Spencer said. “But you can’t be this passionate about the immigration issue and not have a sense of the American nation as it historically emerged.” 
 
 After attending Trump’s inauguration, Jared Taylor, another high-profile white nationalist, posted a piece to his website in which he wrote that Trump is “not a racially conscious white man” but that there “are men close to him — Steve Bannon, Jeff Sessions, Stephen Miller — who may have a clearer understanding of race, and their influence could grow.” 
 
 In an interview, Taylor said he was “speculating” and that he has not met or spoken with Miller. 
 
 Miller said he has “profound objections” to the views advanced by Taylor and Spencer, saying: “I condemn this rancid ideology.” 
 
 Elder, who is black, said he has never heard Miller speak of Spencer or Taylor or express what he considers racist views. 
 
 Instead, Elder said, Miller believes as he does: “Race and racism are no longer major problems in America. This is the fairest majority-white country in the world. If you work hard and make good decisions, you’ll be fine.” 
 
 Miller said that his views at the time were best summed up in a 2005 column in the Santa Monica Mirror, titled “My Dream for the End of Racism,” in which he argued that Americans should focus on how far the country has come in overcoming such prejudice. “No one claims that racism is extinct — but it is endangered,” he wrote. “And if we are to entirely extract this venom of prejudice from the United States, I proclaim Americanism to be the key.” 
 
 Focusing on “multiculturalism,” he wrote, has had the effect of keeping different groups separate. 
 
 Miller’s White House role is in many ways a departure for an activist who has mostly seen himself as representing an oppressed political minority. Now he holds the power, helping to drive the government while working steps from the Oval Office. 
 
 Bitner said he wonders how Miller’s tactics will translate. 
 
 “I don’t think he’s had the opportunity to practice this,” he said. “These are all outsiders, many of them people who have been vocal minorities. How do you transition from there to governing?” 
 
 Alice Crites contributed to this report. ||||| poster="http://v.politico.com/images/1155968404/201608/3753/1155968404_5094054139001_5094035511001-vs.jpg?pubId=1155968404" true Trump threatens to 'tell the real story' about Morning Joe 'clowns' 
 
 Donald Trump laced into the hosts of MSNBC's morning show anew on Monday, accusing one of co-hosts of being "neurotic" and a "mess" and both of them as being "two clowns." 
 
 "Tried watching low-rated @Morning_Joe this morning, unwatchable! @morningmika is off the wall, a neurotic and not very bright mess!" Trump tweeted Monday, referring specifically to Mika Brzezinski, in response to the first hour and 20 minutes of MSNBC's "Morning Joe." 
 
 Story Continued Below 
 
 Minutes after his initial tweet, Trump offered another personal broadside. 
 
 "Some day, when things calm down, I'll tell the real story of @JoeNBC and his very insecure long-time girlfriend, @morningmika. Two clowns!" Trump tweeted, a day after campaign manager Kellyanne Conway insisted that he "doesn't hurl personal insults." 
 
 The show offered its usual criticism of the GOP nominee, returning from one commercial break to the tune of "Everything Is Awesome" from "The Lego Movie," as a clip of Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus telling ABC on Sunday that Trump had a "great week" and is "getting into a groove." 
 
 "Everything's awesome," Brzezinski said. "Everything's awesome," co-host Joe Scarborough repeated. 
 
 Brzezinski offered, "This is the part I don't understand. You just have to look at this as an opportunity, right? You can't pretend this is OK." 
 
 Scarborough mocked Trump in response, tweeting, "@HillaryClinton is targeting key swing states today while Trump starts his day obsessed with cable news hosts while channeling Gawker. SAD!" 
 
 Trump's tweets come just a day after his new campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, told ABC News that he doesn't attack people personally. 
 
 "He doesn’t hurl personal insults,” she said. ||||| At 6:56 A.M. on Friday morning, Mika Brzezinski was hustling down a fluorescent-lit hallway at 30 Rock, en route from the makeup room to the set of Morning Joe. Joe Scarborough, her co-host and recently unveiled fiancé, was trailing slightly behind her. The two anchors had intended on taking the day off in order to commence the July Fourth holiday a little early, but all planning had been thrown out the window some 24 hours earlier. On Thursday morning, of course, President Donald Trump had sent the news cycle into convulsions, and Washington into disarray, by tweeting that “low I.Q. Crazy Mika” had been “bleeding badly from a face-lift” when she and “Psycho Joe” visited him at Mar-a-Lago around New Year’s Eve. 
 
 The series of tweets immediately struck a nerve. Rival networks expressed their support for the anchors; a slew of Republican lawmakers, including Paul Ryan, Susan Collins, Ben Sasse, and Lisa Murkowski, spoke out against the tweet. Brzezinski responded, at first, by tweeting an image of the back of a box of Cheerios depicting a boy with small hands—a reference to Spy magazine, which famously called Trump a short-fingered vulgarian. (Graydon Carter, Spy’s co-founder, is the editor of Vanity Fair.) Subsequently, she and Scarborough composed an op-ed for The Washington Post to run Friday morning declaring that “America’s leaders and allies are asking themselves yet again whether this man is fit to be president. We have our doubts, but we are both certain that the man is not mentally equipped to continue watching our show.” Meanwhile, both decided to address the furor at the top of the 7 A.M. hour on Friday morning. 
 
 As they walked to the set, the newsroom seemed to orbit around them. A huddled scrum of colleagues applauded Brzezinski as she entered the set. Katy Tur, the NBC correspondent who had appeared on the first hour of Morning Joe on Friday, asked Brzezinski if she could give her a hug. The panel awaiting them around the glass desk—including Willie Geist, Katty Kay, and Donny Deutsch—resounded with choruses of "you go, girls," jokes about a missed day off, and a smattering of hugs. As a gaggle of contributors, producers, and support staff gathered to watch what Brzezinski would say, one nearby P.R. person noted that she expected they would be on for seven or eight minutes. 
 
 They stayed on for a little more than a half-hour, with no commercial breaks. “It’s unbelievably alarming that this president is so easily played,” Brzezinski said to the camera at one point. “He’s so easily played—by a cable news host. What is this saying to our allies? What is this saying to our enemies?” Scarborough echoed her concern. “We’re O.K. The country is not.” 
 
 They shared a story about how top White House aides warned them that the National Enquirer, owned by Trump’s longtime friend David Pecker, would publish a negative story about them unless they called the president and asked him to get it killed. (The president later tweeted what appeared to be a confirmation. “He called me to stop a National Enquirer article. I said no!” he wrote. Scarborough responded that this was “yet another lie.”) 
 
 Afterward, they walked off set to more claps and made their way through high-fives and fist bumps to a small hair-washing room across the hallway. Brzezinski, in jeans and tennis shoes, perched on a makeup ledge in front of a wall of mirrors, and took a breath. It had been nearly 24 hours since the president thrust personal details about her—incorrect ones, she contends—into the national spotlight. She had a feeling that the jokes she had made on air on Thursday would “tweak” the president, but she was searching for a “moment of levity,” she said. 
 
 She hadn’t seen the president’s tweets herself until she looked over at Geist on the set, who she said was looking at something on his phone and kind of angling it away from her. Her producer then told her in her ear to stay where she was; he needed to show her something. 
 
 “I said, ‘Guys! What did he tweet?’ Willie showed me, and I started laughing, and said, ‘Shit. I kind of wanted to keep that to myself,’” she said, referring to the procedure she had undergone to tighten the skin under her neck. “I had a turkey neck. My mom told me to get it done,” she explained. “I was FaceTiming all my friends, telling them to get it done, that it wasn’t so bad.” 
 
 She said that she had told Melania Trump about the procedure when the couple stopped by Mar-a-Lago on New Year’s Eve. “The irony of it all is that Donald kept saying, ‘That’s incredible. You can’t even tell. Who did it? Who did it?’ He kept asking for the name of the doctor. He literally asked 10 times. ‘Is he down here? Who is he?’” Scarborough recalled. (A spokesman from the White House declined to comment.) 
 
 In the wake of the president’s tweets, the co-hosts said their staff went quiet. “It was like they were at a funeral,” Scarborough said. “We realize we had to tell everyone we were fine with this, but they were all gone by the time we went out. They were spooked.” 
 
 It wasn’t the first time the co-hosts and their staff had to react to being on the other end of the president’s ire. Last summer, he tweeted that Brzezinski was “a neurotic and not very bright mess!” and threatened to “tell the real story” about their relationship. 
 
 Afterward, they said that the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, brokered a meeting with the four of them. Brzezinski said she explained that the tweet had caused a lot of hurt to her children and family. Trump, she said, apologized. 
 
 “Jared said we should end the meeting right then and there, because it was one of the only times he had heard him apologize,” Scarborough said. (A White House spokesman had no comment about this meeting and the apology.) 
 
 They are not holding their breath for a “sorry” this go-round. “We would take these insults seriously from anyone else,” Scarborough said. “We don’t from him, because, unfortunately, we believe he is in decline.” ||||| The hosts of MSNBC’s Morning Joe continued their blistering attacks against Stephen Miller, the senior advisor to President Donald Trump, just one day after the political aide represented the White House on the Sunday talk shows. 
 
 And despite the fact that Miller’s performance earned favor with the president himself, Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough were flabbergasted at Miller’s combative rhetoric against the judiciary. 
 
 “It’s so much worse than I thought,” said Brzezinski, who used her own Twitter account late Sunday to promote the hashtag #MillerTime2Go. 
 
 Scarborough, who previously ripped into Miller for his role in advising the executive orders on immigration, continued his brash language Monday morning. “[The president’s decisions] will be questioned my young, little Miller. They will be questioned by the Court. It’s called judicial review. Alexander Hamilton and James Madison wrote about it in the Federalist Papers. It was enshrined in Madison’s Constitution.” 
 
 “That was the worst performance out of anybody,” Scarborough continued. “That was horrendous. An embarrassment.” 
 
 On Sunday, Miller defended the president’s use of executive order, going as far as to criticize judges who dared stand in the way of the law and order presidency. “We do not have judicial supremacy in this country,” Miller said to Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday. “We have three co-equal branches of government.” 
 
 To make matters worse, Brzezinski pointed out on the Morning Joe panel Monday, “They love him. They love this guy.” 
 
 And what would happen if Miller’s assertions were actually acted upon by the administration? “We would have impeachment proceedings within the next six months. Donald Trump would be impeached,” added Scarborough sharply. 
 
 “There are some anti-Constitutional forces in that White House,” the Morning Joe co-host continued. 
 
 Watch above, via MSNBC. 
 
 [image via screengrab] 
 
 Have a tip we should know? tips@mediaite.com ||||| "Morning Joe" hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski on Friday morning forcefully responded to President Donald Trump's Twitter attack, saying it was "amazing how many lies he packed into two tweets." 
 
 The pair postponed their vacation to appear live on their MSNBC show in the wake of his Thursday morning tirade that drew outrage from across the political spectrum. They said they received calls and texts from concerned friends and family, but stressed that the president's disparaging remarks aren't really about them. 
 
 "We had so many people saying, 'Hope you're OK.' 'Hope you're OK,'" Scarborough said. "We're OK. The country's not." 
 
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 Brzezinski said: "I think it's been fascinating and frightening and really sad for our country." 
 
 In the tweets, Trump used insulting names against the cable news hosts, but the comment that drew widespread condemnation was his claim that Brzezinski "was bleeding badly from a face-lift" when he saw her on New Year's Eve. 
 
 I heard poorly rated @Morning_Joe speaks badly of me (don't watch anymore). Then how come low I.Q. Crazy Mika, along with Psycho Joe, came.. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 29, 2017 
 
 ...to Mar-a-Lago 3 nights in a row around New Year's Eve, and insisted on joining me. She was bleeding badly from a face-lift. I said no! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 29, 2017 
 
 Scarborough on Friday said the president has an "unhealthy obsession with Mika" and is "much more vicious with women." 
 
 "He appears to have a fragile, impetuous, childlike ego that we’ve seen over and over again, especially with women," Brzezinski added. 
 
 Scarborough and Brzezinski moderate a town hall during the presidential primaries with Trump in Charleston, South Carolina on Feb. 17, 2016. Mark Peterson / Redux for NBC News file 
 
 Before Trump tweeted Thursday morning, Scarborough and Brzezinski were on "Morning Joe" discussing reports that Time magazine had asked the Trump Organization to remove phony covers featuring him from several of his golf clubs. 
 
 "I thought it was hilarious ... I knew in real time that the president would be tweaked by that," Brzezinski said. 
 
 "It is unbelievably alarming that this president is so easily played by a cable news host," she added. 
 
 Trump tweeted a response about two hours after Brzezinski and Scarborough went on air Friday, saying he tuned in to the show, "for first time in long time." 
 
 Watched low rated @Morning_Joe for first time in long time. FAKE NEWS. He called me to stop a National Enquirer article. I said no! Bad show — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 30, 2017 
 
 Scarborough then tweeted: "Yet another lie. I have texts from your top aides and phone records. Also, those records show I haven't spoken with you in many months." 
 
 Scarborough said on the show that the National Enquirer was working on a story about him and Brzezinski, but that the tabloid would "spike" the story if they apologized to the president for their coverage of him. 
 
 "Donald is friends with the guy who runs the National Enquirer," Scarborough said on the show. 
 
 "They were pinning the story on my ex-husband," Brzezinski added. "And I knew he would never do that. So I knew it was a lie and they had nothing." 
 
 National Enquirer editor-in-chief Dylan Howard responded after the show that a story was reported in early June about Scarborough and Brzezinski's relationship, but that "at no time did we threaten either Joe or Mika or their children in connection with our reporting on the story. We have no knowledge of any discussions between the White House and Joe and Mika about our story, and absolutely no involvement in those discussions.” 
 
 In a Friday op-ed in The Washington Post, Scarborough and Brzezinski said they were concerned that Trump's "unmoored behavior" is going beyond personal attacks. 
 
 "America's leaders and allies are asking themselves yet again whether this man is fit to be president," they wrote. "We have our doubts, but we are both certain that the man is not mentally equipped to continue watching our show, 'Morning Joe.'" 
 
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 "The president's unhealthy obsession with our show has been in the public record for months, and we are seldom surprised by his posting nasty tweets about us," Scarborough and Brzezinski wrote, adding that they "believe it would be better for America and the rest of the world if he would keep his 60-inch-plus flat-screen TV tuned to 'Fox & Friends.'" 
 
 The pair said on "Morning Joe" that it was Trump, then-president-elect, who invited them to dinner at Mar-a-Lago on Dec. 30. Scarborough said Brzezinski opted not to go, but then she changed her mind after Trump asked Scarborough if she could visit the next day. 
 
 Brzezinski said they had a short meeting with Trump and the first lady that following night before quietly exiting. 
 
 "We were shuffled into a side room — it was actually a bedroom — talked for 20 minutes. We left through this party of people dressed to the nines," she said. 
 
 They also disputed Trump's claim about Brzezinski's face, writing in The Post that "Mika has never had a face-lift." Brzezinski said on "Morning Joe" that she had skin under her chin "tweaked." 
 
 Related: Trump’s Diatribes Against the Press Are Producing a Backlash 
 
 "He takes something small, he tries to weaponize it," Scarborough said. "This has been one of our great frustrations. He just ends up hurting himself." 
 
 Scarborough said he was alarmed when he got a call from a member of Congress who told him that Trump was speaking to about 20 lawmakers on the health care bill when the talk suddenly shifted to the "Morning Joe" hosts. 
 
 The congressman said the president mentioned how Brzezinski had been bleeding from an apparent face-lift and appeared in a rage, according to Scarborough. 
 
 "This congressman said, 'I don't even know why I'm calling you, but I was scared for you guys and wanted you to know,'" Scarborough said. 
 
 MSNBC issued a response Thursday as the comments sparked backlash from both sides of the aisle and reignited Trump's past remarks related to women that have been decried as sexist. 
 
 It’s a sad day for America when the president spends his time bullying, lying and spewing petty personal attacks instead of doing his job. — MSNBCPR (@MSNBCPR) June 29, 2017 
 
 When asked about Trump's tweets, House Speaker Paul Ryan told reporters Thursday: "Obviously I don't see that as an appropriate comment." 
 
 Several members of Trump's own Republican Party tweeted messages denouncing the president's posts. 
 
 This is not okay. As a female in politics I am often criticized for my looks. We should be working to empower women. https://t.co/sV6WDE0EUD — Lynn Jenkins (@RepLynnJenkins) June 29, 2017 
 
 Mr. President, your tweet was beneath the office and represents what is wrong with American politics, not the greatness of America. — Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) June 29, 2017 
 
 Trump was a frequent guest on "Morning Joe" during the start of his 2016 presidential run. But his contentious relationship with the media has only grown since taking office earlier this year. He attacked CNN, The Post and The New York Times on Twitter earlier this week. 
 
 White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders responded to the furor by saying that voters "knew what they were getting when they elected Donald Trump." She said Trump was defending himself against continuing personal attacks from the "liberal media." 
 
 "The president has been attacked mercilessly on personal accounts by members on that program ('Morning Joe'), and I think he's been very clear that when he gets attacked he's going to hit back," Sanders said at a Thursday press briefing. ||||| MSNBC hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski Friday accused the White House of threatening them with a negative tabloid story as a way to extract an apology for their tough comments on President Donald Trump. 
 
 In an op-ed article in the Washington Post, and then in a live appearance on "Morning Joe," the couple said top White House officials warned them earlier this year that the National Enquirer was planning an exposé about their relationship, and urged them to beg Trump to get the paper to back off. 
 
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 The accusation came a day after Trump attacked the newly engaged couple on Twitter. Scarborough and Brzezinski were friendly with Trump in the early months of his candidacy, and had him on their show often. Scarborough and Brzezinski told Vanity Fair that when they visited the White House just after Trump's inauguration, the president suggested he could host their wedding, or officiate. 
 
 But that warmness has evaporated, as Scarborough and Brzezinski have stepped up their criticism of him, and Trump has lobbed back invective. 
 
 "The president and his relationship with the media is now starting to resemble 'The Jerry Springer Show' at its worst, with taunts and insults and name calling," said Jonathan Marshall, a professor at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism. While bashing journalists works well with his base of supporters, "I don't think it's good for his presidency in the long term or the country in the long term." 
 
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 Scarborough said on "Morning Joe" that he got calls from "three people at the very top of the administration" pointing out that Trump was friends with "the guy that runs the National Enquirer." 
 
 It was an apparent reference to David Pecker, the chief executive of American Media, Inc., which publishes the Enquirer. Pecker is a longtime friend of Trump, and their friendship was the subject of a New Yorker article this week. 
 
 The Enquirer has been reliably pro-Trump. It helped Trump launch his campaign by running personal essays about him. It published critical articles about his rivals, including an attempt to link Sen. Ted Cruz's father to John F. Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. And it often portrayed President Trump as heroic with headlines such as “TRUMP’S PROFILE IS IDEAL FOR THE COMMANDER IN CHIEF, SAY TOP EXPERTS” and "TRUMP DECLARES WAR ON DICTATORS!” 
 
 Scarborough, describing his conversations with the White House aides, continued: "And they said, if you call the president up and you apologize for your coverage, then he will pick up the phone and basically spike the story." 
 
 Scarborough and Brzezinski moderate a town hall during the presidential primaries with Trump in Charleston, South Carolina on Feb. 17, 2016. Mark Peterson/Redux / Redux for NBC News file 
 
 Prior to the reporters' calls, Brzezinski said, the Enquirer had been phoning her teenage daughters and friends for comment on the story, citing her ex-husband as a source. Scarborough added that he'd encountered a man in a van outside her home, and believed the man was a reporter staking her out. 
 
 Scarborough and Brzezinski said they refused to make calls to Trump about the story. 
 
 But Trump tweeted after the segment that Scarborough actually had called him to spike the story, and he refused. 
 
 Watched low rated @Morning_Joe for first time in long time. FAKE NEWS. He called me to stop a National Enquirer article. I said no! Bad show — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 30, 2017 
 
 Scarborough responded by calling Trump a liar. "I have texts from your top aides and phone records," Scarborough tweeted. 
 
 Yet another lie. I have texts from your top aides and phone records. Also, those records show I haven't spoken with you in many months. https://t.co/TZWiElo6Gs — Joe Scarborough (@JoeNBC) June 30, 2017 
 
 The story ran in the Enquirer on June 2 with the headline, "Joe & Mike: TV Couple's Sleazy Cheating Scandal." 
 
 The Enquirer tweeted out the story after Friday's "Morning Joe" segment and said later on its website that it wasn't involved in any discussions between the White House and the television personalities. 
 
 Related: ‘Morning Joe’ Hosts Respond to Trump’s Tweets: ‘We’re OK. The Country’s Not’ 
 
 "At the beginning of June, we accurately reported a story that recounted the relationship between Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, the truth of which is not in dispute," Dylan Howard, chief content officer at American Media, Inc., said in a statement. 
 
 "At no time did we threaten either Joe or Mika or their children in connection with our reporting on the story. We have no knowledge of any discussions between the White House and Joe and Mika about our story, and absolutely no involvement in those discussions," Howard said. 
 
 The spat is part of a pattern by Trump to undermine the media, which could be dangerous, said Marvin Kalb, a former reporter for NBC News, who researches the impact of media on public policy and politics at The Brookings Institution. 
 
 "The thing that is upsetting to a lot of people who care about the way this country works is the time the president puts into an argument with an anchorman or woman would better be spent on health care or foreign affairs or what it is that the president said during the campaign ─ that many middle-class people need help," Kalb said. "Well, help them. This is your opportunity." 
 
 Theodore Glasser, a communications professor at Stanford University, said it was "perfectly reasonable" for Scarborough and Brzezinski to harshly criticize Trump and for Trump to do the same to them, as long as it involves a discourse about issues, and an acknowledgment of the role of a free press in a democratic society. 
 
 "But that’s not what he's doing," Glasser said. "He’s being mean and spiteful." ||||| Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough slammed President Donald Trump Friday morning as they returned to the air after he personally attacked the Morning Joe hosts in a pair of tweets on Thursday. 
 
 “Unfortunately, we’ve learned what we’ve always learned. He for some reason takes things very personally with women. He’s so much worse with women,” Scarborough said. 
 
 He added: “He attacks women.” 
 
 Brzezinski, whom Trump called “low-IQ, crazy” in a tweet and claimed she was “bleeding from a face-lift” when he last saw her, assured viewers that she has not taken the attacks to heart – but she’s concerned about the state of the nation. 
 
 “I’m fine. My family brought me up really tough,” said the host, who is the daughter of renowned diplomat Zbigniew Brzezinski, who served two presidents. 
 
 “He has a fixation. Its does worry me about the country. He appears to have a fragile, impetuous, childlike ego that he can’t take it,” she added. 
 
 “It is unbelievably alarming that this president is so easily played. He is so easily played by a cable news host. 
 
 After their on-air comments Friday morning, Trump took to Twitter once again to attack the show — and lob an attack at Scarborough. 
 
 “Watched low rated @Morning_Joe for first time in long time. FAKE NEWS. He called me to stop a National Enquirer article. I said no! Bad show,” he wrote. 
 
 Watched low rated @Morning_Joe for first time in long time. FAKE NEWS. He called me to stop a National Enquirer article. I said no! Bad show — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 30, 2017 
 
 PEOPLE previously confirmed the engaged couple delayed their July 4th holiday vacation in order to address the president’s tweets on-air. 
 
 Trump, 71, took to Twitter early Thursday morning with a series of insults aimed at Brzezinski, 50, and Scarborough, 54. 
 
 “I heard poorly rated @Morning_Joe speaks badly of me (don’t watch anymore). Then how come low I.Q. Crazy Mika, along with Psycho Joe, came to Mar-a-Lago 3 nights in a row around New Year’s Eve, and insisted on joining me,” Trump wrote. “She was bleeding badly from a face-lift. I said no!” 
 
 I heard poorly rated @Morning_Joe speaks badly of me (don't watch anymore). Then how come low I.Q. Crazy Mika, along with Psycho Joe, came.. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 29, 2017 
 
 …to Mar-a-Lago 3 nights in a row around New Year's Eve, and insisted on joining me. She was bleeding badly from a face-lift. I said no! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 29, 2017 
 
 Brzezinski was quick to respond to Trump’s tweets on Thursday. The mother of two shared a photo of a Cheerios box with the headline “Made for Little Hands.” 
 
 She opened up about the Mar-a-Lago meetings on Friday, revealing that she and Scarborough didn’t want to go to the Palm Beach estate but “Donald kept calling Joe.” 
 
 After initially meeting with Scarborough, Trump allegedly insisted on Brzezinski visiting Mar-a-Lago as well — “For some reason he was more interested in Mika being there than me,” Scarborough said. 
 
 RELATED VIDEO: Natasha Stoynoff Breaks Silence, Accuses Donald Trump of Sexual Attack 
 
 The couple went together the next night and Brzezinski said they spoke with Melania and Trump for just 20 minutes before leaving. 
 
 “Speaking of my face … I had my chin tweaked,” Brzezinski said, responding to Trumps face-lift claims. “I’m pretty transparent about what I do and I think it looks great. 
 
 Many were upset by Trump’s tweets, including politicians. But some of the most biting comments came from fellow Republicans who condemned the president’s morning rant. 
 
 Brzezinski and Scarborough initially responded to the attack in a Washington Post opinion piece. In the article, they opened up about their past experiences with the embattled president, including a National Enquirer article he allegedly threatened to use to cast the pair in a negative light. 
 
 The political commentators alleged that “top White House staff members” told them that the publication was planning to write a negative story about them unless they “begged” Trump to have it spiked. 
 
 “Let me explain what they were threatening,” Brzezinski said on Friday, referring to National Enquirer officials. “They were calling my children. They were calling close friends and they were pinning the story on my ex-husband [Jim Hoffer] … I knew immediately that it was a lie and that they had nothing.” 
 
 Good time to remind you that @MorningMika is smart as hell, stronger than any critic, & a role model for what we hope our daughters can be. — Willie Geist (@WillieGeist) June 29, 2017 
 
 Scarborough said that he received numerous calls from White House officials, begging him to call the president and offer an apology for the morning show’s coverage. 
 
 “The president is friends with the guy who runs the National Enquirer and they said, ‘If you call the president and you apologize for your coverage then he will pick up the phone and basically spike the story,’ ” Scarborough recalled. 
 
 “I’m not gonna do it. The calls kept coming and kept coming and they were like, ‘Call! You need to call! Please call! Come on, Joe. Just pick up the phone and call [Trump].” 
 
 American Media Inc., the parent company of the National Enquirer, did not immediately respond to request for comment. 
 
 .@morningmika: "It’s been fascinating and frightening and really sad for our country" #morningjoe pic.twitter.com/Ch9fekp905 — Morning Joe (@Morning_Joe) June 30, 2017 
 
 This isn’t the first time Trump has called out members of the media or commented on their appearance. 
 
 Earlier this week, the President was criticized by some after singling out Ireland RTE’s U.S. Bureau Chief, Caitriona Perry, during an Oval Office phone call with Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar. 
 
 “She has a nice smile on her face, so I bet she treats you well,” Trump told Varadkar on the phone after he had called Perry over. 
 
 In addition, Trump has had a long-running feud with Fox News-turned-NBC News anchor Megyn Kelly since the first presidential primary debate, when he said that “she had blood coming out of her wherever” after she grilled him during the debate. ||||| At 5:40 P.M. on Saturday evening, Mika Brzezinski hurried out of a black S.U.V. a few dozen yards from the back entrance of the National Archives. An umbrella was popped open for her, and she walked into the historic library in order to get married to her longtime Morning Joe colleague and partner, Joe Scarborough, in front of the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Bill of Rights. 
 
 Part of the popularity of the Scarzinski relationship derives from the fact that, despite their prominent roles as hosts of perhaps the most influential news program in American politics, their romance has been handled with militant discretion. The couple, who got engaged last spring at the Hotel du Cap in Antibes, France, never talk about their relationship on the air, are seldom photographed together at social events, or spotted at restaurants, on vacation, at parties. This discipline has lent the duo an unexpected celebrity air, rendering them a sort of Brangelina of the political-media in-crowd—a credential more or less certified when Donald Trump offered to have them married at the White House during a visit in 2017. They declined the offer. 
 
 Their wedding was handled with similar secrecy. Washington was a post-Thanksgiving ghost town: Congress was out of session, the president was in Palm Beach, much of the city's permanent class was away for the holiday or at home in suburban Maryland or Northern Virginia. Most of the people working for the vendors did not know the identity of the betrothed until Saturday evening, and many of the reservations were made under a friend’s name. The couple did not send out any formal invitations; they made about 14 phone calls to their family members and close friends, and none of the guests knew where the dinner was until Saturday evening. They chose this date because people with prying eyes would be out of town, but it would also work with their kids’ school schedules (Scarborough has four children from two previous marriages; Brzezinski has two daughters from her first marriage). “We wanted it to be really small and simple and not what you expected from Mika and Joe,” Brzezinski explained on Saturday. “Everything we do is exposed, and everything felt exposed every step of the way, so we want this to be private until it’s over. We wanted to recognize it more quietly and have the people who are most important to us around us. And you know, our show is a cocktail party every morning.” 
 
 Scarborough playfully interrupted. “Not a cocktail party. A coffee. We have three hours talking to our good friends every morning,” explaining how a rotating cast of their friends make their way onto their set from 6 to 9 A.M. each weekday to help make sense of the news (disclosure: as an MSNBC contributor, I appear on Morning Joe to talk about my reporting for Vanity Fair). “We made the decision a year ago to dramatically change our lives and have a low-key existence,” he added. “The more time we can spend with our family, the happier we are.” 
 
 The monsoon-like weather made the secret easier to keep: the sidewalks were almost entirely clear and most people in the city were huddled inside. Brzezinski had absconded from the nearby Ritz-Carlton sheathed in a bathrobe to keep dry and keep her dress hidden. The Archives, closed to the public on Saturday evening and almost entirely empty apart from security and staff, were opened to accommodate the couple and five guests, plus their children. It was the first time a wedding has ever been held there. 
 
 Brzezinski wore a stark-white, tea-length Milly dress, with delicate, polka-dotted lace sleeves that swept into a sweetheart neckline, created by her friend, designer Michelle Smith. Her shoes were custom-made by designer Layla-Joy Williams, who flew to her factory in Brazil with fabric from the dress to make sure the pointy-toed stilettos were just right. Scarborough, for his part, wore a black Zegna suit from his on-air rotation, what he called a Robert Mueller-approved white shirt and a traditional black wedding tie. He affixed a boutonniere with a white orchid and green sprigs to his lapel. 
 
 A few minutes after 6:30 P.M., a string quartet—two of whom nearly missed the ceremony, stuck in transit—began a brief set of songs they discovered in the C.D. collection of Brzezinski’s father, Zbigniew, who passed away just before their engagement. As Handel’s “The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba” began, the couple each entered from a separate end of the rotunda, walking toward each other to meet in a bronze circle in the center of the main room, with inlays that read “history,” “justice,” and detail the Ten Commandments. On the bride’s side was her mother, Emilie, and her two of her closest friends, Laura Erlacher and Susan Castallanos. On the groom’s, two close friends of the couple, Rachel and Dr. David Campbell, who hosted the wedding and dinner for them. “We did an event there more than a year ago and we were just blown away, seeing all these documents and how we felt seeing them,” Brzezinski told me before the ceremony, explaining how they settled on the rotunda in the Archives, with its 70-foot ceilings and those three historic documents framed behind glass, as the place where they wanted to marry. “It makes sense now more than ever, given what we stand for as a couple, what we do for a living, and what we’re worried about as a country.” 
 
 They walked past the five cameras set up to capture the ceremony, and up the four steps that brought them to their officiant, Representative Elijah Cummings, who has represented Maryland’s 7th Congressional District in the House of Representatives since 1996. Cummings started a traditional ceremony, which he and Scarborough had written together. (Along with the music and the ceremony scripting, Scarborough had a hand in planning details for the day, though he explained that he was translating Brzezinski’s wishes. “I was really Mika’s wedding planner,” he joked. “I did what she told me to do.”) The congressman talked about knowing the groom from their time together in Congress, and the bride and her family over the years in Washington. There was a reading from the Old Testament (Ruth 1:16-17), one from the New Testament (First Corinthians), the question of whether anyone objected to the union (no one did), the exchange of vows (which they each wrote themselves) and a prayer for the couple. By 6:46 P.M., Cummings pronounced them married and told Scarborough that he could kiss the bride (which he did). “My mom would always say that she loved Episcopalian services because they marry you and bury you in 15 minutes or less,” Scarborough told me earlier in the day. At that point, the couple’s children and close family came into the rotunda to greet the newlyweds and take photos (Her daughters chose not to be at the actual ceremony but wanted to support their mom). So, too, followed Brzezinski’s daughter Emilie’s little black rescue dog, Cali, who arrived on a Tiffany-colored leash (her traditional something blue). 
 
 Courtesy of Miller Hawkins. 
 
 Cummings, who has led the charge in probing President Trump as ranking member of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, also bore the weight of symbolism. “He’s a representative of the movement forward, of getting the country back,” Brzezinski said. The couple denied that the decision was intended to suggest possible presidential aspirations for Scarborough, whose name is often invoked in putative 2020 and 2024 conversations. “We didn’t think of that at all,” Brzezinski told me. “But I’m sure people will say that.”
– The name Stephen Miller has been in the news a great deal since the inauguration, often paired with Steve Bannon as President Trump's top advisers. Over the weekend, however, the 31-year-old Miller got his biggest exposure yet as he appeared on four Sunday talk shows to defend Trump policies, particularly on immigration. The boss was a big fan: "Congratulations Stephen Miller- on representing me this morning on the various Sunday morning shows. Great job!" Trump tweeted. Related coverage about Miller: A Washington Post profile calls him a "key engineer" of Trump's "America First" agenda and notes that Miller first began voicing his conservative views while still in high school, in phone calls to a national radio show. He didn't let up as a college student at Duke. The word "workaholic" comes to mind. As an aide to then Sen. Jeff Sessions, Miller wrote so many emails to Republican colleagues that they were essentially regarded as spam, according to a New York Times profile. A post at Breitbart pushes back against the Times' characterization: "Miller is a tough and determined populist, but he is portrayed merely as a bomb-throwing email spammer in the article." Read the defense of Miller here. On the Sunday talk shows, Miller made several claims about voter fraud being a problem in the US. The Washington Post Fact Checker blog goes through them one by one and gives Miller its worst rating of four Pinocchios, "over and over again." One of Miller's most-quoted lines from Sunday: “The end result of this, though, is that our opponents, the media, and the whole world will soon see as we begin to take further actions, that the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned." It came during his appearance on Face the Nation. See the clip. The Week compiles highlights from all his appearances in a two-minute clip here. Trump may have been a fan, but Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski were not. They panned Miller's appearances during the Morning Joe show Monday. "That was horrendous, an embarrassment," said Scarborough, per Mediaite, which has the clip. Brzezinski even started a #MillerTime2Go hashtag. Sean Hannity of Fox soon came to Miller's defense: "Steve Miller works 18 hour days serving the country and the @POTUS," he tweeted to Scarborough. "What do you do? Basically talk to yourself & @morningmika Nobody watches!"