A Trump official is being raked over the coals for what he did in the third grade when he was 8 years old.
Remember our discussion Are Adults Still Responsible for What They Did as Minors? That was occasioned by Brett Kavanaugh being accused for things he did as a high school student. I asked how far back we should go in unearthing bad behavior that adults should still be held responsible for. I raised some hypothetical cases, including one exaggerated for effect about a five-year-old boy who hit his sister getting accused of violence against women when he is an adult. I also warned that the Kavanaugh accusations might set a precedent for criticizing adults for what they did as children. Well, it is happening.
Stephen Miller is President Trump’s senior political advisor. His third grade teacher wrote a piece for Hollywood Reporter saying that when he was 8 years old, Miller was dirty and a “loner.” Also he ate glue.
From Nikki Fiske, as told to Benjamin Svetkey, Stephen Miller’s Third-Grade Teacher: He Was a “Loner” and Ate Glue:
Do you remember that character in Peanuts, the one called Pig Pen, with the dust cloud and crumbs flying all around him? That was Stephen Miller at 8. I was always trying to get him to clean up his desk — he always had stuff mashed up in there. He was a strange dude. I remember he would take a bottle of glue — we didn’t have glue sticks in those days — and he would pour the glue on his arm, let it dry, peel it off and then eat it.
I remember being concerned about him — not academically. He was OK with that, though I could never read his handwriting. But he had such strange personal habits. He was a loner and isolated and off by himself all the time.
[Keep reading. . .]
How could we let someone of such low character, who did something so heinous as eat glue, work in the White House?
By the way, this does not come from the Onion or any other satirical site. This is not a joke, unless it turns out to be like one of those academic pranks designed to see just how outlandish a claim can be and yet get published. Again, this was published by the Hollywood Reporter.
But that raises another question: Why did that trade journal publish this story? It has nothing to do with movies, acting, or the entertainment industry, other than that industry’s overall hatred for anything and anyone having to do with President Trump.
Photo: Stephen Miller by Gage Skidmore [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], from Wikimedia Commons
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