When John Miller speaks, he’s discursive, darting from topic to topic in a whirlwind fashion. He often says “uh” and “you know,” a cross between a silver-tongued car salesman and any confident suit and tie on the streets of Manhattan. Miller has an oft-used pseudonym, a monosyllabic word that is fixated on the side of giant buildings from Chicago to Las Vegas, Panama to Bali: Trump. Or rather, Miller is an alter ego of Trump’s, a faux-publicist the presidential hopeful would apparently pose as in interviews with journalists in the decades before “The Apprentice” and closed door meetings with Paul Ryan, sharing stories about “Donald” as if he wasn’t the Don himself.
On Friday morning, The Washington Post released a recording of an interview between journalist Sue Carswell and Miller (Trump) conducted in 1991. Carswell, researching a story on Trump’s divorce for People magazine, phoned Trump’s office to ask him about his recent divorce from his first wife Ivana. Instead, she got Miller.
“He’s coming out of a marriage, and he’s starting to do tremendously well financially. As you saw, he got his licenses five to nothing the other day and totally unanimous. And he’s really been working hard and doing well. And probably, as you know, there’s a real estate depression in the United States and he’s probably doing as well as anybody there is. And frankly, he wants to keep it that way. And he just thought it was too soon to make any commitment to anybody,” Miller told Carswell when asked about Trump’s divorce.
It’s all there: the self-inflation, the hyperbole, the inability to commit.
And then there’s this gem of a story, in which Miller addresses Trump’s rumored affair with Carla Bruni Tedeschi, an Italian model at the time who would go on to marry the now former president of France, Nicholas Sarkozy:
What she was having a very big thing with Mick Jagger. And then what happened, she was going with Eric Clapton, and Eric Clapton introduced her to Mick Jagger, and then Mick Jagger started calling her, and she ended up going with Mick Jagger. And then she dropped Mick Jagger for Donald, and that’s where it is right now. And again, he’s not making any commitments to Carla either just so you understand.
Let’s examine a little nugget that was buried in that beautiful anecdote: “And then she dropped Mick Jagger for Donald.” That’s right up there with “Mexico will pay for it” and “ban all Muslims.”
And considering recent comments (and the fact that he denies being the man posing as Miller), perhaps President Trump’s cabinet will be entirely made up of John Millers–all different facets of Trump’s expertise, his deep knowledge of complex subjects, and his understanding of the scope of history. It’s a one man puppet show called “Make America Great Again,” where Trump is both puppet and puppeteer.