In setting the stage for Trump’s primetime address, White House officials had insisted the president was making a good-faith effort to win over skeptics of his border-wall proposal and get the government reopened. But the speech he ended up giving was not calibrated for persuasion. It was, by and large, dark, divisive, and shot through with the kind of calculated provocation that rallies the president’s fans and riles his enemies. It was, in other words, classic Stephen Miller.

This is an approach Miller has been honing since his teenage years in Santa Monica, California, where he rebelled against the native culture of affluent liberalism by listening to Rush Limbaugh and quoting books by right-wing ideologues like Wayne LaPierre. At Santa Monica High School—the kind of place where proto-woke students organized “racial-harmony retreats”—Miller delighted in offending his peers’ progressive sensibilities. In some ways, he has never stopped, as I reported in my profile of Miller last year.

This instinct for agitation permeates every line Miller writes in the White House—even the ones Trump ends up delivering in his serious, presidential voice. Consider, for example, the most-praised bit from Tuesday night’s speech: