Miller is the uber-architect of Trump’s racist and deliberately cruel mass deportation program. His agenda is no secret: Make America White Again and destroy the left, which he regularly denounces—in Nazi-like fashion—as an existential threat to the nation. America went blue last week; Miller wants blood. Perhaps literally. (Soon after federal agents in January killed Alex Pretti, Miller called the slain intensive care nurse and anti-ICE protester a “would-be assassin” and “domestic terrorist”—as if Pretti deserved to be shot dead in the street.)
As you know, White House chief of staff is perhaps the most powerful position in the US government after the president. He or she controls access to the president, filtering what officials and information reach the Oval Office. When the chief of staff passes directions to agencies and federal officials, the presumption is that these instructions come from the top dog.
Miller may well become the de facto president. Trump is old, tired, and declining cognitively. Miller is not. He is zealously committed to his mission of booting out dark-skinned people and exterminating the left. He has the desire (bloodlust?) and energy to vigorously pursue these tasks, and he is now well positioned to manipulate the system—which he knows well after years of service in both Trump administrations—and bark out orders to federal entities to pursue his malevolent goals.
Will these orders be coming from him or from Trump? Who will really be in charge? Who knows? There will be no one in the chain of command between him and Trump who might question or impede Miller’s extremism. Certainly not Vice President JD Vance, whose first move after the decimation of the GOP was to tweet out a statement blaming Trump’s Iran war for the disaster. That might have been necessary to preserve his shot in 2028. But it’s hard to believe it enhanced Vance’s standing at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Miller is poised to shape the second half of Trump’s rerun presidency in his own image—which is an ugly and frightening one. His thirst for vengeance matches Trump’s. His hunger for eradicating their political enemies may exceed Trump’s. (On 60 Minutes, Trump told conservative correspondent Ross Douthat that even if forgiving his political enemies—such as Nancy Pelosi and James Comey—would be necessary for his entrance to heaven, he still couldn’t do it.)
Miller, who as a high school student jokingly (or not) advocated for the use of torture, has fervently embraced a might-makes-right ethos. Earlier this year, he proclaimed, “We live in a world, in the real world…that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.” Now he has immense power, and he will use it.
This will be a dangerous stretch, as Miller mobilizes the force of the federal government to conduct a political massacre. His crusade is likely to further tarnish the discredited and tattered GOP, especially as Democrats move quickly to promote legislation and actions aimed at improving the lot of many Americans. But it’s clear that Miller and Trump don’t give a damn about the Republican Party’s reputation or forging compromises. Scorched earth it will be, with a power-crazed Miller leading the way.
I’m traveling at the moment, so I’ll leave it at this. A year ago, I wrote a piece for this newsletter prophetically (I believe) headlined “The Stephen Millerization of the GOP.” The article related a telling encounter I had with him years ago and reported on his ongoing project to vilify and eviscerate the left. Alas, it remains highly relevant. So here it is once more.
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About a dozen years ago, a staffer for Sen. Jeff Sessions, the ultraconservative Republican from Alabama, reached out to me and asked if we could meet. I don’t hear from too many GOP aides on Capitol Hill, so I was game. We rendezvoused at a coffee shop around the corner from my office. The aide was eager to pitch me an idea. Shouldn’t liberals who care about American workers make common cause with immigration restrictionists? Fewer immigrants, he contended, would mean more jobs available for American citizens. And if these were the sort of jobs employers had trouble hiring for, those owners would then have to pay workers more—and Americans would earn more. How could unions and liberals not support this?
He was quite earnest and a tad nerdy, and he discussed this notion with a missionary zeal. It was clear he was not having much success on the Hill connecting with Democrats or Republicans on this. He was an outsider and reminded me of those proud libertarians I had met in college who were certain they had figured everything out and didn’t understand why others didn’t embrace their logic-driven ideology. I told the fellow that I was hardly a representative for liberals or labor but that I would think about what he said. Nothing concrete came out of our conversation. I pinged the aide a few times with questions about in-the-news matters involving the Senate, and he replied, usually with information that was not that useful. What struck me most was that he was so sure he had found the path for America’s future and that he just needed to persuade the unenlightened (like me) to see it.
His name was Stephen Miller.
Years later, I was surprised to see him as a top commander in Trump’s MAGA army. Sessions, the first GOP senator to endorse Trump in the 2016 campaign, had brought him into the fold. Though Trump fired Sessions less than two years into his stint as attorney general, Miller remained in Trump’s inner circle, becoming a top enabler—perhaps the most important one—of Trump’s dangerous id and a power-hungry extremist guiding Trump’s crusade of nativism and march toward authoritarianism.
When I first met Miller, he did not seem like a likely propagandist for autocracy. I guess you never know.
These days, Miller, as Trump’s mini-me, has been paving the way for Trump’s war on dissent—and that’s a literal war, with Trump deploying troops to cities to do battle with protesters (who tend to be peaceful) and to show Democrats that he’s a strongman who can exert military power to seize control of their cities and states.
In remarks and social media posts over the past few weeks, Miller has declared that Trump as president has unlimited power; that “left-wing terrorism” is rampant across the land; that Democrats support violence against Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, back “domestic terrorists,” and are a “domestic extremist organization”; and that governors, mayors, and judges who oppose and block Trump’s deployments of troops to American cities are engaged in an “insurrection.” He claims there’s a war raging in America’s cities due to antifa, ICE protesters, and hordes of criminals; he’s obviously attempting to establish a predicate for Trump invoking the Insurrection Act and expanding his use of troops within the United States to solidify his rule.
Miller was a force behind Trump’s recent moves to designate antifa, a decentralized movement, as a “domestic terrorist organization,” which Trump had no authority to do, and to issue a National Security Presidential Memorandum that associates a variety of political views—“anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality”—with “violent and terroristic activities.” As the Brennan Center for Justice notes:
This breathtakingly broad list easily encompasses everyone from labor organizers, socialists, many libertarians, those who criticize Christianity, pro-immigration groups, anti-ICE protestors, and racial justice and transgender activists, to anyone who holds views that the administration considers to be “anti-American.” Under NSPM-7, the antifascist label can be attached to any of these types of people and groups and many more besides, giving the government maximum flexibility to pick and choose its targets.
As the center says, much of this memo “is squarely directed at speech and nonviolent action by organizations and individuals protected by the First Amendment.”
The Trump-Miller effort to delegitimize, if not criminalize, freedom of speech and protest has been embraced by Capitol Hill Republicans. This Saturday, there will again be No Kings marches and rallies across the nation opposing Trump. Millions could turn out for this event—in a continuation of the peaceful demonstrations that were held in June that drew an estimated 4 to 6 million participants. And this seems to scare Republicans.
On Friday, during a press briefing held by House Republican leaders, Rep. Tom Emmer (R-Minn.), the majority whip, exclaimed that the “terrorist wing” of the Democratic Party was “set to hold…a hate-America rally in DC.”
