This is why Stephen Miller and his choice to replace trump matters, for those who were wondering why I started this thread. Miller is not going to step down when trump leaves the presidency, whether upright or horizontally. Miller is driven, and he will want the next Republican president to be as much his puppet as trump is/was. He is behind a lot of the things we despise about the trump administration.
(This is supposed to be a gift link. You may be asked to create a free login in order to read it. I’ll quote as much as I think I can get away with.)
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Donald Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy ruthlessly pursues the president’s vision, especially when it comes to pushing immigrants out of the country, and he runs a tight, efficient meeting. Consensus is not the goal.
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In Trump’s inner circle—even with the president himself—Miller is known as a dogmatic force whose ideas are sometimes too extreme for public consumption. “I’d love to have him come up and explain his true feelings—maybe not his truest feelings,” the president joked at an Oval Office briefing in October. But in Trump’s second term, Miller finds himself at the height of his powers—the pulsing human id of a president who is already almost pure id.
Miller has tried to recast the nation’s partisan political disagreements as an existential conflict, a battle pitting “forces of wickedness and evil” against the nation’s noble, virtuous people—a mostly native-born crowd that traces its lineage and legacy “back to Athens, to Rome, to Philadelphia, to Monticello.” He accuses federal judges of “legal insurrection” for ruling against Trump’s policies, describes the Democratic Party as a “domestic extremist organization,” and dismisses the results of even legal immigration programs as “the Somalification of America.” And he has declared an end to the post–World War II order of “international niceties” in favor of a world that rebukes the weak, “that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” as he put it this week when discussing recent military action against Venezuela.
Along with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Miller was the chief force behind Trump’s decision to capture the Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro. “We are a superpower, and under President Trump, we are going to conduct ourselves as a superpower,” Miller told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Monday, articulating a worldview that started with the fear of immigration but has gradually expanded to a broader national-security and rule-of-law argument.
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Miller is now acting as an accelerant for the president’s most incendiary impulses and shaping the lives of individual Americans in nearly every realm. He has demonstrated neither the interest nor the ability to moderate his views—even for tactical purposes. He is apt to overreach. And he has shown that he’s not afraid to use the power of the government to go after those who try to stand in his way—even his liberal neighbors, whom he has accused of threatening his family.
During Trump’s first term, Miller pushed the family-separation policy at the southern border, a measure long considered too extreme to implement. It triggered such a massive backlash that Trump’s wife and eldest daughter urged him to stop it.
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But Miller has continued to push not just for the deportation of people in the country illegally but also for narrowing or closing legal immigration pathways, especially for people from poor, not-majority-white, non-Christian nations.
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During debate prep for the 2024 campaign, Miller found himself in a contentious back-and-forth over immigration with a more moderate Trump ally. Finally, a frustrated Trump interrupted the two men: Stephen, he said, if you had it your way, everyone would look exactly like you, someone familiar with the exchange told us.
“That’s correct,” Miller said, before turning back to continue sparring.
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This man who is running the government from trump’s back pocket is quoted in the article as saying:
In the [2003] video, Miller smirkily suggests that the “ideal solution” for “Saddam Hussein and his henchmen” would be “to cut off their fingers”… “Torture is a celebration of life and human dignity,” he continues, briefly unable to hide his delight as his latest outlandish proclamation illicits titters from his peers…
