The deputy chief of staff’s power at the White House appears to know no bounds, and his voice is one of the most influential in the President’s ear
If civil war begins in the US – and with Donald Trump’s commitment to deploying troops on the country’s streets, there is every possibility that it might – Stephen Miller will probably view it as his own personal, signature achievement.
No figure in Trump’s inner circle exhibits more zealotry than Miller – the White House deputy chief of staff for policy – about the revolutionary ambitions of the “Make America Great Again” movement. Nor more of a willingness to lay waste the country’s constitutional guardrails in an effort to supercharge the President’s powers, disregard Congress, and ignore court rulings that fail to go the administration’s way.
Last week, even Trump acknowledged the extremism of the Rottweiler in his midst.
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At an Oval Office event in which FBI Director Kash Patel was providing an update on the President’s determination to launch criminal probes of his political enemies, Trump called on Miller to speak: “I would like to thank Stephen Miller… I love watching him on television. I would love to have him come up and explain his true feelings.”
The President then caught himself. “Maybe not his truest feelings. That might be going a little bit too far,” he joked.
Trump understands that Miller’s role in his government goes way beyond the traditional and relatively minor activities of a deputy chief of staff. Put crudely, he is the brains behind the entire operation, a far-right ideologue who provides the intellectual framework for Trump’s excesses, and often the attempted legal justification for them as well.
Miller with FBI Director Kash Patel and Attorney General Pam Bondi. Miller also served in the first Trump administration, as a top adviser and speechwriter (Photo: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)
Targeting the mid-terms
Back in August, Miller was the first Trump official to describe the Democratic Party as a “domestic extremist organisation”. The phrase served as the first indication that, within weeks, the White House would more broadly be accusing the party of engaging in acts of terrorism and insurrection, with Trump warning his military generals to prepare to fight “the enemy from within” in towns and cities all over the country.
Miller is the originator of a plan that may soon see Trump invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807 to deploy active-duty military personnel into combat roles in states governed by Democrats.
Earlier this month, in a social media post, Miller claimed “the issue before us now is very simple and clear. There is a large and growing movement of left-wing terrorism in our country”. Without providing any evidence, he also insisted that domestic terrorists on the left were “well organised and funded… shielded by far-left Democrat judges, prosecutors and attorneys general. The only remedy is to use legitimate state power to dismantle terrorism and terror networks”.
There should be no doubt about Miller’s goals: he intends to dismantle the Democratic Party in time for next November’s mid-term elections, or at the very least neuter it and brand it a political movement that is sponsoring terrorism on the streets.
By “terrorism”, Miller means constitutionally protected protests against the mass deportations that are being carried out by Trump’s masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents.
Highway patrol officers police an anti-ICE protest in Los Angeles. Miller is said to be the brains behind Trump’s decision to send federal forces into Democratic-ruled cities to ‘control law and order’ (Photo: Benjamin Hanson/Middle East Images via AFP)
Miller is, in short, the principal architect of efforts to rid America of millions of immigrants, despite being the descendant of German migrants himself. In 1903, members of the Glosser family began arriving at Ellis Island after fleeing anti-Jewish pogroms in what is now Belarus. They included Miller’s great-great-grandfather.
“In the span of some 80 years and five decades, this family emerged from poverty in a hostile country to become a prosperous, educated clan of merchants, scholars, professionals and, most important, American citizens,” Miller’s uncle, David Glosser, wrote in an August 2018 article for Politico. “If my nephew’s ideas on immigration had been in force a century ago, our family would have been wiped out,” he added, saying that he looked at his nephew’s views with “dismay and horror”.
Carving out a right-wing niche
Miller was born in 1985 and raised in California. By the time he was studying at Santa Monica High School, he was already carving out a right-wing niche for himself, railing against political correctness and the diversity of the student body.
“I will say and I will do things that no one else in their right minds will do,” he told students as he sought a position on the school’s student government.
Activists dressed as, from left, Vice President JD Vance, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Trump and Miller during a protest in Washington DC (Photo: Anna Rose Layden/Getty)
In March 2002, he wrote an editorial for a local news website, The Santa Monica Lookout. “Political correctness has crossed the line,” he said, citing the number of students at his school who did not speak English as a first language. He called bilingual signage within the school “a crutch… preventing Spanish speakers from standing on their own… it demeans the immigrant population as incompetent and makes a mockery of the American ideal of personal accomplishment”.
After graduating from Duke University in 2007, where Miller headed the campus Conservative Union, he became communications manager for Jeff Sessions, the Alabama senator who went on to serve as Trump’s first attorney general.
Today, Miller’s star in the Maga revolution is ascendant. His power at the White House appears to know no bounds, and his voice is one of the most influential in Trump’s ear on a continuing basis.
He regularly lambasts judges who rule against the administration, “radical left” protesters who dare to question the President’s policies, and even suggested recently that Trump enjoys “plenary authority”, a phrase that Cornell Law School defines as “complete and exclusive authority… unrestricted within its constitutional limits”.
Trump’s hesitation last week in the Oval Office to let Miller voice his “truest feelings” at an on-camera White House event can only leave Americans wondering: given how much they already know about his extremist views, just how much further could he go?
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