How Stephen Miller Became the Power Behind the Throne

Nobody ever voted for Stephen Miller. Solely a naked plurality of American voters pulled the lever for his boss, Donald Trump, in 2024—and even then, voters had been involved above all with the rising price of dwelling, not with immigration, Miller’s obsessive focus. However over the previous 12 months, Miller has turn out to be arguably essentially the most consequential determine within the second Trump administration—the maximalist drive behind a maximalist presidency. Guided by white-supremacist teachings just like the dystopian novel The Camp of the Saints, Miller has made the ethnic purification of the American physique and the expulsion of potentially millions of immigrants the administration’s central precedence.

What makes Miller really scary is that he’s uncommonly efficient at getting his method. Steve Bannon has described him as Trump’s “prime minister,” whereas White Home press secretary Karoline Leavitt lately told The Atlantic that Miller “oversees each coverage the administration touches.” His fingerprints may be discovered everywhere in the deployments of ICE to US cities, together with the one which culminated within the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti within the streets of Minneapolis; the rendition of scores of immigrants to a gulag in El Salvador with no shred of due course of; the try to eradicate birthright citizenship and thus strip tens of millions of native-born Individuals of their most elementary constitutional rights; and, more and more, Trump’s most provocative and unilateral foreign-policy strikes, from abducting Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela to his ongoing threats to annex Greenland.

Like Miller himself, none of that is fashionable. In Trump’s first 12 months again within the White Home, his net approval rating steadily declined from a excessive of plus 4 % to a low of minus 19 %—about as dangerous as has ever been recorded at this stage of a presidency—and the Democrats are favored to take again the Home on this fall’s midterms. Voters are overwhelmingly involved in regards to the state of the economic system, which continues to undergo from excessive inflation due to Trump’s much-publicized tariffs, and have expressed sturdy disapproval of his immigration-enforcement insurance policies particularly, particularly within the wake of the slayings in Minneapolis, which even many conservatives have struggled to defend. In a extra rational administration, the way in which ahead politically could be clear: Trump would marginalize (or ideally hearth) Miller and pivot to a much less abhorrent coverage method. As a substitute, Miller has appeared solely to develop in stature and affect throughout the administration.

How did essentially the most highly effective authorities on earth come to be dominated by this unelected, viscerally unappealing 40-year-old right-wing extremist from Santa Monica? Final 12 months, I reviewed the most authoritative biography of Miller, Jean Guerrero’s Hatemonger, for this journal, and I got here away with the impression that Miller has a handful of abilities: a willingness to draw and capitalize on unfavourable consideration (colloquially, he’s good at “trolling”); an uncommon talent at navigating workplace energy politics and flattering the suitable individuals (in Trump’s first time period, Miller received over Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump though neither shares his excessive anti-immigration views); and an unusual sense of how you can flip his ruthless dogmatism into coverage.

The trolling is desk stakes within the MAGA prolonged universe, the place numerous people, together with Miller’s spouse, have pursued careers as influencers channeling the myriad frustrations of the American proper. Miller, a frequent visitor on shock-jock radio since highschool, actually might have gone that route. But it surely was Miller’s cutthroat instincts on Capitol Hill and his unfailing loyalty to Trump that ensured that his legacy could be extra than simply discuss, and that he would exert the sort of affect over a sitting president that malign figures like Henry Kissinger and Dick Cheney as soon as did. The Venn diagram of competent Beltway operatives and ideologically dedicated neofascists has a really small intersection, however Miller sits comfortably on the middle of it. He’s hardly essentially the most colourful character within the second Trump administration, the place the competitors contains Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Pete Hegseth, Kash Patel, and Kristi Noem. However his impression on coverage is outsize, even when the administration itself is likely to be higher served politically by doing the rest.

“We reside in a world in which you’ll discuss all you need about worldwide niceties and every thing else, however we reside in a world—in the actual world, Jake—that’s ruled by energy, that’s ruled by drive, that’s ruled by energy,” Miller told CNN’s Jake Tapper lately in a protection of Trump’s Western Hemisphere expansionism. “These are the iron legal guidelines of the world for the reason that starting of time.”

The Darwinian prospers are pure Miller, however the underlying imperial hubris remembers the 2004 quote that Ron Suskind received from a prime George W. Bush official, extensively assumed to be Karl Rove: “We’re an empire now, and once we act, we create our personal actuality. And when you’re learning that actuality—judiciously, as you’ll—we’ll act once more, creating different new realities, which you’ll examine too, and that’s how issues will kind out. We’re historical past’s actors…and also you, all of you, can be left to simply examine what we do.”

Given how the Bush administration’s invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq labored out, there’s a lesson right here for Miller—and for us. It’s true that with the ability he at the moment wields, he can mildew actuality to a far better extent than anybody ought to be snug with. However there may be far less domestic support for Trump and Miller’s agenda than Bush and Rove once enjoyed for theirs, and neither monetary markets nor international governments nor the abnormal residents confronting ICE within the streets have passively bent to their will. Actuality isn’t solely the product of anyone small political clique, and it tends to frustrate and foil those that would declare the suitable to form it. It’s far less complicated to outmaneuver one’s colleagues for management of the boss’s ear than it’s to impose one’s will on the remainder of the world. This, too, has been an iron legislation of the world for the reason that starting of time.