Stephen Miller Is the Real President Now

If Donald Trump were a normal president, the devastating defeat he and his party suffered in the midterms last week would cause him to moderate his policies. After all, the sheer scale of Republican losses dwarfs any rout suffered by a governing party in the midterms since at least 1974. As of this writing, Democrats have won the national vote in the House of Representatives races by nearly 13 percent—and that number could climb higher as more votes from slow-counting, Democrat-dominated California come in.

By contrast, Republicans won the national vote by 6.8 percent in the 1994 and 2010 midterms— both considered epochal wave elections—and Democrats beat the GOP by 8 percent in their 2006 “thumping” of George W. Bush.

And Democrats didn’t just win big—they won everywhere, making inroads into deep-red states that had been beyond their reach for decades, like South Carolina, Kansas, Mississippi (assuming, as seems likely, that Scott Colom wins his Senate race there), and, of course, Texas.

Previous presidents made dramatic changes after their midterm setbacks. After 1994, Bill Clinton famously adopted the policy of triangulation, co-opting GOP policies such as welfare reform and declaring that “the era of big government is over.” In the immediate wake of the 2006 loss, George W. Bush fired Donald Rumsfeld, one of the major architects of the disastrous war in Iraq.

Trump’s thrashing far exceeds either Bush’s or Clinton’s, but you wouldn’t know it from the way he’s reacted. True, he’s made some vague, seemingly chastened comments about working with Democrats and pulling back on some of his most toxic policies. In an interview with Ross Douthat on Sunday’s 60 Minutes, Trump said that his persecution of immigrants might have been too “tough,” and expressed a desire to strike a grand “deal” with the Democrats to allow migrants who have committed no crime to stay in the United States—in effect, an amnesty program of the type signed by Ronald Reagan, which subsequent presidents such as George W. Bush and Barack Obama also worked toward.

But Trump’s actions, not surprisingly, point in a totally different direction. He remains the same intransigent and extremist autocrat, one who is keen to double down on deeply unpopular and destructive policies. And nothing symbolizes that like the first big decision he made post-midterms—firing his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, and replacing her with Stephen Miller, the architect of his anti-immigrant terror campaign and perhaps the most zealous white nationalist in his entire administration.

Trump’s decision to make Miller chief of staff makes clear that the president’s gestures toward a grand bargain on immigration are blather. If your goal is compromise, you don’t strengthen the power of a dangerous extremist like Miller.

Miller is far and away the most strident xenophobe in Trump’s inner circle. He was the architect of the family separation policy in Trump’s first term, and, as The New York Times notes, has been at the core of some of the most authoritarian, lawless policies of Trump’s second term:

In addition to helping oversee the militarized crackdown of the U.S.-Mexico border, [Miller] set in motion the suspension of U.S. refugee programs and the deadly deportation crackdowns on American streets.

But his influence during Mr. Trump’s second term has extended beyond immigration policy. He also pushed Mr. Trump’s lethal strikes on civilian boats in the Caribbean that the administration claimed were carrying drugs. He helped use the powers of the federal government to target political opponents and universities, and oversaw the federal crackdown in the District of Columbia.

To say that this clashes with the way Trump spoke on 60 Minutes is an understatement. He told Douthat that he had been politically “hurt” for implementing a harsh deportation policy that harmed migrants who had contributed to the well-being of the country: “For getting people out, I get very high marks for getting the bad ones out. But I get hurt because we also took people that had good jobs, that— that created one violation, or breaking of the law, and that was that they came into the country illegally.

“Now, there is a large part of the country that think that they should be put out. And there’s a large part of the country that think that they should be allowed to stay if they’re good people working in a landscaping company, or workin’ in a hotel, or doing something, right? And in some cases, paying taxes.”

Trump acknowledged that immigration was a tough issue since there were people on the “pretty far right that would like everybody taken out.” Quite reasonably, Douthat asked, “Do any of those people work in your administration? Are they in the building with us right now?” Trump said yes. He’s right about that, obviously—but rather than dispense with those people, he just gave one of them the most important job in his administration.

All of this points to a president determined to learn nothing from his mistakes. On X, former representative Marjorie Taylor Greene noted that Miller “was kind of already running the White House in so many ways, so you can expect more of the same from the White House that you were probably already pissed off and frustrated about.” Greene added that the fact that Wiles was being shifted to Trump’s political team was a sign that Trump wants to play a major role in selecting his successor. This also suggests that Trump’s defeat in the midterms has not subdued his desire to dominate the political landscape.

Sarah Miller, who worked with Stephen Miller in the White House during Trump’s first term, told The Bulwark that she expects the new chief of staff will be the “de facto president” while Trump focuses on his late-life passion for redecorating national monuments. If Sarah Miller is right, we could be heading for an even more dangerous situation, with Trump remaining as a babbling figurehead while an empowered Stephen Miller pursues an extremist agenda even in the face of a hostile Congress. Given this reality, the United States is heading towards a constitutional crisis much larger than the impeachment battles of Trump’s first term.