White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller defended the president’s unprecedented midterm power grab with a factually incoherent rant about Democrats’ “cheating.”
Facing angry voters and razor-thin margins in the House of Representatives, President Donald Trump has demanded that Republican-controlled states redraw their political maps ahead of the midterms, and has called for the Department of Commerce to hold a mid-decade census that would exclude undocumented immigrants.
Both the U.S. Constitution and federal law require the census to be held every 10 years and to count non-citizens, prompting critics to accuse the president of trying to rig the midterms.
During an interview Thursday with Newsmax, Miller tried to defend the move by claiming it was actually the Democrats who have used the census to “steal” House seats.
“Democrats have stolen 20 to 30 House seats by counting illegal aliens in the census. Just think about that for a second,” Miller said. “Now you have Democrats talking about, ‘Oh Republicans can’t change their congressional maps?’”
According to The Poynter Institute’s Politifact, the number Miller cited was amplified last year by prominent Republicans—including Elon Musk—and is based on pure fantasy.
To get there, anti-immigration advocates took one unofficial and unreliable estimate for the total number of undocumented immigrants living in the U.S. (16.8 million) and divided it by the number of people that each congressional seat represents (761,169).
Then they assumed that every single one of those undocumented immigrants lived in blue states—even though far more immigrants moved to red states than blue states between 2019 and 2023—and concluded that Democrats “stole” 22 seats.
In fact, the Department of Homeland Security estimates there are about 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the U.S. Studies have shown that removing them from the census would barely change the House political make-up, if at all, according to Politifact.
One study found that excluding undocumented immigrants from the 2020 census would have led to California and Texas each losing a seat, and Ohio and New York each picking one up, resulting in a partisan wash.
Miller nevertheless ranted at Democrats, “You have literally brought invaders into this country by the tens of millions to rig the results of the census and the apportionment of our congressional seats.”
He also suggested Republicans were justified in redrawing their political maps to pick up seats because Democrats have also drawn congressional districts to their advantage.
“Even though Republicans won a landslide in the [2024] House popular vote, Democrats have so thoroughly rigged the gerrymander and manipulated their districts beyond all recognition that Republicans only gained a four-seat majority, despite winning a much smaller majority in the popular vote in 2010 and getting 63 seats,” he said.
In fact, Republicans won the House popular vote by 6.8 percentage points in 2010, compared to just 2.6 percentage points in 2024. Nationwide, Republicans enjoy a 16-seat advantage in Congress because of gerrymandering, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.
Democratic governors have vowed to retaliate if Texas and other red states changes their maps to entrench the current Republican majority.
Generally speaking, it’s up to each state’s legislature to decide how the state will draw its own political map. Some states keep the process in the hands of lawmakers, while others have created special commissions to draw political districts.
The maps, however, cannot violate the Constitution or the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and, usually, they’re redrawn after each census—not in the middle of the decade.
Congressional Democrats tried in 2022 to outlaw partisan gerrymandering with the federal Freedom to Vote Act. The legislation passed the House but died in the Senate after Republicans filibustered it.
Despite those efforts, “Democrats cheat,” Miller told Newsmax.
“We all know Democrats cheat,” he added.
The post Stephen Miller Yells About Democrats in Defense of Trump’s Election Power Grab appeared first on The Daily Beast.
