In the public imagination, Stephen Miller is the dark heart of the Trump administration — a pulsing mass of anti-immigrant hatred behind its most aggressively authoritarian moves.
But what if there’s a different story to be told — that Stephen Miller’s obsession with deportations isn’t helping President Donald Trump secure control over the country, but actively undermining it?
Take Trump’s militarization of Washington, DC, as an example. The move is puzzling, in that it’s authoritarian in principle but ineffective in execution. While seemingly designed to expand Trump’s ability to control the American public, the on-the-ground deployments are doing nothing to repress protest — in fact, they’re assuredly generating far more resistance than they’re suppressing.
So what’s going on? The best answer I’ve found is a recent piece from Dara Lind, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council (and Vox alum). Looking granularly at the details of the operations in DC, Lind found they heavily focused on immigration enforcement — things like forcing DC police to cooperate with ICE and setting up checkpoints to try and trap people they think look like migrants.
“Every day since the federal takeover, DC residents have posted videos of federal agents — often with a mix of uniforms or no official badges at all — in patrols, staffing checkpoints, or going after people. And the people they’ve been going after have largely been (apparent) immigrants,” Lind writes. (Her findings are supported by recent on-the-ground reporting from the Wall Street Journal.)
This is, I think, a viciously cruel policy (not to mention a waste of federal resources). But it is also a very ineffective policy when it comes to consolidating authoritarian control. Undocumented migrants do not vote, but the administration’s ceaseless efforts to deport them en masse is galvanizing street protests and tanking GOP support among Latino voters.
This is Miller’s influence on policy made manifest: Obsessed with deportations, he has done everything he can to turn the federal government into a deportation machine. And it’s actually hurting the overall Trumpist cause.
Stephen Miller is doing authoritarianism wrong
I wrote a book about how democracies become autocracies. One of my central findings is that, for would-be autocrats, it is exceptionally important to maintain democratic appearances. If you are too openly authoritarian before consolidating enough power, you’re likely to galvanize a potent wave of popular resistance.
The paradigmatic recent example is South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol’s attempted power grab in December. Instead of subtly chipping away at Korean democracy, Yoon simply declared martial law overnight and tried to arrest opposition leaders. The result was an immediate street uprising and a parliamentary vote nullifying the martial law declaration. Yoon was impeached and is currently on trial for insurrection, a crime punishable by life imprisonment or death.
The paradigmatic counter-case is Hungary under Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. After winning power in 2010, Orbán and his Fidesz party made a blizzard of confusing changes to Hungarian law designed to make elections less competitive and bring the courts to heel. They then spent years expanding their power, using financial and regulatory pressures to take control over the press and civil society. Today, the electoral deck is so stacked in the ruling party’s favor that even a wildly popular opposition leader may not be able to win the 2026 elections.
Yoon and Orbán represent poles we can use to evaluate the Trump administration’s authoritarian effectiveness. The more Trump acts like Yoon, attempting to nakedly assert the powers of a police-state ruler in a democracy, the more likely he is to generate meaningful pushback. The more he acts like Orbán, hiding behind a legalistic veneer, the more insidious the threat becomes.
By this metric, the most dangerous developments of the Trump administration have been his attacks on universities, his successful shakedown of CBS, his push to get Republican states to do pre-midterm gerrymandering, and the Supreme Court’s willingness to bless his mass firings of federal employees (at least temporarily).
All of those developments tangibly affect American democracy. Each chips away at a key institution — civil society, the free press, fair elections, and limits on executive power — that prevent authoritarian consolidation. Each moves Trump meaningfully closer toward building an Orbán-style regime (even if the United States is still pretty far off from the terminus).
But the militarized immigration crackdown championed by Miller doesn’t advance that goal in any meaningful way. It combines the optics of authoritarianism — sending masked, unidentified armed men into the streets of American cities — with a lack of actual repressive capacity.
Look, for example, at this recent video of DC residents (in my old neighborhood) chasing off unidentified federal agents. The feds are armed and masked, but the protesters are totally fearless. Why? Because unlike an outright authoritarian state, where demonstrators are repressed with deadly force, Trump’s guys aren’t authorized to fire indiscriminately on crowds. Their show of force is just that — a show. And people on the ground, in DC and LA before it, are calling their bluff.
Miller’s crackdown is good at two things: deporting undocumented people and terrorizing the communities they live in. I find this abhorrent: He is hurting innocent people, and the US writ large, for no good reason. But the fact that Miller’s policy is morally terrible does not mean it is contributing to Trump’s broader authoritarian project. In fact, its naked cruelty and thuggishness are the best reasons to think it’s counterproductive.
Back in November 2019, Miller said in a meeting that deporting immigrants was his reason for living.
“This is all I care about,” he said, per the New Yorker. “I don’t have a family. I don’t have anything else. This is my life.”
That same month, Miller got engaged to his now-wife Katie. The level of monomania on display there, an obsession with immigration so total that it erased his own fiancée, has been even more vividly on display in this administration — where he has personally redirected ICE officers responsible for disrupting organized crime to arresting random construction workers at Home Depot.
I don’t think Miller is thinking carefully about whether his deportation campaign is contributing to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation of power. I think he just wants to deport people, and the consequences be damned.
Mostly, those consequences are horrific. But if there’s any silver lining, it’s this: Miller is helping awaken millions of Americans to the true nature of their current government.
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