One of President Donald Trump’s top advisers is essentially running the government, according to a Washington, D.C., insider.
Axios co-founder Jim VandeHei told MS NOW’s “Morning Joe” that the administration’s strikingly aggressive shift in foreign policy – an invasion of Venezuela and the capture of its leader Nicolás Maduro and his wife and threats to take control of Greenland – reflect the outsized influence of White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller.
“I think Stephen Miller is a much closer approximation to what Donald Trump thinks right now than Marco Rubio is,” VandeHei said. “I agree that there’s not any coherent plan for how they’re going to govern Venezuela now that they’ve toppled the regime. I’m not surprised they were able to topple the regime as easily as they could. We have a military that’s bigger than the next 10 combined. We have an awesome Special Forces Delta, others who have done this type of work with great precision in the past. But if you really want to understand Trump and you want to understand kind of how he’s thinking about the world, listen to Stephen Miller.”
“I think the president has been very clear over the last couple of years that he doesn’t agree with the way most people look at the global map,” VandeHei added. “He thinks that people are ruthless, people are selfish, and that power is what rules. I think he’s comfortable with a world where there’s different spheres of influence, where China has its chunk, Russia has its chunk, and we have ours, which is this hemisphere.”
Trump views natural resources as the vehicle to improve the nation’s wealth, and he seems to view acquisition of new territories as the best way to achieve that aim.
“I don’t think oil is as valuable as it was five years ago, because there’s just more efficient energy and a more diverse set of energy sources,” VandeHei said. “He does seem to think that oil matters a ton, but if you look at what’s in Venezuela, if you look at what’s in Greenland, if you look at what’s in Canada, if you go back to the way that he talked about Canada earlier, about a year ago, it is a lot of the minerals and a lot of the components that you need to win an AI war, which will ultimately probably decide who rules the world 10 to 20 years from now. So that would be the global way that they’re looking at this.”
“Nobody should be surprised that that we went in and we don’t have some kind of coherent plan, and now that there’s factions trying to shape it, that’s how it’s played out with every single major act by this president,” he continued. “We do something big, he does it somewhat. A lot of people internally feel like a little impulsively sometimes, but he does it instinctively. They trust his instincts, and then they build a coherent or try to build a coherent policy around it.”
“Marco Rubio’s job is to make people feel better, to make other nations feel like we’re not trying to take over the world, make Republican senators feel like, hey, we’re not just going to do crazy things, and it’s Stephen Miller’s job as kind of the the mob boss of the White House,” VandeHei added. “The guy is the tough guy, he’s the guy who got them to go even harder line than Trump himself wanted to go on immigration. He understands power now. He understands the power void. He knows if he pushes as hard as he is, like he did in that CNN interview, he can move the balance of power closer to his worldview, and don’t underestimate his power internally. He’s by far and away the most powerful staffer in this administration – not close.”
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