Stephen Miller has spent the bulk of his White House career furthering hard-right domestic policies that have resulted in mass deportations, family separations and the testing of the constitutional tenets that grant American citizenship.
Now, Mr. Miller, President Trump’s 40-year-old deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security adviser, is casting his hard-right gaze further abroad: toward Venezuela and the Danish territory of Greenland, specifically.
Mr. Miller is doing so, the president’s advisers say, in service of furthering Mr. Trump’s foreign policy ambitions, which so far resemble imperialistic designs to exploit less powerful, resource-rich countries and territories the world over and use their resources for America’s gain. According to Mr. Miller, using brute force is not only on the table but also the Trump administration’s preferred way to conduct itself on the world stage.
“We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” Mr. Miller told Jake Tapper of CNN on Monday, during a combative appearance in which he was pressed on Mr. Trump’s long-held desire to control Greenland.
“These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time,” he said.
This aggressive posture toward Greenland — and in turn, the rest of the world — is a perfect encapsulation of the raw power that Mr. Trump wants to project, even against Denmark, the NATO ally that controls Greenland. The moment also illustrates how people like Mr. Miller have ascended to the inner circle of a leader who has no interest in having his impulses checked, and how they exert their influence once they arrive there.
The moment also shows just how differently Mr. Trump has operated in his second term from how he did in his first.
About midway through his first term, the president began joking with his aides about his desire to buy Greenland for its natural resources, like coal and uranium. At the time, his advisers humored him with offers to investigate the possibility of buying the semiautonomous territory. They did not think Mr. Trump was serious, or that it could ever actually happen. Those advisers are gone.
Flash forward to the second term. Mr. Miller has the president’s complete trust, a staff of over 40 people, and several big jobs that include protecting the homeland and securing territories further afield. A first-term joke made in passing about purchasing Greenland for its natural resources is now a term-two presidential threat to attack and annex the Danish territory by force if necessary, under the guise of protecting Americans from foreign incursions.
“Right now, Greenland is covered with Russian and Chinese ships all over the place,” Mr. Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on Sunday evening. “We need Greenland from the standpoint of national security.”
On Monday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told lawmakers that Mr. Trump plans to buy Greenland rather than invade it, though the White House later said the president had not ruled out the use of military force.
Russia and China are active in the Arctic Circle, but Greenland is not surrounded by their ships, and the United States has a military base on Greenland. Mr. Trump has also focused on Greenland because of its potential wealth of critical minerals.
Another crucial takeaway from the first Trump term that rings true to Mr. Miller’s rise: What was once mocked is now a threat to be taken seriously.
Mr. Miller, 40, grew up in wealthy Santa Monica, Calif., and attended a left-leaning high school. There, he was once booed and yanked off the stage during a campaign speech for student government in which a central plank of his platform was to investigate school janitors for inadequately picking up trash. His former classmates recalled that he seemed to enjoy the attention.
A quote from his 2003 yearbook is attributed to Theodore Roosevelt: “There can be no 50-50 Americanism in this country. There is room here for only 100 percent Americanism, only for those who are Americans and nothing else.”
As a student at Duke University, Mr. Miller achieved some notoriety in conservative circles for defending three Duke lacrosse players who had been accused of rape.
“With the players at last nearing release from criminal charges, we are reminded that justice is not always swift,” Mr. Miller wrote in a column for the school paper in 2007. “Instead, it is often a crawl, gently creeping forward, which, if enough momentum builds, can turn into an avalanche. Unified, we can marshal this momentum.”
It later turned out the rape allegations were false.
After graduating, he found his way to Washington and by 2009 he was working for Jeff Sessions, then a senator from Alabama. Mr. Miller has come a long way from his work as a Senate staff member who regularly flooded inboxes across Washington with horror stories of undocumented immigrants. What then seemed to recipients as late-night, xenophobic fever dreams from a nameless staff member went unrecognized for what they really were: a set of deeply held beliefs that helped animate Mr. Trump’s first presidential campaign and, later, helped clinch his second term.
After amassing enough power to shape the administration’s crackdown on immigration into the United States and disparage entire communities of immigrants, as well as their children, Mr. Miller is echoing Mr. Trump’s foreign policy goals.
On CNN, Mr. Miller reiterated Mr. Trump’s intent to rule Venezuela and exploit its vast oil reserves after U.S. forces launched a raid on the Venezuelan capital and seized President Nicolás Maduro and his wife. And he said that no one would fight back if the United States were to decide to use its military to annex Greenland.
Republicans in Washington know that Mr. Miller is channeling the president when he speaks. The two spent the four years that Mr. Trump was out of power speaking on nearly a daily basis, “talking about what a second term agenda might look like before many of us even dreamed that there would be a second term,” said Senator Jim Banks, Republican of Indiana.
Mr. Banks called Mr. Miller “the smartest guy I’ve ever met in Washington,” and said that Mr. Miller had made sacrifices to do his work, including facing threats and moving his family into military housing in Washington. He said Mr. Miller was not going to back down.
“He’s often represented as an ideologue,” Mr. Banks said. “He’s incredibly pragmatic.”
At least one Republican has publicly criticized Mr. Miller’s remarks about Greenland. Representative Don Bacon, a retiring Republican congressman from Nebraska, called Mr. Miller’s comments “really dumb.” On X, Mr. Bacon said: “There is no up side to demeaning our friends. But, it is causing wounds that will take time to heal.”
Mr. Miller, of course, has the full backing of the Trump White House.
“The president has been driving all policy and Stephen faithfully executes what the president wants,” Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said in a statement. “Whether it’s immigration, crime, trade, Greenland or Venezuela.”
She downplayed the idea that Mr. Miller was driving policy decisions and disputed the notion that Mr. Miller was on television promoting his views more often lately; she noted that he had been on television more than 200 times in 2025. The assignments were what had changed.
Ms. Leavitt did not say which aspects of Venezuela Mr. Miller would be most focused on going forward, but she said he and a host of other administration figures, mainly the vice president and Mr. Rubio, would be involved in strategizing over the military and economic future of the country.
Mr. Miller did not respond to a request for comment for this article.
His wife, Katie, also did not respond to a request for comment about her husband’s role in the administration. Ms. Miller, 34, a former administration official who now runs a politics and lifestyle podcast, shared a photo of Greenland on social media on Saturday, after American forces had invaded Venezuela. In it, the territory was covered with the stars and stripes of the American flag. “SOON,” she captioned the photo.
Questions about Mr. Trump’s intentions for Greenland followed from there.
“I just wanted to reset, Jake, by making clear that has been the formal position of the U.S. government since the beginning of this administration, frankly, going back into the previous Trump administration, that Greenland should be part of the United States,” Mr. Miller said on CNN on Monday evening. “The president has been very clear about that. That is the formal position of the U.S. government.”
This week, Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen of Denmark urged Mr. Trump to “stop the threats” to annex Greenland, in effect attacking a NATO ally. Ms. Frederiksen said that the threats were “unacceptable pressure” but that they must be taken seriously.
“I believe that he means it,” she said in an interview with DR, the Danish broadcaster.
For decades, it has been clear that Mr. Miller does, too.
Katie Rogers is a White House correspondent for The Times, reporting on President Trump.
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