And now, it’s Miller Time.
Let’s just get this out of the way right off the top: Stephen Miller is a vile white nationalist piece of garbage who has done more to destroy the lives and the spirit of hard-working immigrant Americans than anyone in the nation’s history. He is profoundly cruel and without conscience, President Donald Trump’s monstrous, xenophobic attack dog, a man devoid of conscience, morals or decency.
Miller is single-handedly responsible for a brutal and unconscionable immigration policy that has separated and destroyed families, and an ICE policy that has terrorized communities and led to the traumatization of everyone with whom the masked thugs enforcing the incarcerations and deportations come into contact.
Moreover, nearly everyone the odious Miller has worked with despises him. That’s Republicans as well as Democrats. He also speaks in the language of Nazis despite being raised Jewish and has made no mystery of his desire to transform the United States into a whites-only country, where there is no such thing as a legal immigrant.
You might therefore say that Miller is the perfect distillation of everything the hateful Trump administration stands for. And this is why it should have come as no surprise that Miller would be chosen last week to replace Susie Wiles as the new White House Chief of Staff.
What does the chief of staff do? Basically, it’s the position that makes all the decisions the president doesn’t want to bother with which, in the case of Trump, means anything that’s non-construction or interior design related. This guy, in other words, has more power than anyone else in the White House.
Think of it as having a Klansman overseeing the country and running things.
That’s the bad news. The good news is that we will soon have a Democratic Congress supplying the guardrails that have been entirely missing since January 2025. Miller cannot just do whatever he wants with impunity and expect no pushback from a compliant, missing-in-action House and Senate.
There are also guaranteed to be leaks aplenty by people across the administration who are determined for Miller to fail. At this point, they’re all in survival mode, and having a Nazi running things for the last few years of their tenure doesn’t much help their resume.
But none of that matters to Trump. If you’re him, this is precisely the dude you put in charge of things. He’s intent on punishing the nation for having the temerity to launch the blue wave washing his party out of congressional control. His response, naturally, wasn’t to take a step back and assess what the country was telling him but to dig in his heels, quadruple down and display his typically juvenile defiance.
Putting Miller in charge is like appointing the wolf as Little Red Riding Hood’s legal guardian, like appointing a great white shark to head up the beach safety commission.
Let’s remember that this man was the architect of the family separation policy during the first Trump administration that resulted in thousands of children being separated from their parents. Now, he’s being entrusted with substantially broader responsibilities. All that could go wrong is everything.
This is also the guy who once raised the idea of suspending habeas corpus. He has zero respect for due process or the rule of law. He believes that he IS the law, and nothing he’s encountered while working under Trump has disavowed him of this notion. Yet the chief of staff is generally expected to ensure that the president understands legal and institutional constraints. Good luck with that.
If there is a looser cannon than Trump to be found anywhere in the free world, it would be Miller. He also brings a record of inflammatory rhetoric into a leadership position, yet has described immigrants as “invaders.” He’s also proudly circulated white nationalist materials for years.
But on a more practical level, he’s pressed for a target of 3,000 immigrant arrests per day over the past 22 months. This has resulted in pushing the already savage and sometimes deadly tactics of ICE agents to another level, where documentation is irrelevant and citizens are treated the same way as those who are not here legally.
Miller’s style is to ignore the facts and condemn those he opposes without evidence. He called Alex Pretti a domestic terrorist following his fatal shooting by ICE officers in Minneapolis in January. This was a man who was holding a cellphone, not a gun, during a crucial point in that encounter. Didn’t matter to Miller.
He’s also endorsed unleashing the U.S. military on American citizens if necessary, and has played a role in dismantling federal diversity initiatives because, you know, we can’t be treating black and brown people with respect.
The timing of Miller’s ascension is also noteworthy and creates an extraordinary political contradiction. It comes just as House and Senate oversight is about to intensify and the House Oversight Committee is gearing up to investigate Miller’s role in immigration enforcement. He’s now going to occupy the post most directly involved in coordinating responses to congressional demands for information.
Does anyone doubt that Miller will do his best to obstruct any investigations and save himself? He’s already a walking conflict of interest. Like seemingly everyone else associated with this White House, it will be all about his own self-interest, certainly not the country’s.
The primary question now is what happens when the man who spearheaded some of Trump’s most abhorrent and lawless policies is also given responsibility for managing the machinery that carries them out — and for responding to the investigators preparing to examine them.
It should give us a small measure of reassurance, however, that while a White House Chief of Staff has enormous practical influence, he has no independent constitutional authority to override Congress or the courts. In other words, prepare for a lot of screaming and yelling but precious little ultimate power.
Also, everyone outside of Trump and his wife desperately wants to see Miller fail. Operating in a town where relationships are everything, that’s a kiss of death
(Ray Richmond is a longtime journalist/author and an adjunct professor at Chapman University in Orange, CA.)
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