A former Trump aide has pulled back the curtain on how Stephen Miller enforces President Donald Trump’s agenda behind the scenes.
Miles Taylor, the Homeland Security official who wrote as Anonymous for The New York Times in September 2018 saying he was part of a “quiet resistance” under Trump 1.0, described how working with Miller required taking late-night phone calls and dealing with his surprise appearances during meetings.
Stephen Miller has been promoted to White House chief of staff after the bombshell departure of Susie Wiles.
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Miller, 41, served as a senior adviser to the president and White House director of speechwriting under the first Trump administration. Just last week, he was promoted to the plum role of White House chief of staff after Trump announced that Susie Wiles was headed for the exit.
“It sounds like if you’re in the job that I was in, late-night phone calls every single weeknight to the point that your spouse starts asking you questions,” Taylor told The News Agents podcast.
In 2018, Miles Taylor anonymously wrote a New York Times op-ed about a “quiet resistance” within the first Trump administration.
Taylor described Miller as a “ferocious micromanager” who gets deeply involved down to the smallest government offices, “because he knows that’s how you get things done in Washington.”
“That’s something that made Stephen very formidable and very effective, is that he understands the government bureaucracy and he is willing to jump down into meetings where they would never expect him,” he recalled.
Miller, pictured here in January 2017, has long been a loyal enforcer for Trump.
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“Think about the most junior staff at the most remote office in government. Stephen was the type of person that would surprise them on their morning phone call and show up and say, ‘This is Stephen Miller at the White House.’”
White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers said “comments made by disgruntled, former government officials are irrelevant.”
“By implementing the President’s common-sense agenda, Stephen oversaw the Administration’s efforts to achieve the most secure border in history,” she said in a statement. “Stephen Miller’s dedication to making our country safer and wealthier will continue in his new role as Chief of Staff.”
Insiders previously revealed to The Atlantic that Miller would run their daily conferences like a “wartime general,” yelling at those he believed weren’t pushing his hardline immigration agenda hard enough.
But Taylor said it’s Miller’s unwavering loyalty to Trump that makes him indispensable to the president—and dangerous to the rest of the country.
“Almost every single breathing person that I met in the Trump administration criticized Donald Trump in private,” Taylor said. “Stephen Miller never showed daylight between him and Donald Trump in our private conversations. And that’s why he’s sort of the ‘last man standing in the bunker’ type of character.”
Miller and his wife Katie (right) have become a MAGA power couple.
“My biggest worry about that, of course, was when you have a president like Donald Trump who has a deep and abiding inclination toward illegality, a loyalist who never says no becomes someone who facilitates illegal activity,” he added. “And that’s always been the concern about Stephen Miller is that he accelerates Trump’s worst impulses rather than stabilizes them.”
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