Anyone wondering how Trump will respond to the biggest repudiation a modern U.S. president has ever received from American voters need wonder no longer. Today, Trump announced that Stephen Miller would become his chief of staff, replacing Susie Wiles.
In a Truth Social post, Trump called Miller one of his “most trusted” advisers and said he would be starting in the new role Monday.
Miller as chief of staff is not a positive development for anyone interested in mending our government or healing our nation.
As Trump’s attention recedes into his vanity projects — the ballroom, the arch, the heliport, the golf links, the gold-leaf makeovers — Miller is likely to become de facto president, manipulating an increasingly incoherent and cognitively impaired old man.
I expect Miller to conduct a scorched-earth campaign of retribution and legal harassment — a war against all perceived Trump enemies — while burning down everything in his way.
Let’s be clear. Miller is bigoted, xenophobic, and vicious — the architect and chief advocate of Trump’s loathsome immigration policy. He is perhaps the most venal of all the obsequious sycophants surrounding the mad king.
In one of his most bizarre claims, Miller has said immigrants to the United States bring problems that extend through generations. “Not only is the first generation unsuccessful,” Miller asserts. “You see persistent issues in every subsequent generation. So you see consistent high rates of welfare use, consistent high rates of criminal activity, consistent failures to assimilate.”
Rubbish. The children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren of most immigrants are models of upward mobility in America.
Researchers have found that immigrants today are no slower to move into the middle class than immigrants were a century ago. In fact, no matter when their parents came to the U.S. or what country they came from, children of immigrants have higher rates of upward mobility than their U.S.-born peers.
Stephen Miller’s great-great-grandfather was born in a dirt-floor shack in the village of Antopol, a shtetl in what is now Belarus. He came to America in 1903 with $8 in his pocket and spoke no English. Three generations later, little Stephen was born in 1985 to American parents — but somewhere along the way he developed a visceral hatred for immigrants.
Miller and Trump have been dealing with immigrants the same way Pete Hegseth and Trump have been dealing with Iran and the Strait of Hormuz — inflicting pain on both them and the United States in the hope their pain will be worse than the pain we endure.
Before Miller started his brutal Kristallnacht against undocumented immigrants, they had been paying roughly $60 billion annually in federal taxes, much of it going into Social Security and Medicare — programs from which they don’t benefit. Now, tax experts predict that many immigrants won’t file returns, and those who formerly had their taxes withheld in every paycheck will shift into under-the-table jobs. The Yale Budget Lab, a nonpartisan research center, projected lost tax revenue of about $300 billion over a decade.
Miller’s vast, sadistic crackdown is also causing significant pain for the U.S. economy. There aren’t enough workers in construction, hospitality, and agriculture to keep these sectors going.
There’s an argument for “regularizing” immigration to the United States by making it more difficult for people to live in America illegally while making it easier to immigrate here legally. But this is not Miller’s agenda. Miller and Trump want to fuel division and bigotry. Their entire project depends on hate of the “other.”
Yet apart from Native Americans, we are all immigrants — all descended from “foreigners.” Some of our ancestors came here eagerly; some came because they were no longer safe in their homelands; some came enslaved.
As Ronald Reagan put it in a 1988 speech,
You can go to Japan to live, but you cannot become Japanese. You can go to France to live and not become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey, and you won’t become a German or a Turk. But … anybody from any corner of the world can come to America to live and become an American. A person becomes an American by adopting America’s principles, especially those principles summarized in the “self-evident truths” of the Declaration of Independence, such as “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
Reagan understood that America is a set of aspirations and ideals more than it is a nationality.
We have just emerged from a remarkable midterm election in which Americans embraced these aspirations and ideals and elected the most diverse set of senators, representatives, governors, and state lawmakers in our history. Which makes Trump’s pick of Miller for chief of staff especially ironic and sad.
Like dictators before him, Trump’s and Miller’s road to tyranny is paved with stones hurled at “them” — whether “they” are immigrants, Muslims, Latinos, or anyone else who doesn’t fit the white Christian nationalist mold.
As Americans showed on Tuesday, we are better than Trump and his chief bigot, who’s now his chief of staff.
- Robert Reich is an emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/. His new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org
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