‘Ousting his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, Trump replaced her with the architect of some of his administration’s most extreme policies: Stephen Miller.
Miller is a fervent white nationalist who appears to believe in the racist “great replacement theory,” the idea that Black and Brown immigrants to Europe and the United States are destroying “Western culture.”
Miller’s elevation to chief of staff doesn’t necessarily change much; he already was a powerful force in the White House. Miller drove the “Muslim ban” in Trump’s first term and, in his second, the administration’s arrest, incarceration, and deportation plans for undocumented immigrants. His push for masked agents to arrest 3,000 people a day led to the murders of U.S. citizens Renee Goode and Alex Pretti, as well as the shooting deaths of immigrants and their mistreatment and deaths in concentration camps.
Miller has been a key proponent of Trump’s seizing power through emergency declarations that he uses to ignore the law. Frustrated by opposition to his plan to hurt Black and Brown people, Miller pushed for Trump to crush the opposition by invoking the Insurrection Act.
And Miller was central to the administration’s undermining of disability rights. Mike Hixenbaugh of NBC News reported that after Trump complained about seeing homeless encampments in Washington, D.C., Miller argued for a plan to make it easier to round up mentally ill homeless people and institutionalize them. Making that happen required abandoning enforcement of the 1999 Supreme Court decision Olmstead v. L.C., which established that disabled Americans have a right to live in their communities rather than being forced into institutions.
The Department of Justice went along with Miller’s plan and issued a memo saying that it would no longer enforce Olmstead. While the initial targets were unhoused people, Hixenbaugh notes, the administration quickly backed away from at least five disability rights cases designed to keep physically or mentally disabled children and adults out of institutions. Hixenbaugh points out that the administration’s refusal to enforce Olmstead is sending a message to the states that, with the dramatic cuts to Medicaid in the Republicans’ so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” they should “feel free to cut services that help disabled people remain at home,” forcing them into institutions.
As Phillips P. O’Brien wrote in Phillip’s Newsletter, Miller also supports Russia’s version of its war on Ukraine and has taken a strong and public stand against the embattled U.S. ally. O’Brien notes that Trump’s elevation of Miller now illustrates the president’s determination to get whatever he can for Russia’s president Vladimir Putin before the new Congress starts investigations and puts up roadblocks.
So, rather than moderating his behavior after voters’ dramatic rebuke, Trump is demonstrating by elevating Miller that he is hardening his position. He is surrounding himself with the most extreme of his advisors: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, whom he has supported in the face of calls for his impeachment; Natalie Harp, the smiling aide who appears glued to his side; and Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget and a key author of Project 2025, who Trump boasted before the election would soon “be one of the very important people in the history of our country, in my opinion.” He noted: “We have some big surprises coming up in another few weeks, right, Russ?”
Trump’s elevation of Miller was a deliberate declaration that he doesn’t care what the American people want….’
