Impeach President Miller
Stephen Miller’s ascent to the shadow presidency began like so much other poison in the very immediate aftermath of 10/7, with a post nine days after the terror attacks from the official X account of the Trump campaign introducing a long list of bullet points under the title “Trump Plan to Keep Jihadists and Their Sympathizers Out of America.” The campaign promised it would immediately revoke student visas from campus protesters born outside the country, “proactively send ICE to pro-jihadist demonstrations” to arrest them, “aggressively deport resident aliens with jihadist sympathies,” use a then-obscure law called the Alien Enemies Act to jump-start said deportations, and “implement strong ideological screening for all immigrants to the United States” that would automatically disqualify anyone suspected of harboring “sympathy for jihadists, Hamas or Hamas ideology.”
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Miller wrote in the first of several X reposts of the plan, as though he hadn’t authored it himself, “it doesn’t get any better this. Read below in all its glory.” The Trump campaign referred all inquiries on the details behind the plan to Miller, who soon added “communists” to the species of undesirables that must be expelled not only from the United States but from “any country,” and who held forth on how he planned to circumvent the various constitutional obstacles to such a plan for a terrifying New York Times story the following month. Among other things, Miller said, he planned to reinstate public-health emergency declarations used during the pandemic to halt immigration from countries beset by infectious disease; invoke the aforementioned Alien Enemies Act of 1798 and a 1996 “stowaway” loophole to circumvent due process requirements; divert Pentagon appropriations to build a cross-country network of “vast holding facilities that would function as staging centers” for human disposal; and replace government lawyers with “the right kinds of attorneys” for executing such outside-the-box strategies as abolishing birthright citizenship and invoking the Insurrection Act.
“Trump will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown” with a speed and intensity so overwhelming that lawyers “won’t know what’s happening,” Miller told the newspaper. “Any activists who doubt President Trump’s resolve in the slightest are making a drastic error.”
By then, it should have been abundantly clear that the coming “migration crackdown” was not driven by migration at all but the cynical desire to exploit a common fallacy that the Constitution applies exclusively to citizens (or even “Heritage Americans”) as an excuse to capriciously suspend protections to anyone the Trump administration deemed an “enemy,” a group that definitionally and principally consists of U.S. citizens registered to vote. The crackdown on “international students” and threats against essentially anyone with a parent born outside the country were a warning shot for a much broader campaign to purge higher education and the general discourse of criticism of Israel, American foreign policy, capitalism, and most crucially Donald Trump. (To that end, Miller has terminated contracts, federal building access, and security clearance to attorneys whose firms had worked for Hillary Clinton; helped impose crippling financial sanctions on U.N. special rapporteur on the Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese and every staffer of the International Criminal Court; and even argued that the “Democrat Party” should itself be criminalized, on the grounds that it “is not a political party. It is a domestic extremist organization.”)
Everyone—right and left, mainstream and independent, intelligent and dumb as a rock—agrees Stephen Miller is the mastermind of this moment. “He will lose the midterms because of Stephen Miller,” Latinas for Trump co-founder Ileana Garcia predicted last week following the murder of Alex Pretti, while Sens. Ruben Gallego and Bernie Sanders both demanded his resignation. Never Trump Republican strategist Steve Schmidt recently observed that the man he called “a preening and belligerent asshole without peer, who is ignorant of history, drunk with power, corrupt, cruel and wildly dangerous,” was bringing about nothing less than the “collapse” of the American republic.
“Miller came into the first Trump White House as a joke; no one took him seriously,” Trumpologist and Fire and Fury author Michael Wolff opined on a recent video promoting his Substack. “Then as all of the other people were washed out, Stephen Miller stayed and his power and his influence grew, partly because he was so peculiar he couldn’t go anywhere else. He’s a real tinfoil hat guy, Us vs. Them. A white militant right-winger who controls the paramilitary police force that is in an increasing number of American cities, ICE, and he is really writing our new ‘take everything, take what we want’ foreign policy. Can fascism come to America? Well anyway, here we are.”
IT WAS MILLER WHO DICTATED Kristi Noem’s statement claiming federal agents had murdered Veterans Affairs intensive care nurse Alex Pretti for attempting to “massacre law enforcement,” and it was Miller’s famous “WHY AREN’T YOU AT HOME DEPOT??” tantrum last spring that led agents to launch the indiscriminate national terror tour of blue-state courthouses and taquerias and Spanish-language churches that led inexorably to this moment. As individually violent and unhinged as the agents themselves often appear in videos, it’s crucial to remember that the 3,000-a-day arrest minimum Miller imposed during that meeting—a sixfold rise from the numbers they had been doing previously—essentially forced the agents to act like barbarians to hit their numbers.
But beyond his babysitting of Noem’s Department of Homeland Security, it’s also Miller, from his perch as a supposed “deputy” to White House chief of staff Susie Wiles and director of something called the Homeland Security Council, who has arguably spent the past year running, at the very least, the Justice Department, the FBI, what’s left of the Department of Education, most of the Pentagon, and probably just about all of the erstwhile “Department of Government Efficiency.”
A February Wired report detailed how the “prime minister” had dispatched his wife and soullessmate Katie Miller to operate as an “emissary” to Musk and keep him posted on the day-to-day operations of the wrecking crew, especially when it came time to “expose” what he termed the “radical Marxists” running the now-shuttered USAID, which Miller almost giddily explained had to be fed into the woodchipper because “98 percent” of its staffers “donated to Kamala Harris or another left-wing candidate.”
Miller also goes way back with current DOGE implementer-in-chief Russ Vought, who was treasurer of Miller’s America First Legal Foundation when he was giving his famous speeches about how federal workers would be “traumatically affected” by the terror of Trump 2.0, as well as Sergio Gor, the lead operative behind the torrent of one-line emails firing dozens of Democratic and nonpartisan regulators, commissioners, inspectors general, and other officials, in violation of an about-to-be-cashiered 90-year Supreme Court precedent. (Gor and Miller were both veterans of Michele Bachmann’s staff and the late David Horowitz’s campus conservative pipeline, and Gor hosted a Miller-organized project called “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week” during his stint atop the George Washington University chapter of Young Americans for Freedom.)
Unsurprisingly, Miller’s fingerprints were all over the hysterically unconstitutional “Compact for Excellence in Higher Education,” a joint venture of Miller’s chief legal adviser May Mailman and private equity billionaire Marc Rowan, through which the Department of Education is attempting to extract contractual agreements from universities to submit everything from personnel decisions and curriculum to admissions process to strict Trump administration ideological supervision in exchange for federal research funding.
In March, Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg revealed he had been accidentally added to an 18-person group chat in which Miller, not the secretary of defense, gave the ultimate “green light” to murder several hundred Yemenis and destroy vital infrastructure in retaliation for the Houthi government’s periodic drone attacks on commercial ships crossing the Suez Canal in protest of the genocide in Gaza. Then in May, The New York Times detailed Miller’s “extraordinary control” over “figurehead” attorney general Pam Bondi. At that agency and in the FBI, Miller wielded power via Emil Bove, the former Trump defense attorney detailed to the DOJ as Bondi’s so-called “enforcer,” according to a wrongful termination lawsuit filed in September by three former senior FBI officials. Starting a week after the inauguration, the complaint alleges, Bove began demanding a list of names of agents who worked on the January 6th investigation, explaining he was “receiving pressure from Stephen Miller to see ‘symmetrical action at the FBI as had been happening at DOJ.’” Later, he pressed again, according to a passage in a recently published book on the purges. “I just need five or six names because Stephen Miller is breathing down my neck.”
Ultimately, the Trump administration would preside over the exodus of more than 800 FBI agents and 5,500 DOJ staffers, nearly half of them lawyers. The entire Tax Division of the DOJ was shut down; nearly a quarter of the nation’s FBI agents have been reassigned to immigration enforcement, meaning that half the agents in some offices are now working immigration cases, while white-collar prosecutions are at an all-time low. So we also have Miller to thank for the unprecedented ubiquity in brazen frauds and scams exemplified by the frenzied prediction-market betting on what Miller & Co. will do next.
Miller himself has made no attempt to avoid the appearance of self-dealing: His family just made as much as $150,000 selling stock in an obscure Las Vegas rare earth mining concern following a suspicious Trump administration deal to funnel $550 million into the company.
But staving off the next financial crisis or international terror attack could not be further from the minds of the Pam Bondis and Kash Patels of the world, if one believes the account of former FBI official Brian “the Driz” Driscoll, who “failed” his first interview with a Trump official for not sounding sufficiently “based,” but stuck around after Bove convinced him someone “political” would take his job if he left, according to the lawsuit. After Kash Patel was confirmed, he was quick to trust Driscoll and other longtime agents Bove had chosen to be his deputies, sharing cigars and defending them on news shows. But every few days, he and/or Dan Bongino would become paralyzed with fear over an angry comment from one of their social media reply guys “outing” one agent or another’s work on some sensitive job or another. In August, after an agency pilot named Chris Meyer was erroneously “outed” on social media as “the signatory to the Mar-a-Lago search warrant affidavit,” a flurry of Trump officials including Bongino called Driscoll to report that “he and Patel were under a lot of pressure from the White House regarding Meyer.”
The Driz was ultimately fired last February for refusing to fire Meyer; another official was fired because a former subordinate who’d listened to Patel’s podcast was angry that their field office had required agents to submit to periodic COVID-19 tests. “Patel explained that he had to fire the people his superiors told him to fire, because his ability to keep his own job depended on [their] removal,” the lawsuit claims. Shortly after terminating Driscoll and a dozen agents who had been photographed kneeling during a June 2020 Black Lives Matter riot, Patel received a “thank you” of sorts from King Miller via his deputy Anthony Salisbury, who made a big show of sending a laudatory text message on the firings to a Pete Hegseth staffer. “This is how Kash survives,” he wrote the Pentagon staffer on the move, digressing somewhat from a discussion about the brazenly illegal possibility of sending the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division to subdue anti-ICE protesters in Portland. “He will do this stuff for the man but day to day giant douche canoe.”
Salisbury’s background—he came to the White House from Miami, where he served as special agent in charge of the Miami field office of the investigatory arm of DHS—helps explain one of the more improbable developments of Trump 2.0: the close alliance of Miller and Marco Rubio, whose political career Miller once spent a year laboring to undermine from his perch as a shadow editor of Breitbart, a stint that produced the single best source of the famously text-averse Miller’s unfiltered musings. (Typical 2015-2016 Stephen Miller statement on the former Florida senator: “I mean if you were to design in a lab the instrument of the GOP’s destruction, [Rubio] is exactly what you’d come up with.”) Miller has clearly warmed to Rubio, presumably due to their shared interest in eradicating the left-wing Chavista government of Venezuela, an agenda Miller’s America First Legal Foundation spent much of 2023 and 2024 laboring to recast as an “America First” priority with its incessant coverage of Venezuelan migrant crimes the Trump administration now insists amounted to a Maduro regime “invasion” of America itself.
Rubio is a Trump 2.0 rarity: His ambition matches Miller’s, his staff is famously competent, and he has deep donor and foreign-policy relationships. And yet even he has reversed pretty much every relevant position he once espoused since his confirmation vote. He vigorously defended the destruction of USAID, an agency he once extolled; he lied that its disorderly unwind resulted in no deaths (it likely caused hundreds of thousands); he embraced the full-scale termination of Temporary Protected Status for Venezuelans after literally co-sponsoring the legislation that extended it to 600,000; he threw María Corina Machado under the bus after touting her as the savior of Venezuela; etc. If Rubio sees Miller as a necessary evil to attaining his higher ambitions, perhaps he should listen to his wife’s recent interview with Elon Musk, in which the beleaguered ultra-billionaire admitted his disastrous tenure as the public face of Trump’s trauma infliction team had destroyed his brand and that no, he wouldn’t do it all over again if he could.
Because at this point, the pattern is so blindingly obvious Joe Biden could spot it: In Musk and “Ka$h,” Bongino and Bondi, Pete Hegseth and Sean Duffy, Miller has assembled a colorful menagerie of hysterically venal, unqualified reality show narcissists to keep the Big Boss entertained, while he attends to the more serious business of dismantling the government, suspending the Constitution, neutralizing his opponents, and presumably repealing democracy. No one conforms to this role more aggressively than Noem, the genius who famously thought murdering her puppy would make good material for a political memoir (and less famously earned a college degree at 40 by convincing South Dakota State to grant her “intern credits” for being a congresswoman), though erstwhile Border Patrol “commander-at-large”—a fake title—Greg Bovino, who had been obsessed with “the border” since he saw a Jack Nicholson movie about it in elementary school, comes close.
Noem deserves to be impeached solely for the number of unique outfits she has worn in photos she has posted to Instagram over the past year. (It’s at least 93, and that’s not including the skintight white number she wore with the $50,000 Rolex during her visit to CECOT, which is not on the feed, for some reason.) She also just spent $220 million of your tax dollars—$143 million of which went to a shadowy LLC that in turn paid an advertising company owned by the husband of DHS chief spokesrobot Tricia McLaughlin—filming and airing a commercial starring herself riding horses in multiple wardrobes around Mount Rushmore while promising to punish foreigners who might attempt to attain “the freedom only America provides” by crossing the border illegally. But in her idiocy she has, like Bondi with the Epstein binders, performed a valuable service: laying bare the cynicism at the heart of the Trump 2.0 project while making the Trump administration a laughingstock to its own supporters. It might be politically wise, to that end, to keep her around.
I am sure Democrats feel the same way about Miller, an avowed Nazi with a vampiric countenance who makes Jared Kushner look salt-of-the-earth, and whose fiery CNN diatribe in favor of seizing Greenland simply to prove that “we live in a world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power” left even Fox News die-hards with the wrong kind of chills. There are signs that Miller’s “untouchable” status within the White House is wearing off. After repeated rebukes from the Supreme Court, the administration has given up on wielding the Alien Enemies Act; a handful of Reagan-appointed federal judges have expressed horror at the flagrant First Amendment violations, routine floutings of court orders, and “meritless justifications of criminal activity” that have typified the Trump 2.0 legal system. One prominent longtime civil rights attorney told the Prospect he believed Miller-ism peaked during the spring and has been on the wane ever since simply because the gutted DOJ lacks the personnel to handle the lawsuits it invites, which would explain why he has more recently focused his sadism on parties less equipped to challenge him in court, and why Noem felt emboldened to throw him under the bus.
But it should console nobody if Miller’s stock within the White House is on the decline. In the best-case scenario, he inflicted enough institutional destruction to consume a generation repairing the damage; in the worst, he declines television news interviews for the next six months and devotes his attention to rigging the next election for Vance-Rubio. That’s the thing about politicians and repellent personalities: The former instinctively trust the latter because they never threaten to upstage them, and Miller has never shown any desire to run for office or get people to like him. He’s kept his eye on the long game of killing democracy entirely, and is perilously close to a final victory if no one stops him.
The post Impeach President Miller appeared first on The American Prospect.