Of a churning gallery of grotesques, fascists and opportunists, Stephen Miller is the worst

For a minute there, after the merciless thrashing Donald Trump and the Maga movement received at the hands of voters in last week’s midterm elections, it looked like the US president might have been somewhat chastened. It looked, in fact, like he might be preparing to take a more conciliatory approach toward the Democrats, whose majorities in both houses of Congress afford them significant – though limited – power to obstruct his agenda. In a phone interview with CNBC the day after the election, he seemed to be signalling some form of potential rapprochement, and suggesting that bipartisan co-operation might come easier to him than people anticipated. “I can tell you I can work with them on many things,” he said, “many more things than people understand.” Bernie Sanders, for instance, had very similar views on trade, he claimed.

The mere fact that he was immediately willing to accept the legitimacy of the result – albeit, admittedly, continuing to blame it on poor Republican candidates and to insist that if he’d personally been on the ballot they’d have won in a landslide – seemed to signal whatever might pass, with Trump, for a conciliatory mood.

But it was not to be. Of course it was not to be. Did anyone seriously expect otherwise? And the most dire indication of just how spectacularly it was not to be came two days later, with Trump’s decision to replace Susie Wiles – who since his return to office in January of 2025 had served as his chief of staff and who was viewed as the closest thing to a moderating influence on the president – with Stephen Miller.

Of the churning gallery of grotesques, fascists and abject opportunists who have populated Trump’s two presidential administrations, Miller is undoubtedly the most politically extreme and the most personally unappealing. He is one of only a handful of figures who have remained by Trump’s side since his first administration. (In 2016, he left a role as communications manager for the Republican Senator Jeff Sessions to work on Trump’s first election campaign.)

As a senior adviser in that first administration and, since 2025, deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security adviser, Miller has been a hugely influential figure, in particular on Trump’s immigration policies. The shock-and-awe barbarism of those policies – the separation of children from their families at the US-Mexican border; the banning of immigrants from Muslim majority countries; the imposing of quotas on Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents for arrests; and the imprisonment without trial of immigrants in Salvadoran prisons – has been to a very large degree the work of Stephen Miller. This is very much his thing. The cruelty, as they say, is the point; he lives for it, and works very hard for it.

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Perhaps even more than Trump himself, he is a true believer in the idea that power is the only principle that matters in politics, domestically and internationally, and that the power of a US president is sovereign. Last January, after the Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro was illegally kidnapped in Caracas and transported to New York to face drug trafficking charges, Miller was asked on CNN about the coup, and about who was now running Venezuela.

“The United States is now running Venezuela,” he said. “By definition that is true. We live in a world where you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. Those are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”

Many commentators have noted, in Miller’s remarks and in the conception of power they revealed, the lurking presence of the German legal theorist Carl Schmitt, whose writings informed and facilitated the Third Reich’s system of law. For Schmitt, the power of the leader – whom he referred to in his writings as the “sovereign” – was absolute, and it consisted in the capacity to declare exceptions to the legal order. (The archetypal state of exception, in this sense, was the Nazi suspension of civil liberties after the Reichstag fire.) Schmitt’s ideas have become increasingly influential in recent years on the American right.

According to a report by Reuters two days before the midterms, the Trump White House spent months, in advance of the election, strategising on how the president might continue to advance his agenda through executive power in the face of a Democrat-controlled House and Senate. Such a rule-by-decree conception of presidential power reeks of Miller, and indeed the Reuters report named him as one of the senior officials involved in the planning.

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Miller’s views on race and immigration are, too, notoriously informed by white nationalist ideas. In 2019, when he was a White House senior adviser, the Southern Poverty Law Center, a US civil rights advocacy group, published leaked emails in which Miller referenced a book called The Camp of the Saints by the French author Jean Raspail.

Since its publication in 1973, the book has been a central text of the white nationalist canon. (Steve Bannon and Marine Le Pen have also cited the book.) In it, a fleet of about a million Indian migrants arrives on the southern coast of France; when politicians fail to deal with the crisis, Europe is overrun with Asiatic hordes and the collapse of civilisation ensues. These immigrants are, needless to say, depicted not as desperate and vulnerable, but as violent savages intent, in particular, on the rape of white women.

The leaked emails were sent by Miller to an editor at the rightwing political website Breitbart in 2015, when Europe was receiving a large number of migrants from Syria and Afghanistan. “Someone,” he wrote, “should point out the parallels to Camp of the Saints.”

But it isn’t, in the end, necessary to know anything of Miller’s political affinities to see that he is motivated by an extreme and dangerous ideology of hate; it’s only necessary to look at the chaos his influence has wrought, especially since the start of Trump’s second term. When US Customs and Border Patrol agents shot and killed a 37-year-old nurse named Alex Pretti in Minneapolis earlier this year, Miller immediately announced that he was a “domestic terrorist” and an “assassin”.

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Aside from appointing Miller as his new chief of staff, Trump’s other most notable response to the midterm drubbing was to revert even deeper to his late-career comfort zone: renovating the White House. The longer Trump remains president, the less interest he seems to take in the actual business of government. And the more time and energy the octogenarian president puts into interior decor, the more Miller will be in a position to do the actual work of running the administration. The next two years of American politics, it seems, could see more chandeliers in the White House, and more blood on the streets.