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Incoming White House chief of staff Stephen Miller talks as he sits in the presidential limo.
ColumnStars and Swipes
Trump's appointment of hardliner Stephen Miller as chief of staff signals a dangerous two years
The architect of Trump’s hardline immigration agenda is poised to shape his final two years in office, with little appetite for compromise.
IT WAS THE tapping gloves before the first uppercut landed; an opening feint in what is now widely expected to be a brutal two-year brawl.
The relief Americans felt after Donald Trump’s apparently conciliatory response to the brutal humiliation he endured at the polls was short-lived. Stephen Miller’s appointment as his new Chief of Staff shattered the short-lived illusion that he would rise above the most crushing midterm defeat of a Republican president in half a century.
Even as Trump was indicating his willingness to work with Democrats on immigration reform, he had already tapped Miller, the most hardline of the white nationalist cabal within the White House, to replace Susie Wiles.
The decision is the clearest possible indication that Trump has no intention of going gently into the twilight of his lame duck era.
Unlike Wiles, who was essentially a toll booth operator for the Oval Office, deciding which special interest groups, tech and corporate titans had access to Trump, Miller brings an unshakeable ideology to the Chief of Staff’s office. Wiles, a veteran lobbyist and highly regarded campaign operative within GOP circles, had little knowledge of, or experience with, the legislative and political machinations of Congress. Miller has an insider’s knowledge of both, underpinned by a voracious appetite for conflict.
What next?
With Miller in charge, the second half of Trump’s second term is likely to be far more ideologically driven, combative and refocused on the anti-woke, anti-DEI crusades that galvanised the MAGA base in 2024.
Trump may have reverted to the pugilistic mode that has defined his political career to date, but he’s a much-depleted force. His power has been eroded by the scale of the midterms defeat and by his diminished mental and physical capacity. His evident detachment from his role as President comes at a dangerous time. The ‘angry little weirdo’ from a grim Los Angeles neighbourhood has become the ruthless power behind the most volatile of thrones.
I first encountered Miller on the campaign trail in Dallas in 2016. At the time he was the communications director for Senator Jeff Sessions, one of the most unabashedly anti-immigration forces on Capitol Hill. When Sessions became the first US Senator to endorse Trump, Miller was initially seconded to beef up the anti-immigration rhetoric in Trump’s speeches.
I’d seen him perform as a sort of warm-up act for Trump at a few events previously. Initially audiences didn’t pay a lot of attention; despite his penchant for expensive suits, he had the physical presence – and all the charm – of a junior accounts clerk in a debt collection agency.
But his angry anti-immigration screeds soon caught their attention – as did his unabashed loathing of Hillary Clinton. Before Trump made ‘Lock Her Up’ his 2016 election battle cry, Miller was gleefully declaring at rallies in Iowa and Texas that Clinton was going to prison.
He already knew some of the key players in Trump’s orbit. He and Steve Bannon, a Trump adviser, campaign manager and White House chief strategist, had a relationship going back several years. Miller had been a regular contributor to Breitbart and right-wing talk radio and online media outlets for almost a decade. It didn’t take long for his extremist views to propel him into Trump’s inner circle but he was also careful to court relative moderates like Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump. Their Jewish faith provided a bond and soon Miller was a regular guest at dinner parties which they hosted in their Washington DC home. It was a savvy move; when Bannon was ousted, Miller’s friendship with Kushner and Trump’s daughter ensured his proximity to Trump continued uninterrupted.
After Trump’s surprise election victory in 2016, Miller accompanied him to the White House as a policy adviser. He was a regular at Trump’s newly acquired International Hotel, formerly the landmark DC Post Office Building. Ivanka Trump had overseen the renovations; it looked like a cross between the set of Frozen and a Saudi Marriott: acres of blue velvet upholstery did little to soften the chill of white marble floors, columns and tables and oversized crystal light fixtures.
Welcoming it wasn’t but it was a magnet for MAGAs with moolah and ambitious young flunkeys in skinny suits. They eyed the entrances like meerkats, alert for the arrival of a Trump scion, Rudy Giuliani, Tucker Carlson, or other members of Trump’s inner circle who frequented the bar and restaurant on a near nightly basis. It was also prime stalking ground for journalists like this one, looking to doorstop White House officials whose tongues had been loosened by a few martinis.
Miller was usually surrounded by aspiring young guns who hung on his every word as he held forth on his topic du jour in his high-pitched staccato delivery, laughing uproariously at his cutting asides.
Vying for position
The scuttlebutt at the time was that he was disappointed not to have been appointed as Secretary of Homeland Security and didn’t believe Kirsten Niejsen was up to the job. But their often combative interactions put him in regular contact with Katie Waldman, an ambitious Congressional aide who had become DHS spokesperson around the time Miller was crafting Trump’s zero tolerance immigration policy.
At the time, a Congressional official who knew both Miller and Waldman from their Senate communications roles told me, “They fell in love while they were figuring out how to keep brown kids in cages. As you do.”
Their February 2020 wedding took place at the Trump DC hotel, in the final heady days before Covid struck. The economy was booming and, the immigration fiasco of 2018 notwithstanding, Trump’s inner circle believed a second term as inevitable. An Elvis impersonator provided the entertainment, Trump was guest of honour, and virtually every MAGA heavyweight was in attendance. Miller, the derided outsider, had arrived in the winner’s circle.
Unlike most of the insiders who have survived a decade with Trump, Miller does not avoid the spotlight. On the contrary, he relishes the profile his perch in Trump’s inner circle has given him and the opportunities to ‘own the libtards’ in combative exchanges on cable TV.
In the post January 6th wilderness, Miller remained close to Trump until the 2024 campaign swung into action. His skills as a strategist are limited, his intellect is middling at best but he’s an effective manager and campaign operative. He became indispensable to Susie Wiles during the campaign and became her Deputy Chief of Staff for policy. He read this as a mandate to resume the hardline immigration approach he had championed during the first term, only more so.
He found a fellow traveller in JD Vance who, mindful of how the winds of power circulate around the Oval Office, quickly befriended Miller and his wife. There were cosy sorties family snaps. Shortly after Miller’s wife became pregnant with her fourth child under the age of six, Vance’s wife Usha announced her fourth pregnancy. The nativist patriarchs assembled their wives and children for a series of White House photo ops.
But unlike Vance, whose role as Vice President carries little inherent power, Miller is poised to shape the final two years of the Trump era. He has navigated Washington’s convoluted corridors of power in record time, advancing from Congressional flunky to Oval Office insider in less than a decade. But few Chiefs of Staff have engendered more animosity or created such a polarising public profile.
As with so many extremists, the roots of Miller’s rise lay in an early humiliation. After an early childhood of relative privilege, The near collapse of his father’s real estate business in 1998 forced the Miller family one of Santa Monica’s wealthiest white enclaves to a rented house adjacent to the Interstate 10 motorway underpass, where most of his neighbours were working class Blacks and Latinos. The move coincided with his years at the Santa Monica High School, whose sprawling campus accommodated 2,500 students from diverse backgrounds.
Nick Silverman, an LA based writer and one of Miller’s former classmates, recalls his extremist rhetoric even alienated the minority of students who held conservative views. Recordings from Recordings suggest a teenage Miller, unpopular and academically undistinguished, revelled in a High School persona as right-wing provocateur; arguing for the torture of Iraqis and against the use of Spanish signs on the school campus.
In one widely circulated clip of a 90 second campaign address from 2002 Miller, who was seeking election to the student council demands to jeers and boos; “Am I the only one who is sick and tired of being told to pick up my trash when we have plenty of janitors who are paid to do it for us?”
Miller, like Vance, believes the midterm humiliation occurred because the war in Iran fractured the Trump coalition. But his combative nature means he’s unlikely to throw Pete Hegseth to the Democratic wolves on Capitol Hill, even though he favours ending the war in Iran. The conundrum is how Iran’s negotiating position has been bolstered by Trump’s domestic defeat and the knowledge that Democrats are unlikely to provide unchecked funding for an ongoing war. It’s unlikely that any peace deal will deliver what Trump has pledged repeatedly; an unconditional surrender by Iran of its nuclear capabilities.
The Democrat leadership’s goal of delivering bipartisan immigration reform is likely to prove even more problematic. White nationalist impulses have been the animating forces of Miller’s teenage and adult existence.
His antipathy towards minorities was abundantly documented as a teenage High School provocateur. Since then, there has been no deviation in Miller’s white male supremacist route to the apex of political power. And there is no-off ramp.
Marion McKeone is an award-winning journalist, writer and documentary maker. She is a columnist with TheJournal.ie.
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