1. Role in Harsh Immigration Policies
Family separation policy: Miller was the key strategist behind the 2018 policy that separated thousands of migrant children from their parents at the U.S.–Mexico border, which was widely condemned by humanitarian groups, religious leaders, and members of both parties.
Muslim travel ban: He helped draft and defend the travel ban on several predominantly Muslim countries, which critics viewed as discriminatory and unconstitutional.
Reduction in refugee admissions: Miller pushed to lower refugee caps to historic lows, arguing for a “Fortress America” stance that critics said betrayed U.S. humanitarian values.
2. Extremist Rhetoric and Ideology
Nationalist and xenophobic tone: His public and private communications (revealed through leaked emails) included links to white nationalist publications and “replacement theory” talking points.
Civil rights backlash: Groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) have said his views echo far-right, anti-immigrant ideologies inconsistent with democratic and inclusive values.
3. Undermining Democratic Norms
Support for executive overreach: Miller encouraged using presidential power aggressively — including emergency declarations and rule changes — to bypass Congress on immigration and border control.
Disinformation tactics: Critics accuse him of framing immigrants and minorities as threats to manipulate public fear and divide voters for political gain.
4. Influence on Trump’s Policy Agenda
Consolidation of power: Miller was one of the few aides who retained Trump’s trust throughout his presidency, shaping a broad range of policies — not just immigration — with a focus on isolationism and cultural polarization.
Post-Trump activism: He continues to lead America First Legal, a group that sues the Biden administration over diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, which critics view as an attempt to dismantle civil rights progress.
The White House aide equates opposition to Trump’s agenda with terrorism—and pushes for the use of state power to suppress it.
Stephen Miller spent his weekend, as he is wont to do, describing American politics as if the nation were in the advanced stages of civil war and as if he were dictating a message while racing to a mountain hideout to escape bloodthirsty guerillas. “There is a large and growing movement of leftwing terrorism in this country. It is well organized and funded,” he wrote on X. “And it is shielded by far-left Democrat judges, prosecutors and attorneys general. The only remedy is to use legitimate state power to dismantle terrorism and terror networks.”
The provocation for this latest sweaty missive was an unfavorable judicial ruling (by a judge contravening President Donald Trump’s federal takeover of 200 National Guardsmen in Oregon). But violent defiance has become the animating vision through which Miller—and, therefore, on account of his sweeping influence over domestic politics, the Trump administration—views his conflict with Democrats, the media, the judiciary, or any entity that stands in his path.
The most consistent theme in Trump’s career is that any word or deed that he deems contrary to his political interests is illegitimate. Any unfavorable news story is libel, any election he loses is rigged, any unflattering fact pattern is a hoax, and almost anybody who opposes him should be locked up.
Miller’s career was defined, in its early stages, by a fanatical hatred of immigration. Over time, as Miller has emerged as the chief architect of Trump’s second-term agenda, his worldview and Trump’s have blended together.
“The Democrat Party is not a political party,” he said in August. “It is a domestic extremist organization.” Several weeks later, Trump seized on Charlie Kirk’s assassination to depict his own political opponents as accessories to murder. “For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals,” he said, in remarks reportedly written by Miller. “This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now.”
Kirk’s death became the immediate pretext for using state power to crush political opposition. As the shock of that murder has worn off, Miller is shifting to a more durable pretext: the political and legal backlash against Trump’s expansive deployment of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The executive branch certainly has the right, and indeed the obligation, to enforce immigration law. Trump, though, has redefined the boundaries of this enforcement in numerous ways: by detaining people without due process, some of whom have inevitably turned out to be citizens; by seizing law-enforcement powers from states and localities; by employing masked agents who don’t always identify their agency, and who have frequently attacked journalists and bystanders.
These actions have generated public pushback, and even isolated and horrifying acts of violence—but hardly an insurrection. As the ruling turning down Trump’s demand to federalize law enforcement in Oregon notes, the administration’s assertion that Portland is in a state of revolution musters a total of four episodes of threatening behavior by protesters to justify this claim. One of the incidents is “protesters setting up a makeshift guillotine to intimidate federal officials.” Another was “someone posting a photograph of an unmarked ICE vehicle online.” The other two involved flashlights being shone in the faces of agents driving vehicles. These incidents may be regrettable, but they do not even constitute actual violence, let alone terrorism.
In the Miller-Trump formulation, however, Trump embodies both the public will and the only force standing between the public and rampant criminal anarchy. It follows that opposition to Trump in any form, including by judges issuing legal rulings, constitutes an illegal rebellion. “The President is the commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces, not an Oregon judge. Portland and Oregon law enforcement, at the direction of local leaders, have refused to aid ICE officers facing relentless terrorist assault and threats to life,” Miller asserted on X. “This is an organized terrorist attack on the federal government and its officers, and the deployment of troops is an absolute necessity to defend our personnel, our laws, our government, public order and the Republic itself.”
Trump’s remarks on the night of Kirk’s murder redefined violent incitement to include harsh criticism of judges. (“My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it, as well as those who go after our judges, law-enforcement officials, and everyone else who brings order to our country.”) Now Miller himself is going after judges.
To call this “hypocrisy” is to engage Miller’s reasoning at a level upon which it does not operate. The essence of post-liberalism is the rejection of the notion that some neutral standards of conduct apply to all parties. Miller, like Trump, appears to believe his side stands for what is right and good, and his opponents stand for what is evil. Any methods used by Trump are ipso facto justified, and any methods used against him illegitimate.
A couple of weeks ago, Miller claimed that a disturbed gunman shooting Charlie Kirk impelled the government to crack down on the left. Now he says a handful of activists protesting ICE impel the government to crack down on the left.
Violence is not the cause of Trump and Miller’s desire to use state power to crush their opposition. It is the pretext for which they transparently long.
Stephen Miller sounds more and more like Joseph Goebbels every day. He aspires to be Reinhard Heydrich. Look him up.
This guy is going to have to face justice when the vile Trump administration (so-called) is finally left in the garbage bin of history.
https://www.theatlantic.com/
Stephen Miller Sparks Suspicion After ‘Glitch’ on CNN When He Mentioned ‘Plenary Authority’
An awkward live TV moment for White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller is under heavy scrutiny on social media.
On Monday afternoon, the Donald Trump aide went on CNN’s News Central to discuss the President’s deployment of National Guard troops to U.S. cities.
CNN asked Miller whether the Trump Administration will abide by a district judge’s order blocking the Guard’s deployment in Oregon. “Well, the Administration filed an appeal this morning with the Ninth Circuit,” Miller began. “I would note the Administration won an identical case in the Ninth Circuit just a few months ago with respect to the federalizing of the California National Guard.”
Then, Miller said: “Under Title 10 of the U.S. Code, the President has plenary authority, has—” before making an abrupt stop. Miller blinked several times, with anchor Boris Sanchez calling out his name, though he still did not respond.
“Stephen, I apologize. It seems like we’re having a technical issue,” Sanchez said, before the show cut to a break, and resumed after with Sanchez saying some “wires got crossed.” The interview with Miller continued, but neither Sanchez nor Miller brought up “plenary authority” again. A CNN spokesperson confirmed there was a technical issue during the interview, though they did not specify the details.
What is plenary authority?
The definition of plenary authority is a complete and absolute power to take action on an issue without limitations,
The brief moment sparked controversy online over Miller’s use of the phrase “plenary authority,” which Cornell University’s Legal Information Institute defines as “power that is wide-ranging, broadly construed, and often limitless for all practical purposes.”
Some users speculated that there was no malfunction during the interview but rather that Miller abruptly caught himself and stopped talking. One TikTok user said, “Stephen Miller said the quiet part out loud accidentally and then appeared to glitch, all of a sudden when he recognized how much of his foot he just put into his mouth.” The user added: “He just came out and said Trump is authoritarian.” Another TikTok user posted a video with more than 100,000 likes: “Stephen Miller absolutely did not have a glitch on live TV. He had an ‘Oh sh-t’ moment where he said something that he f-cking was not supposed to say.”
On X, one user posted, “Stephen Miller didn’t glitch. He said ‘plenary authority’ and whoever was in his ear told him to STFU because he said too much and he froze like a deer in headlights.”
Upon return to air, Sanchez asked Miller about “the President’s legal authority as you see it under Title 10,” which refers to the part of the U.S. Code outlining laws that govern the Armed Forces, and “whether the Administration still plans to abide by that judge’s order, restricting any National Guard troops from being sent to Oregon.”
“Well, the Administration will abide by the ruling insofar as it affects the covered parties,” Miller said. “But there are also many other options the President has to deploy federal resources and assets under the U.S. military to Portland. But I was making the point that under federal law, Section— Title 10 of the U.S. Code, the President has the authority anytime he believes federal resources are insufficient to federalize the National Guard to carry out a mission necessary for public safety.”
A section of the law Miller mentioned states that the President may call into federal service members and a state’s National Guard under three conditions: if there is an invasion by a foreign nation, if there is a rebellion or a danger of one staged against the U.S. government, or if the President is “unable with the regular forces” to execute U.S. laws.
Trump has continued to test his executive authority in the deployment of troops within the U.S. and has been met with criticisms from local officials as well as pushback from court rulings, to which he has floated the possibility of using the 19th-century Insurrection Act to bypass.
Inside Stephen Miller’s Secret Plan to Normalize Trump’s Dictator Rule
He wants to supercharge searing civil tensions to get low-information voters to embrace their inner authoritarian. Exactly two Democrats appear to fully grasp this.
Stephen Miller has a theory about this political moment. As President Trump expands his lawbreaking and dictatorial rule, the powerful MAGA disinformation apparatus—at Miller’s direction—is supercharging public attention to the debate over Trump’s conduct in a way that’s designed to deeply polarize it. That will force Americans to take a side in that standoff, Miller clearly believes, driving them to embrace authoritarian rule, though perhaps without understanding it in exactly those terms.
Do Democratic leaders broadly have their own theory about this moment? It’s unclear. But here’s what we can divine right now: Governors J.B. Pritzker of Illinois and Gavin Newsom of California do have one. They grasp Miller’s theory of the case, and they are responding in kind, with their own war for attention, on the intuition that voters will side with the rule of law over authoritarian dictatorship—if they are presented with this as a clear choice.
This week, Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act after a federal judge blocked him from sending the National Guard into Portland, in a ruling that sharply noted Trump is making up facts about crime there as his pretext.
“It’s a burning hell hole,” Trump said. “You have a judge that tries to pretend there’s no problem.” Trump declared that he’d enact the Insurrection Act “if people were being killed and courts were holding us up, or governors or mayors were holding us up.”
The specter of Portland “burning” is dimwitted MAGA propaganda. But Trump is now nakedly threatening to invoke the notorious nineteenth-century act if Democratic governors or the courts lawfully exercise their roles in our constitutional schema, in a way that displeases him. This would unshackle vast and dangerously vague authorities to domestically deploy the military, powers nominally reserved for extraordinary domestic unrest or civil breakdown. Trump would invoke it based on sheer fabrications, or possibly on old footage of Portland he saw on Fox News.
Yet it’s no accident that this comes right after Miller loudly denounced the Portland ruling by that judge—a Trump appointee, no less—as “legal insurrection.” Miller declared that it’s “insurrection” when judges assume for themselves “powers that have been delegated by the Constitution to the president.” Miller is also insisting that judges “have no conceivable authority” to restrict the commander-in-chief from “dispatching members of the U.S. military to defend federal lives and property,” meaning in Portland.
Of course, here in non-MAGA reality, the judge was merely interpreting whether Trump breached the limits Congress has already placed on that presidential authority. She concluded that Trump doesn’t have unlimited power to simply declare that the conditions permitting him to federalize a state’s National Guard have been met. In other words, as Harry Litman argued at TNR, facts matter. But that’s precisely what Miller denies. His argument, in essence, is that Trump’s power to declare by fiat that those conditions have been met really is quasi-absolute.
To that end, Miller appears to want Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act. Recently, Miller was asked directly if he’s discussed the idea with Trump, and he evaded the question. It’s likely that Miller, a master manipulator lurking furtively behind the despot’s throne, frequently uses the word “insurrection” about Trump’s opponents to lodge it deep in Trump’s brainstem and make invocation of the Act more likely. As The Bulwark’s Andrew Egger notes, Miller’s goal is to supplant the rule of law with the “rule of Trump,” a personalist form of rule that answers to Trump the man and no one else.
Yet there’s another dark aim here that’s worth appreciating. Miller is working overtime to polarize the public debate about Trump’s increasingly dictatorial abuses of power. And he’s doing so quite consciously. He relentlessly depicts Democrats as allied with a vast, inchoate class of violent criminals and insurrectionists operating in every shadow of American life. Miller seizes on every attention-grabbing moment he can to amplify the point, even if—and this part is crucial—it looks likely at first to reflect negatively on Trump.
Consider what happened after ICE raided an apartment building in Chicago last week. As Garrett Graff chronicles, media coverage was brutal: It depicted jackbooted federal agents busting down doors and dragging children, some naked, out into the dark streets.
Yet MAGA was undaunted. State-sponsored propaganda video depicted the affair as akin to an action movie featuring the thrilling spectacle of defeated-looking migrants in handcuffs. Miller went on Fox News to hail the operation as an enormous triumph.
says the ICE raid targeting Tren de Aragua terrorists in Chicago “was one of the most successful law enforcement operations the we’ve seen in this country.” “These ICE officers—these heroes—saved God knows how many lives by getting these TdA SCUM out of our country.”
Citizen
This is out of hand. These agents are there to cause trouble and violence, not to keep people safe. These are the scenes that play out in war torn, destitute countries – not America.
Amid all this, Miller’s public battle with Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker has been particularly noteworthy. Pritzker went on CNN and tore into the ICE raid, vividly depicting it as a lawless action targeting U.S. citizens in order to provoke a response and justify more thuggery later. Pritzker called it “Trump’s invasion,” deliberately using a term Miller uses for immigrants. Miller eagerly took the bait:
The rub here is that both these men want this fight. To be clear, the public is squarely with Pritzker: A new CBS survey finds that 58 percent of Americans oppose Trump’s National Guard deployments. And G. Elliott Morris’s recent poll finds opposition to National Guards assisting ICE at 51 percent to 37 percent.
But in Miller’s worldview, polls like that only register shallowly held convictions at best. In this understanding of politics—and you should read Brian Beutler and Lee Drutman on this—what really matters is the political attention economy, and how conflict plays within it. Supercharging searing civil tensions over jarring high-profile events drives attention, jolts low-propensity voters out of their information ruts, and compels them to really take sides.
Pritzker and Newsom are now plainly motivated by an understanding like this one. Pritzker has plunged very deeply into the public argument over Trump’s troops in Chicago. In urgent moral language, he has told his state’s residents that Trump represents a dangerous threat to their way of life. Newsom has done the same. After Trump tried to dispatch California’s National Guard into Portland, Newsom warned: “America is on the brink of martial law.”
In short, Pritzker and Newsom see it as a defining challenge of this moment that Trump is consolidating authoritarian power daily, and using it to subjugate and dominate Blue America as if it’s akin to an enemy nation within. And they are shaping their approach accordingly.
Miller plainly believes there’s a latent majority out in the country that can be sleepwalked into authoritarianism. If Democrats sit this debate out, Miller has calculated, Trump’s deceptions can flood public information spaces, persuading low-info, low-attention voters that his autocratic encroachments constitute a proportional response to the civic unrest he keeps propagandizing about.
What’s notable, in one sense, is how badly this project has failed. Despite months of effort, Trump and Miller have not come close to manufacturing the sense of fear or trauma out in the country they’d hoped for. But in the nascent Pritzker-Newsom understanding, assuming this will all take care of itself—that voters will resist Trump-Miller agitprop without prompting—is insufficient. We’ve learned, hearteningly, that majorities seem to harbor a deep attachment to liberal rights and liberties, one that instinctively recoils at masked kidnappings, at hypermilitarized vehicles on urban boulevards, at the trappings of totalitarian dictatorship. But this must be activated. That takes conflict and controversy—powerful imagery and language that rivets attention.
It’s not clear many Democrats understand this. Some Democrats have confided to reporters that they see this topic as a “trap” enticing them into a losing debate about crime. But why assume voters will automatically believe Trump’s occupations are actually about combating crime? This throws in the towel, right up front, on communicating to voters what this debate is really about: that Trump’s abuses should be utterly abhorrent to anyone who values living in a free society.
Do Democrats, broadly speaking, have a theory of this moment that’s consciously matched to MAGA’s authoritarian politics? They need one. Because guess who does have a theory of the moment? Miller does. And he’s amassing unprecedented power to put it into practice as we speak
Judges are “terrorists and enemies of the state?
Lickily she was not in the house which exploded, husband got broken bones escaping, Miller responsible?
