A bad czar has become more despised than he otherwise might have been because one very, very bad boyar is giving him terrible advice, and there’s evidence that the czar has started to realize it. What will Trump do about his Stephen Miller problem?
Out of touch.
The “Stephen Miller problem” is actually three problems. (Well, four.)
Miller is the White House’s chief proponent for mass deportation, reportedly hellbent on removing 1 million illegal immigrants per year. Everything we’ve seen from the administration over the last six months flows from that—workplace raids aimed at rounding up illegals with no criminal record, legal impunity granted to immigration agents to encourage them to execute their mandate aggressively, and huge federal shows of force like the one playing out in Minneapolis to signal how important the issue is to Trump and his team.
That’s all Miller. Americans hate it.
A Quinnipiac poll published yesterday found 60 percent believe the administration is treating immigrants too harshly, while a nearly identical percentage said they favor giving most illegals a pathway to legal status. Trump’s job approval on immigration in the same poll dropped from 44 percent in December to 38 percent now, a trend replicated in other surveys. Nate Silver’s tracker had the president at -3.8 points in net immigration approval as recently as December 10, but today he’s all the way down to -11.1. Americans don’t like Miller’s deport-everyone priorities.
They don’t like the way immigration enforcement officers do business either. Last month, after Renee Good was shot but before Alex Pretti was killed, a New York Times poll found 61 percent of respondents believed Immigration and Customs Enforcement had gone “too far” with its tactics and another 63 percent disapproved of how it’s handling its job. This week’s Quinnipiac survey replicated that 63 percent figure, fueled by a remarkable 47 percent who said they personally know someone who’s living in fear of Trump’s deportation policies. A majority of 51 percent assessed that those policies—the linchpin of the right’s law-and-order message—are making the country less safe.
The true dagger for the czar and his bad boyar, though, is how their obsession with immigration has distracted them from Americans’ exasperation with the cost of living. Check any national poll and you’ll find evidence that voters are furious with the White House for not focusing on the economy. Yet instead of executive action on affordability, they’ve spent the last month drowning in dystopian scenes of an ICE crackdown in Minnesota that’s killed two American citizens.
Last month, by a margin of nearly 2-to-1, respondents in a CNN survey rated the economy as the most important issue facing the United States. The same poll found just 36 percent of Americans believe the president has the right policy priorities, though, and an even smaller share agreed when asked if they thought he cares about people like them. That was the worst number of his five years in office.
Ditto for last month’s Times poll: “Overall, 57 percent of voters thought Mr. Trump was focused on the wrong issues—including a whopping 69 percent of voters under 30, more than any other age group.” Unsurprisingly, those who named immigration as their top issue did think Trump had the right priorities. Too bad for him and Miller that those people are a small-ish minority.
The extreme disillusionment that the Times found among young adults also turned up in a Wall Street Journal survey. Among nine issues tested, Trump’s single worst rating in the 18- to 29-year-old cohort came with respect to “having the right priorities,” on which he was 36 points underwater. “A lot of people expected him to address economic issues first,” one College Republican from Ohio told the paper, worrying that the president has spent too much time on immigration.
Trump and Miller have lost touch with the country, sidetracked by their fantasy of purifying the national “blood” by purging undesirables, and the public’s reaction is turning ugly. Fifty-eight percent in the CNN poll (conducted before Pretti’s death) called the president’s first year a failure. Forty-nine percent in the Times survey believe America is worse off now than it was a year ago, compared to 32 percent who believe it’s better off. New polling data from Harvard-Harris this week found 51 percent overall said Trump is doing a worse job than Joe Biden. Among independents, 56 percent said so.
The cherry on top of this widening political disaster is that it was Stephen Miller who reportedly seized the initiative to defame Pretti as a “domestic terrorist” and would-be “assassin” in the hours after he lay dead on the pavement. Not content to spearhead an agenda that Americans dislike and to carry it out in ways they despise, Miller cemented the White House’s role as villain in Minneapolis by smearing an innocent victim of state violence as the aggressor.
That’s the fourth “Stephen Miller problem” I mentioned earlier: his inability to restrain his impulses toward viciousness even when doing so would benefit him and his boss. The thought of making common cause with him will grow increasingly repulsive to all but the most fanatic and/or dissolute border hawks.
As the saying goes: The first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem. Donald Trump might be nearing the point of admitting he has a problem with Stephen Miller.
Miller time.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the czar isn’t altogether happy with his most notorious boyar.
Cracks have appeared even in the Oval Office. The president, aware of polls showing that much of his immigration agenda isn’t popular, has told advisers he wasn’t comfortable with how far Miller has gone on some fronts, according to people who have spoken with Trump. The president has said that business officials are calling and complaining to him about longtime workers being thrown out of the country.
…
Miller pushed for sweeps at Home Depot and other spots where day workers gather, though Trump has at times been asked to temper raids at businesses. Following immigration arrests in September by federal agents at a Hyundai Motor factory in Georgia, Republican Gov. Brian Kemp called the president and asked for the release of 300 South Korean workers, according to administration officials. The president publicly said he opposed the raid and told Kemp privately that he didn’t know it was happening. He told aides repeatedly that he didn’t want any more sweeps at factories or farms, the officials said.
That’s not all. Trump also reportedly raised an eyebrow when Miller began giving television interviews on subjects beyond his portfolio, like the White House’s designs on Venezuela and Greenland. (“He doesn’t do foreign policy,” the president is said to have complained to an aide.) Ask Steve Bannon what happens when an adviser gets too big for his britches and starts crowding into a media spotlight that rightly belongs to one, and only one, man.
Seems like we have a solution in search of a problem, then. Fire Stephen Miller, pivot to a “deport the criminals first” strategy on immigration and a much lower profile for ICE, and spend the next eight months laser-focused on reducing the cost of living. That might not be enough to prevent a Democratic House takeover in November, but it could hold down losses, preventing a blue wave and potentially saving the Senate.
One Dispatch colleague even suggested to me that Trump could “declare victory” on immigration as a pretext for abandoning Miller’s deport-everyone strategy and pulling out of Minnesota. Why not? Crusty hardline nationalists like Bannon might object, but 90 percent of Trump’s supporters will believe anything he tells them. If he says it’s time to work on other things because the immigration problem has been solved, then the immigration problem has been solved.
And yes, I realize it’s almost unheard of in Trump 2.0 for an aide to perform so horribly that he ends up being axed for it, but it does happen. It’s a penalty reserved for the worst of the worst, it seems. Stephen Miller certainly qualifies.
In fact, at the risk of veering too close to “good czar, bad boyars” logic, it’s fair to say that in some ways the deputy is a more sinister figure than his boss. Trump is a fascist by instinct, but Miller is a fascist in full. According to the Journal, it’s Miller who’s been behind the most hair-raisingly lawless gambits of Trump’s second term, from shipping detainees to Bukele’s gulag without due process to blowing up suspected drug traffickers in the Caribbean without authorization from Congress to the ICE rampage in Minneapolis that’s brought the judicial system to its knees.
Miller and his master share the goal of consolidating power in an autocrat but are driven to it by meaningfully different desires, I sense. Trump wants to be Caesar because he luxuriates in the grandeur of the role. Miller wants Trump to be Caesar because postliberalism needs that degree of unchallenged power in order to effectively subjugate its enemies. My guess is that he, more so than even Trump, would enthusiastically support overturning adverse election results this fall or in 2028 in the name of “saving the country.”
A Trump administration without Miller would be ruthless but less ruthless than an administration with Miller would be. And inevitably, I think, it would govern in ways that would improve its popularity. For all his mania, the president yearns to be loved and admired. He cares about winning elections, if only for narcissistic reasons. Miller, the ideologue, plainly doesn’t give a rip and possibly revels in being hated.
So you would think Trump would be willing to send him packing. But … it’s awfully hard to imagine, isn’t it?
‘Where’s my Roy Cohn?’
For one thing, it’s hard to imagine how a Trump administration without Miller would operate. The Journal claims that Miller has either drafted or edited every executive order the president has signed in his second term. I repeat what I said last week: He’s “a sort of human operating system for Trumpism” whose dismissal would “amount to uninstalling the postliberal ideological software on which the entire administration runs.”
But Miller’s presence is existential for the White House in another way. What was the point of reelecting Donald Trump, and the point of postliberalism writ large, if not to empower authoritarian cretins like Stephen Miller and unleash them on the American people?
What would be left of this second term as a culture-war project without him? Would Republicans consider it a triumph if the president ditched his most ideologically committed aides, pivoted to a conventional Republican agenda over his last three years, and finished his term with a respectable-ish 46 percent approval rating without further meaningful achievements? Sure, some would (the immigration problem has been solved), but postliberals would be crushed. They would accuse Trump of having squandered a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to transform American political culture durably into the sort of garbage third-world friends/enemies system they fantasize about.
This isn’t politics as usual. So why would personnel decisions about unpopular aides and their unpopular programs be made based on the usual political incentives?
Years ago, during his first term, in a fit of anger over the Justice Department’s investigation into his relationship with Russia, Trump reportedly exclaimed to aides, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” Cohn was an amoral lawyer and “fixer” with the distinction of having worked for the two most infamous demagogues in American history, red-baiting Sen. Joe McCarthy and, later in life, a young Donald Trump. In asking “Where’s my Roy Cohn?”, the president was scolding the attorneys who worked for his administration for not being cutthroat enough about shielding him from the Russia probe. He needed aides who would behave ruthlessly, without apology, in the name of winning.
Stephen Miller is his Roy Cohn. Miller may not be a lawyer, but he’s the near-Platonic ideal of the sort of character whom Trump and his movement extol as a “fighter”—blindly loyal, untroubled by laws or ethics, glowering with hubristic contempt for political enemies and palpably delighting in using power to impose his will on them. It took Trump nearly a decade to reach a place where he could install someone like that to run his government without meaningful political interference, but he finally reached it.
And now we expect him to change his mind?
I’ll believe it when I see it. The president has his Roy Cohn at last, and so the rest of us are stuck with him too. That’s worth a 37 percent approval rating to Trump all day long.
