Friday, Donald Trump declared that White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles would receive the Mustafa from Austin Powers treatment. Dropping high-ranking administrational officials into a flaming pit is a reasonable response when the president’s party loses the midterms so badly that Texas, Kansas, Ohio, Iowa, South Carolina, and even Mississippi swing left. Trump openly blamed Wiles for his humiliating defeat on Tuesday, because it’s just easier for him to abandon women. Look at his past wives. Wiles was willing to take the fall: According to Semafor, she reportedly told Trump, “Let me make this easy on you, I am going to resign,” but Trump still pushed the fire pit button.
Trump announced that he was replacing the badly burnt Wiles with current deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, ensuring that he plans to learn nothing from what happened on Tuesday. The two people most responsible for the midterm rout are Miller, whose Nazi policies targeting immigrants erased any gains Trump had made with Latinos and perhaps have permanently turned them off the GOP in key states like Texas, Arizona, and Nevada, and drunken sleazebag Pete Hegseth, the Department of Defense secretary who botched the Iran War. A sane president would have fired both Miller and Hegseth by the week’s end, but Trump is hardly sane. We had every reason to expect that he would double down in his defeat.
Saturday, for instance, Trump threatened to sic his personal lawyer Attorney General Todd Blanche on Democrats, seemingly unaware that Democrats will soon have the power to impeach Blanche and even remove him if Trump pushes too far, as it might not take long to find 11 Republicans who are done with his shit.
The White House chief of staff is a very powerful position, as everyone knows who watched The West Wing. The chief of staff is par of the command structure that addresses national security threats, which ironically includes both Trump and Miller. Wiles, like Trump’s past chief of staffs, was unable to meaningfully constrain his worst impulses. However, Stephen Miller would only enable and further stoke those impulses. This is why Republican strategists freaked out when they heard the news.
One senior official from Trump’s first nightmare administration described Miller “the biggest asshole I have ever met,” and while Republicans are so far avoiding profane language in public, they are still coming out against his elevation.
Republican Rep. Marlin Stutzman from Indiana has called for Miller’s termination and told Semafor’s Shelby Talcott that promoting Miller to chief of staff is a “horrible decision.”
“He’s a terrible voice and a face for the policies that we got beat on so badly, and specifically immigration,” Stutzman added.
Outgoing Republican Sen. Thom Tillis, whose North Carolina seat Roy Cooper just won overwhelmingly, told Jake Tapper that Miller’s promotion is a “colossal mistake.” I agree, though I’d extend that beyond his new role and back to his conception.
Democrats quickly seized on the news. Democratic House leader Hakeem Jeffries posted on social media, “Stephen Miller is a dangerous xenophobe and reckless extremist who has American blood on his hands. His presence in government should be eradicated like a malignant tumor. Fire him today.”
That’s a little tame, considering, but I suppose Miller is only White House Chief of Staff not a Twitch streamer. House Rep. LaMonica McIver was more to the point and included specifics (Jeffries should consider taking a persuasive writing course): “Stephen Miller is a white supremacist. Promoting the guy responsible for ICE detaining our neighbors and killing people in the streets is Trump doubling down on cruelty and corruption. The administration is falling apart, and Trump is panicking, as he should be.”
“White supremacist” is a far better description of Stephen Miller than Jeffries’s “dangerous xenophobe.” After all, there’s no evidence Miller actually likes minorities who are actually born here, either.
Miller’s rhetoric is openly and consistently racist. In 2023, Miller said on Fox News, “We are being conquered. We have millions of people coming in from different cultures and different ways of living and different belief systems.”
While the right-wing Anti-Defamation League combs through Zohran Mamdani’s or Abdul El-Sayed’s every word — including statements of support for Jewish Americans — for evidence of their supposed antisemitism, the ADL remains mostly silent on the weasel in the White House who talks and acts like an actual Nazi.
When Trump’s ICE goons executed U.S. citizens in Minneapolis, Miller slandered them on TV. He called Alex Pretti a “domestic terrorist” and an “assassin” who had “tried to murder federal agents.” (Not a single word of this was true.)
Miller is popular among the diehard MAGA base that still voted for Republicans last week, but when that base is not enough for Texas, Ohio, Kansas, Iowa, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Mississippi, it’s worth reconsidering the strategy.
Someone close to the White House raved, “Hiring Stephen sends the right message to the base and he is probably the best possible person to help rebuild our fractured coalition. He is a wartime consigliere.” (Maybe this source is Stephen Miller.)
The Godfather reference is apt, considering the Trump administration operates like a bunch of gangsters, but Miller is hardly some master strategist. He’s a fascist bull in a minority china shop. He relies entirely on brute force and lawlessness rather than effective relationship building across party lines. When Republicans controlled the House and Senate under Trump, they never actually passed a massive immigration bill. Instead, they weaponized ICE and threw jackboots on poorly trained thugs. In 2025, Miller claimed the administration was “actively looking at” suspending habeas corpus so it could further accelerate mass deportations.
Former Department of Homeland Security Miles Taylor revealed that Miller had boasted to him about a plan to use pre-drafted executive orders almost immediately into a second Trump administration as part of a “shock and awe blitz against the American people,” because Miller loves nothing more than talking like a villain from a B movie serial.
When reporting on Miller’s promotion, the New York Times stated, “Unfazed By Midterm Rebuke, Miller Is Poised To Push The Limits Of Trump’s Power.” In reality, once Democrats take control of the House and Senate with historic majorities, all Miller is truly poised to do is pee in his pants. Democratic voters want blood, and elected Democrats are trying to sound polite and talk about constructive legislation. Stephen Miller as chief of staff makes it clear the latter is impossible and that Trump will spend the dying days of this putrid administration provoking the sort of congressional smack down we can all savor.
I love that you wrote that Miller is about to pee in his pants when the Dems take control of Congress. Miller isn't brave, or strong, or intelligent - he mistakes cruelty for all three, and the cruelty is the point in all that he says and does. Yes, there will be fuckery, but we are ready for it. We might be scared, but it doesn't mean that we won't face what's coming and defeat it. We are also about to find out just how cowardly, weak, and stupid Miller is.
The good news is this shows Milker is even stupider than we thought. He had massive influence in his previous role without being openly in charge of the administration, and now will have responsibilities far beyond his capabilities. He will drive the remainder of Trump’s term into the ditch, and likely have to live in exile not only to flee justice, but possible assassination because a putrid sack of shit like him has created a lot of enemies. And he has to also live in constant fear that his greasy wife gets too close to an open flame and immolates them both.
Smart move for Democrats now is to spend every moment in the media demanding that Trump resign, giving every good reason for it (mental decline, corruption, abuse of office) and begin the impeachment in January. Steamroll over any Democratic dipshit who disagrees—the man is polling in the 30s and can be brought to the teens with repeated attacks, and Republicans will be very unconvincing trying to defend him because they don’t really want to defend him. Hobble him, remove him if possible, but leave him toxic going into 2028.