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

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The next two years of American politics, it seems, could see more chandeliers in the White House, and more blood on the streets ...

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.

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…

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