Donald Trump lost the midterms on Tuesday, and before the weekend was over, his administration was talking about who to arrest.
It started Saturday on Truth Social, where the president announced he was ordering the Justice Department to investigate Democrats who dared to say they would investigate his cabinet, calling the incoming committee chairs “extortionists” who belong in prison. On Sunday, Attorney General Todd Blanche (who until recently was his personal criminal defense lawyer) went on CNN and refused to rule out prosecuting members of Congress for doing the oversight the Constitution assigns them.
“There could be” investigations, Blanche told CNN’s Dana Bash. Pressed on what crime a congressman commits by promising to hold hearings, Blanche of course couldn’t name one. But that won’t stop the Trump DOJ from trying.
Hanging over that conversation was another report that the Trump team is plotting a new wave of arrests after the president’s loss. According to The Atlantic, the White House and DOJ have been discussing jailing journalists to force them to give up their sources. Recently-departed White House chief Susie Wiles reportedly objected, while Stephen Miller voiced support, noting that it wouldn’t take very long for the reporters to crack. Miller starts as White House chief of staff today.
Round it out with the fact that the president spent his weekend reposting claims that the midterm numbers in Texas were “Looney Tunes” and implying the race was stolen, days after telling the New York Times he accepted the results.
After a few days of licking his wounds, Trump is already back to his old ways. Over one weekend he’s threatened to criminalize the opposition, jail the press, and cast doubt on the vote. But this time he’s put someone in power who will eagerly advance those directives, rather than let them die a quick death in Trump’s frenetic social media feeds.
I want to tell you about the man he’s tapped to run the White House. I spent the better part of two-and-a-half years dealing with Stephen Miller almost every day. And his selection for the job is among the most dangerous, foolish, and self-defeating actions we’ve ever seen an American president take.
In the first Trump administration, nearly everyone in the senior ranks privately saw the president for who he was. Cabinet secretaries, chiefs of staff, and national security officials might defend him in the morning but would be shaking their heads about him in the afternoon. They saw how utterly impulsive and lawless Trump was. Stephen, on the other hand, was the one person in Trump’s orbit I never once heard criticize him. Not because he was blind to it. But because Trump was the vehicle for Stephen’s agenda. And you don’t complain about a car when it’s taking you exactly where you want to go.
When the president made his wildest remarks, Stephen never pushed back. Often to my utter horror, he found a way to say “yes, sir”
I vividly remember an Oval Office meeting one afternoon with Trump, Stephen, and a handful of us inside the administration. The president had just lost a ruling in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. He was furious, and he said — in front of the whole room — that he wanted to eliminate the people ruling against him.
“We need to get rid of the judges,” he declared, pounding his fist on the desk. “They are ruining this.”
Most people in that type of situation would find a diplomatic way to let the moment pass. To not take the president seriously. Instead, Stephen replied: “Yes sir, a country without judges would help.”
A country without judges.
That’s not speaking truth to power. That’s the constitutional equivalent of speaking in tongues. And it tells you enough about the character of the insecure fast-talker who’s fused himself to Donald Trump across two volatile presidential terms. Stephen is not the type to make comments like that without follow-through. Not long after, Trump allies on Capitol Hill made moves to advance legislation to split up the courts, including the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Thankfully, those efforts failed.
The people who worked with Stephen back then will tell you the same thing I will: he’s not a stabilizer in that building. He’s an accelerant of the president’s absolute worst impulses.
Before I quit the first Trump administration, Stephen showed me a locked drawer in his office on the second floor of the West Wing. In it, he said, were draft executive orders written for a second term, each designed to test the outer limits of presidential power and to get those tests to the Supreme Court as fast as possible. It would be a “shock-and-awe blitz,” he grinned.
Now think back to what’s already happened. The National Guard in American cities… the attempts to end birthright citizenship by decree… the impoundment of money Congress appropriated… the firing of inspectors general and civil servants by the thousands… Miller’s comments about suspending habeas corpus… how close we’ve gotten to Trump invoking the Insurrection Act.
Stephen’s “locked drawer” is now open, and there’s no one standing in between him and the president. So Americans can expect serious confrontation, not course correction, from the Trump administration — the likes of which we’ve never seen.
The Trump team has publicly signaled that it sees last week’s losses as a reason to go harder and faster, and with Stephen running the West Wing I can tell you what that will probably look like. The president will double down on revenge against his enemies… he’ll abandon Ukraine and force a settlement with Russia… he’ll pull back from NATO, if not withdraw entirely… and he’ll let all of his agencies be personally micromanaged by Stephen, regardless of whether they’re run by a Senate-confirmed appointee.
But here’s what I also learned watching Stephen up close, which is the reason I think his promotion is (in the end) good news for the political opposition.
Stephen Miller always overreaches. Always. The Muslim ban was his, and it was rewritten three times after courts and the public tore it apart. Family separation was his, and the backlash was so severe that Trump himself signed an order reversing it. Troops in the streets was his, and the courts and the governors pushed back and ejected U.S. forces from American cities. The Minnesota crackdown was his, and it was pulled back after the uproar following the killing of two U.S. citizens. Stephen is not a man who reads the room very well or adjusts to get his way. His instinct is to drive to the extreme and keep driving until something stops him. Something always does. The problem is that we have to get to the extreme first.
That’s what I mean when I say he will fail catastrophically. The catastrophe cuts both ways. He’ll create chaos in this country unlike anything we’ve lived through so far in Trump 2.0, because for the first time there’s no one in the building to slow him down. And that chaos is going to do what family separation and Minnesota did, which is infuriate the American people to the point that the president is forced onto his back foot until he topples over.
So I’ve got bad news for the fist-pumping frat bros in the MAGA movement who are excited that such a sycophant is now in charge. Stephen Miller isn’t going to make MAGA stronger. He’s going to make it — once and for all — fatally radioactive.
Your friend, in defiance,
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