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Stephen Miller Will Drag the GOP Further Into the Electoral Abyss

It has been a week since we all woke up to realize the scope of the Democrat victories up and down ballots and in formerly red states like Texas. While Democrats work to plan legislative and investigative moves, the Felon and far too many Republicans appear to be in denial and/or ignoring the messages voters sought to deliver to them. The Felon's mutterings that the election was "rigged" are largely being ignored even on much of the political right yet by their vote to reject the impeachment of Pete Hegseth yesterday House Republicans figuratively gave voters the middle finger, showing an intent to double down on policies rejected by voters.  And then there is the Felon's promotion of Stephen Miller, the architect of the brutal and deliberately cruel  deportation policy that drove away Latino voters, to chief of staff underscores that the Felon intends to ignore the will of voters as well.  How any of this will aid the GOP in seeking to recover from a generation voter rejection or field viable presidential candidates in 2028 is mind blowing.  Yet, here we are and, as a piece in The New Republic lays out Miller's rise in particular and the rabid policies he pushes will only push the FOP further into the political wilderness. Voters made it clear that they rejected the incompetence and corruption of the Felon's regime and the deliberate cruelty that underscores so many of the Felon's policies.  Here are highlights from TNR: 

As a high school student, Stephen Miller once told a booing crowd of his classmates that he was “sick and tired of being told to pick up my trash when we have plenty of janitors who are paid to do it for us.” Now he gets to reckon with a colossal political mess of his own making as the next White House chief of staff.

President Donald Trump announced on Friday that Miller, his deputy chief of staff and domestic-policy advisor, would take the top job in a post-midterms shakeup starting on Monday.

Friday’s announcement came after Trump and Miller had effectively handed control of Congress to the Democrats. Two years of disastrous results on corruption, immigration, tariffs, and the Iran War alienated enough of the electorate that Texas went blue after 40 years of GOP control. Now Trump may have just handed Democrats the White House in 2028 as well by promoting his most extreme and destructive advisor to oversee the last two years of his presidency.

The shift was met with applause in the most far-right corners of American conservatism. “Stephen Miller is a wartime chief of staff,” Brent Scher, the editor-in-chief of The Daily Wire, said on Twitter on Friday. “This is going to be awesome.” Benny Johnson, a far-right YouTube personality, wrote on the social-media website that White House aides kept texting him “it’s Miller time” after the news broke. “It’s like the dogs have been let off the chain,” he added.

As Trump’s top domestic-policy advisor, Miller has functioned as a servile but ruthless shadow president for a chief executive who cares more about television footage than policy details. Like all authoritarians, Trump has attracted a mixture of thugs who revel in violence, weaklings who crave service to bullies, and opportunists who hope to advance their own fortunes. Miller has championed the deportation of as many immigrants as possible from the United States, taking an extreme approach even by GOP standards that evokes ethnic-cleansing campaigns and white nationalism.

Miller is also hostile to the American constitutional order and to international law. He argued unsuccessfully for Trump to suspend habeas corpus to round up immigrants last year and told CNN’s Jake Tapper in a January interview that the U.S. should acquire Greenland by force.

His own leadership qualities are hardly stellar. Miller has a reputation throughout D.C. for openly berating junior staffers and senior officials alike for not effectively executing his draconian policies. A 2020 New Yorker profile recounted how he ended one such meeting with Department of Homeland Security officials by emotionally letting down his guard. “I didn’t mean to come across as harsh,” Miller reportedly confessed, describing his obsession with deportations. “It’s just that this is all I care about.

During Trump’s second term, he escalated a series of immigration raids in Los Angeles in 2025 by reportedly telling federal immigration officials to arbitrarily gather people off the streets. “Miller came in there and eviscerated everyone. ‘You guys aren’t doing a good job. You’re horrible leaders.’ He just ripped into everybody. He had nothing positive to say about anybody, shot morale down,” an unnamed DHS official told The Washington Examiner last May, recounting a meeting that he had attended. “Stephen Miller wants everybody arrested. ‘Why aren’t you at Home Depot? Why aren’t you at 7-Eleven?’”

The snatch-and-grab tactics that DHS officials pioneered in Los Angeles and other major cities throughout 2025 came to a deadly conclusion this spring. Miller had championed the administration’s siege of Minneapolis, where thousands of federal agents poured into the city and began grabbing suspected immigrants off of the streets at will. Massive protests and community actions disrupted some of the raids as Minnesotans tried to protect their neighbors. One federal agent shot and killed Renee Good, a writer with three kids, as she tried to drive away from one clash in her neighborhood in January. Another agent gunned down Alex Pretti, a local nurse, who tried to render medical assistance to a woman that the agent had knocked to the ground.

Footage of the shootings and protests prompted an intense public backlash to Trump’s immigration policies. Millions of Americans were horrified at the sight of masked federal agents gunning down their fellow citizens in the street with no consequences. Miller was not among them. He described Good and Pretti as “domestic terrorists” . . .

Miller has often argued in recent years that Democrats are “not a legitimate political party,” but rather a “domestic extremist organization.” Nonetheless, his elevation is good news for Democrats in the short and long term. Trump had initially struck a rare conciliatory note in the wake of the GOP’s crushing losses this week. He accepted the election results after more than a decade of election denialism when things didn’t go his way. His administration’s half-hearted, half-baked efforts to challenge ballots and candidates in Alaska, California, and elsewhere faded away overnight.

A defter and more chastened Trump might have made life difficult for Democrats in Washington by trying to compromise with them, dividing a fractious political party that is normally united in opposition to him. Miller’s promotion has brought that potential honeymoon period to a close. “Stephen Miller is a dangerous xenophobe and reckless extremist who has American blood on his hands,” Jeffries said in a post on Twitter on Friday. “His presence in government should be eradicated like a malignant tumor. Fire him today.”

Trump’s announcement is also the first major shake-up of his administration’s top ranks since Democrats recaptured Congress by overwhelming margins on Tuesday. The president said he wouldn’t dismiss Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth on Thursday despite calls by conservatives for him to step down or be fired. Democrats and Republicans alike blame him for the disastrous course of the Iran War. . . . Congressional Democrats are reportedly eager to target him with oversight hearings next year as well.

Trump is notoriously capricious and mercurial. He is prone to trusting long-time sycophants like Miller over newer faces and more experienced voices. John Kelly, who served as Trump’s second chief of staff during his first term, later publicly warned Americans ahead of the 2024 election described the then-ex president for whom he had worked as a fascist and predicted that he would govern like a dictator if re-elected that fall.

Indeed, during the first half of his second term, Trump exulted in his lack of constraints—thanks to a MAGA-stocked executive branch and congressional Republicans’ supine posture—and simply did whatever he wanted.

Now, Miller gets to supervise the wreckage of his own mistakes. He enthusiastically championed Trump’s tariff policy, which drove up prices for Americans and wiped out entire markets for U.S. agriculture and manufacturing. After the Supreme Court struck down most of the tariffs in January, he denounced the justices in the majority as “cowardly.” Even many devout MAGA enthusiasts regarded the Iran War as a betrayal of Trump’s promise to avoid wars in the Middle East and prioritize American interests. Miller has vocally defended Trump’s decisions even as the economic and political fallout doomed his fellow Republicans at the polls.

For Democrats, Miller represents all of the Trump administration’s worst decisions—its authoritarianism, its bigotry, its arrogance, and its foolishness—in one person. There is little doubt that Miller will continue to push the second Trump administration down its self-destructive path, and that he will drag the rest of the GOP down with him. . . . Republicans on the campaign trail will have to decide between embracing Miller’s unpopular policies or distancing themselves from an angry, vengeful power center of far-right American conservatism.

Past presidents have spent the last two years of their administration trying to make things a little easier on their party and their successors.  . . . . With Miller at the helm, there will be no quiet twilight for the Trump era. The two men will continue to inflict as much harm as they can on the country—and, by extension, on any remaining hope for the GOP to stay in the White House or reclaim power in two years’s time.

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The Felon Slides Into His Lame-Duck Era

The Felon has started making comments that the mid-term elections were "rigged."  Some voices on the right called him out on the lie and stated the obvious: the GOP losses were so massive and so spread across the country that it would have been impossible to have rigged the results. Indeed, the Felon is facing a new world where like it or not he is becoming a lame duck.  Deference from Republicans is seemingly weakening and Thomas Massie, an out-going Republican who lost his primary when he was targeted by the Felon has introduced articles of impeachment against Pete Hegseth and guaranteed that either now or in the new Congress convening in January there will be a public examination of Hegseth's failed war plans in the Middle East that led to the destruction of American bases, 23 servicemembers being killed and hundreds more wounded. Incredibly, the Felon continues to claim victory and even claimed that no servicemembers had been lost - an obvious bald faced lie. Then there's appointment of Josef Goebbels like Stephan Miller as chief of state suggesting there will be no let up in horrific deportation operations that pushed Latino voters into the Democrats' arms. The next two years will likely not be pretty as the new Congress launches investigations of the Felons failed policies and his shocking corruption and self-enrichment.  A piece at The Atlantic looks at this new reality:

When [the Felon] President Trump posted on Saturday that he’d asked Dana White, the head of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, to be the new White House press secretary, it felt like a callback to the freewheeling first-term Trump.

“I am pleased to announce that the Great Dana White, a violent Fighter and Warrior, has been offered the job of Press Secretary of the United States,” . . . By weekend’s end, the possibility of the appointment had dissolved, though not without a subplot of speculation that Trump was confusing the impresario with another Dana White who had actually served as a Pentagon spokesperson during his first term. CNN reported that White had declined, and last night, Trump told reporters he never meant it anyway. “I was only kidding, but Dana loves the idea,” he said.

Perhaps. Trump has a long record of launching outlandish ideas and then playing them off as jokes when they don’t work out. If it was all a jape, then the weak stab at humor seems to underestimate the electorate’s frustration with his antics. If he was serious and got rejected, it’s even worse. . . . . “Donald J. Trump is now officially, thoroughly a lame duck.” Now we’re getting a glimpse of what that looks like in practice.

Start with the cool reception that Trump’s elevation of Stephen Miller to White House chief of staff received among Republicans. Representative Marlin Stutzman called it a “horrible decision.” Another legislator told Fox News that his reaction was “utter disbelief.” When a Politico reporter informed one member of the choice, they replied, “Please tell me you’re lying to me right now, just to get a reaction.” . . . . but whether or not they acquiesce with the president matters less now that the GOP is so outnumbered in Congress.

One test of where House Republicans actually stand will come this week. Thomas Massie, a renegade GOP member who Trump helped defeat in a primary earlier this year, refiled articles of impeachment against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth today. Although Speaker Mike Johnson (speaking of lame ducks) had temporarily stymied Massie’s impeachment efforts in September by sending members home until after the midterms, the House is now back in session. Rounding up enough Republican votes to move the articles forward will be difficult but not impossible; a significant number of GOP members lost their seats last week, including many of the more moderate representatives, which means they are less in Trump’s thrall. Assuming that Hegseth is not impeached this month, it seems all but inevitable once Democrats take over. This weekend, presumptive Speaker Hakeem Jeffries said he’s a “hard yes” on impeachment.

Republicans’ losses have produced infighting elsewhere in the party too. As Miller moves to take over, fallout from his predecessor Susie Wiles’s tenure continues.

One person in particular left somewhat unmoored by the results is Vice President Vance, who built his entire profile on closeness to a politician whose toxicity is now made plain. In a long post-election X post, Vance pinned the midterm defeat on the Iran war. . . . But Trump does not seem inclined to cooperate. For one thing, he continues to defend the war. On 60 Minutes last night, he acknowledged the political fallout but said, “I think, historically, this will be a very good decision. Is it a good decision for today and tomorrow? Maybe not.” Speaking with reporters last night, he once again declared victory in the unresolved war with Iran and then claimed, falsely and callously, that “we haven’t lost anybody. No soldiers.”

At other times, though, Trump has sounded unusually chastened since Election Day. He told The New York Times that he looks forward to working with the Democrats. He also acknowledged on 60 Minutes that his deportation policy, which “might be too tough,” could explain the GOP’s shellacking. “I think I got an A-plus for closing up the border,” he said, “but I get hurt because we also took people that had good jobs, that created one violation, or breaking of the law, and that was that they came into the country illegally.” A deescalation on immigration enforcement seems unlikely with Miller as chief of staff, given his role in implementing that policy, but the fact that Trump was willing to offer conciliatory remarks suggests that he is beginning to recognize the challenges of life as a lame duck.

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2028 Is Going to Be Even Worse for Republicans?

The shock waves for last weeks blue tsunami continue to reverberate even as the Felon disclaims any responsibility for the election debacle and most congressional Republicans refuse to lay blame on the Felon and/or undo the policies the Felon implemented that fueled the revolt by voters in the first place.  Even JD Vance who  is struggling to reinvent himself in anticipation of 2028 a a presidential run and is asking everyone to ignore his role as cheerleader for the Felon's failed policies, is only willing to say that the Iran war was a causation while ignoring the Felon's cruel and deliberately inhumane deportation policy, shocking corruption, and the horrific "big beautiful bill."  Vance is not the only would be 2028 Republican presidential candidate that will have a difficult time recasting themself as a vote worthy candidate in two years.  With Rep. Massie introducing his impeachment resolution today against Pete Hegseth, more details of Republican misrule and likely war crimes will be coming.  Added to this is the Felon's selection of Stephen Miller - the architect of the anti-immigrant brutality - which will likely add more ICE outrages to the public consciousness and Hispanic voter revulsion. And then there's the reality that NONE of the Republican presidential candidates did anything to stop the Felon's excesses, self-enrichment and shocking corruption. A piece in the New Republic looks at the 2028 election cycle:

If you’re looking for evidence that the right isn’t sure how to respond to the Republican Party’s historic collapse in Tuesday’s midterm elections, you could do worse than a graphic Fox News host Laura Ingraham blasted to her audience on Thursday. . . . She and her fellow Republicans have suffered a collective shellshock from the worst midterm defeat since Watergate. President Trump only wants to talk about his tacky building projects. Vice President JD Vance is nakedly trying to salvage his own presidential ambitions by throwing everyone else under the bus. Racist goon Stephen Miller is the new chief-of-staff. It’s a terrible time to be a Republican, and it will only get worse. All you can do is lash out.

If you want the full picture of Republican panic, however, you’ve got to look at another Fox graphic, this one built out of a tweet from former speaker of the House—and architect of the GOP’s 1994 midterm massacre of the Democrats—Newt Gingrich. . . .  It’s worth examining Gingrich’s thinking. Yes, he is a fossil. But he has managed to remain a consummate Republican politician in his semi-retirement, and his wife, airbrushing enthusiast Callista Gingrich, is Trump’s ambassador to Lichtenstein. Gingrich led one revolution in the 1990s and survived another. He knows his party. He also knows his party’s in trouble.

Gingrich doesn’t quite stick a knife into Vance, but he comes as close as he can. He shrugs off the vice president’s weaselly attempt to avoid blame for Iran, which is fair enough: As vice president of an administration overseeing that war, it is going to be very hard for Vance not to be saddled with the political and economic fallout, which will likely extend until 2028. Gingrich goes further, though, blaming Vance for defending Vivek Ramaswamy’s disgusting, failed gubernatorial bid in Ohio—essentially saying Vance not only has lousy instincts, but is a bad person too: “A good bit of the luster has come off the bloom.”

Well, what about the luster of the other blooms? It’s clear that Gingrich is eyeing Secretary of State Marco Rubio as a safer and more competent successor, writing, “The number of people who want to draft [him] is staggering.” This may be true, but it’s also absurd, given that Gingrich has already (rightly) acknowledged just how important a role the Iran War played in the GOP’s midterm meltdown. Rubio is arguably the third most prominent public face of that war, ahead of JD Vance and behind Trump and...

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who is also, absurdly, included in Gingrich’s list. For one thing, Hegseth is the most likely fall guy for the administration if two scalps are deemed necessary after Tuesday’s defeats (Chief of Staff Susie Wiles was cut loose on Friday, in favor of Stephen Miller). His department has been embroiled in more controversies than any other during this administration—some of which of unfathomably stupid, like his imposition of grooming standards, and others that are unfathomably horrific, like the extrajudicial killing of suspected drug runners in the Caribbean. . . . he’s fit to start culture wars, not oversee actual wars. He also has a wealth of personal problems, including infidelity and allegations of substance abuse.

There have been rumors that if Hegseth gets dumped from the Pentagon, the administration could try to save face by getting him appointed to replace Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn, should she retire. But if you look at Tuesday’s blue wave, it would be hard to feel confident about Hegseth’s chances of holding that seat. If a Republican would struggle to win a statewide election in Tennessee, could you really count on them winning a presidential election?

Looking outside the administration, the options are hardly any better. Trump humiliated Ted Cruz in the presidential primary in 2016, running the simplest attack one can against the Texas senator: Nobody likes him. (Cruz may have another issue: He has four years left in his term runs. So if he were to somehow win the presidency in two years, then Democratic Governor Gina Hinojosa would be able to appoint his replacement. From there, it may get even worse. Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton has the charisma of one of those 12-foot Home Depot skeletons (and kind of looks like one, too). Former Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin is slightly less stiff, but it’s hard to see his gee-whiz vibes—not to mention his relative moderation—gaining traction in a Republican primary. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis looked like the natural successor a few years ago, but Trump hates him for trying to run against him in the 2024 primary, and there’s little reason to believe that the bad blood between them has gotten any better. It’s hard to imagine him winning a Republican primary while Trump is still kicking.

And that gets to the biggest problem, which Gingrich doesn’t mention: Donald Trump. He will exert a huge amount of influence over whom the Republicans chooses as his successor—not only because he will still be president, and thus remain the party’s leader, but he will also likely wield a massive war chest that Republican presidential hopefuls will fight over like children scrapping in the dirty for candy after the piñata pops. Republicans are delusional right now if they think they can turn the page. Gingrich’s list of possibilities is so pathetic in part because it bows to this reality, without explicitly saying so.

It’s possible, of course, that another charismatic outsider could emerge and win the day. But Trump had been sniffing around the GOP presidential nomination for years before 2016—there’s no one out there like that now. Even if there were, it would be hard to believe that after more than a decade of the Trump show, anyone would vote for a reboot of it.

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