The Felon Doubles Down With Stephen Miller

The Republican Party suffered a generational defeat this past Tuesday - some in the GOP are calling it a catastrophe - with the full extent of the losses still trickling in.   The two undecided U.S. Senate seats continue to trend in favor of the Democrats (if they prevail, Democrats will hold 56 seats) and more defeats in House races continue to come in.  Many in the GOP believe there needs to be a reckoning for the electoral disaster and a reset to attempt to address the issues voters clearly cared about. Unfortunately for this voices of sanity are being ignored by the Felon who, if anyone is responsible for the GOP disaster it's him, is signaling that he his going to double down on his policies which voters rejected.  Indeed, the Felon appointed Stephen Miller, the Josef Goebbels look alike, who is the architect of the brutal and cruel immigration policy that has thousands in concentration camps and has seen the murder of U.S. citizens, as his new chief of staff (it's unclear if Susie Wiles resigned or was fired).  As a piece in Politico lays out, many in the GOP fear Stephen Miller's rise to chief of staff is a signal that there will be no party-wide reckoning after their midterm wipeout. Miller's horrible anti-immigrant push is responsible for driving away millions of Hispanic voters who helped turn Texas blue, and the yet Felon rewards him causing many to fear that the Felon will do nothing to pause his policies that voters have thoroughly rejected as the GOP struggles to find a way forward in 2028.  Here are highlights from Politico that look at the GOP quandary:

[The Felon's] President Donald Trump’s decision to name hard-line loyalist Stephen Miller as his top aide cemented what many Republicans were already privately fearing: There will be no party-wide GOP reckoning with this week’s midterm bloodbath.

Instead, with Trump still in office for another two years, most have grown resigned to the reality that the president is going to lean in on a confrontational approach with Congress — and is not willing to change course.

Trump’s decision Friday to elevate Miller, the architect of his unpopular mass deportation policy and an advocate of fierce partisan confrontation, crystallized the frustration.

“There needs to be some self-reflection for Republicans,” Rep. Marlin Stutzman (R-Ind.) said in an interview about the midterm losses Friday morning. “There should be some heads rolling at the White House because we lost badly.”  Hours later, heads did roll. Trump announced Miller would replace Susie Wiles as his new chief of staff. “Horrible decision,” Stutzman said in response.

How much lawmakers will distance themselves will be put to the test quickly: House Republicans will have an immediate opportunity to break with Trump and the war next week, when Rep. Thomas Massie said in an interview with POLITICO he will trigger his articles of impeachment against Secretary Pete Hegseth. “There are a lot of questions about Hegseth,” House Oversight Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) said Friday.

Some senior Republicans are privately nudging Trump officials to ditch Hegseth before the vote, according to two people with direct knowledge of the conversations. The White House is sticking by Hegseth so far, however.

House Republicans will also have a chance to elect new leadership next week, including a new chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee. But in a sign of what’s to come, none of the candidates — including Reps. Brian Jack (R-Ga.) and Rudy Yakym (R-Ind.) — nor any other GOP leadership candidates have publicly suggested doing more to break with Trump.

We had a lot of Republican leaders out there saying ‘everything’s fine.’ And you kind of had the boomer generation saying, ‘Well, yeah, back in my day, interest rates were 15%, so everything’s good,’” said Davidson, a 56-year-old former Army Ranger. “Well, you had a lot of hardworking young people who felt really ignored, and they they went to the polls and said, ‘Stop ignoring us.’”

Davidson said Republicans need to start discussing their problems quickly, or suffer the electoral consequences again. “Bad news doesn’t get better with time. So avoiding talking about something doesn’t solve the problem,” he said.

A piece at The Atlantic also looks at what Miller's rise could portend and how it signals that the Felon seemingly is unwilling to either admit responsibility for the election debacle or cease policies that have driven voters into the arms of Democrats.  Should the Democrats win in Mississippi and Alaska, they would only need four Republican cross over votes to convict the Felon if he were to be impeached.:

In the days before MAGA’s midterm disaster, [the Felon] President Trump began complaining about his presidency. He felt stuck. The war in Iran wouldn’t end. Inflation wouldn’t subside. Little was going his way. But in the president’s mind, there was one exception: “Stephen is the only one who gets stuff done,” Trump repeatedly griped, a person close to the White House told us. “I need more people who get stuff done.”

Stephen Miller, one of the president’s hardest-charging and longest-serving aides, had managed to maintain Trump’s trust, even though he is the architect of the administration’s sweeping mass-deportation campaign that many in the GOP blame, in part, for the Republicans’ historic wipeout this week.

Where Wiles served as something of a guardrail—making sure Trump was fully briefed and that he understood the risks and pitfalls of any decision—Miller has played the role of an accelerant for a president who already has rash tendencies.

One person familiar with Trump’s decision to elevate Miller told us that the president wants somebody who “will crack skulls,” adding that Trump “doesn’t want to be reined in.” Another described Miller as someone with significant Capitol Hill experience who could manage the coming clashes with Democrats. White House officials have held high-level conversations in recent days, including with Miller, about areas where they can work with Democrats. But another person familiar with Trump’s thinking said there was no need for a chief of staff who could work the Hill to pass legislation, because nothing was going to get done. “The next two years are going to be nonstop political warfare,” this person told us—and Miller can be the face of that fight.

Inside the White House, officials understood that Trump would never blame himself for Republican midterm losses, and the West Wing has spent the past few days wondering whom Trump would punish. When The New York Times published a story about the defeat—with verbatim leaks of Trump’s top political team joking ahead of the election about how grim it all looked—Wiles found herself taking heat from the president. Two people familiar with the matter told us that Trump felt that the story, which featured Wiles’s allies seeming to laugh at Republican failure, was a betrayal, and he expressed his displeasure to her.

At the core of Miller’s agenda was a sweeping deportation program. Masked ICE agents detained people in quiet neighborhoods and Home Depot parking lots, while Miller demanded that dramatic deportation quotas be met. Americans, polling showed, began to view the tactics as extreme, particularly after the killing of two Americans in Minneapolis early this year. Trump’s political team has privately blamed Miller’s aggressive immigration policy in part for the defeat on Tuesday, because violent ICE clashes and ethnic profiling on the streets have alienated both Latino voters and moderate independents.

Miller has already been operating as a de facto chief of staff for the Department of Homeland Security and the president’s mass-deportation campaign. He hosts conference calls six days a week with top officials from agencies across the government who are enlisted to help ICE with the crackdown.

Stephen Miller, his supporters say, is the right person to steer the final two years of Trump’s presidency. Despite the scale of this week’s Democratic victory, the president has rarely reached across the aisle in the past. In recent days, he made his feelings known with a new red hat displayed on the Resolute Desk. It was emblazoned with a single word: VETO.