Stephen Miller re-emerges as an 'untouchable' force in Trump's White House
Outside of President Donald Trump, no White House official has accumulated more influence in this administration than Stephen Miller, the 39-year-old anti-immigration crusader whose brain and bare-knuckled tactics have been deployed to drive the agenda for the commander in chief. Not Vice President JD Vance. Not chief of staff Susie Wiles. Not anyone else. It is Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff for policy, who loaded up scores of executive orders for Trump to sign in his first months back in office — on topics ranging from the declaration of a national emergency at the southern border to dismantling diversity programs in the federal government and withdrawing the U.S. from the World Health Organization. "Stephen is the president's id," said one former Trump adviser who knows Miller well. "He has been for a while. It's just now he has the leverage and power to fully effectuate it." Democrats have long pointed to Miller, in similar if darker fashion, as the engineer of Trump's most audacious plans and tactics. Though he receded a bit from the spotlight during billionaire Elon Musk's ascendance in the first months of Trump's second term, Miller is re-emerging as a target for the political opposition. "Stephen Miller is responsible for all the bad things happening in the United States," Sen. Ben Ray Luján said, adding that Miller was the force behind "some of the ugliest policies" in Trump's first term. This profile is drawn from interviews and text exchanges with more than a dozen White House officials, lawmakers and Trump-world figures familiar with Miller and his work. Even some of those who praised Miller in interviews were reluctant to be identified because they weren't sure what might anger him — or how the hard-liner might seek payback. As a staffer on the Hill, he threatened to turn activists on fellow Republican aides when their bosses did not line up behind his positions, one senior GOP aide on Capitol Hill recalled. "Uh oh," one senior White House official texted when notified that NBC News was working on a story about Miller. But Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, who met Miller when they were both working to sink a bipartisan 2013 immigration overhaul in Congress, had no such reticence. "I think he was an effective [Senate] staffer, and I think he is an exponentially more effective senior staffer in the White House," Cruz said. "I think he has been the chief architect in the White House of the president's extraordinarily successful efforts securing the border," said Cruz, who described Miller as a friend with whom he speaks "regularly." Wearing a second hat as Trump's White House homeland security adviser, Miller has pushed novel policies to restrict citizenship and even legal residency in the U.S. One of the first executive ordershe prepared for Trump, signed on Inauguration Day, would end the 14th Amendment's guarantee that people born in the United States are automatically citizens. Last week, he said that the White House is consideringsuspending the right of habeas corpus— a constitutional protection against unlawful detention — as the administration seeks to continue its deportation program. Like the birthright citizenship order and many other Trump actions, parts of the deportation effort have been impeded on constitutional grounds by federal judges. Miller's voice is the one arguing vociferously — and without evidence — that "Marxist judges" are executing a "judicial coup" by identifying limits on the president's authority. "President Trump built much of his current political success by standing with the American people on immigration, and doing what others have been unwilling or unable to do: close the border," said one top Trump adviser. "There has been no bigger advocate of that in the history of the country than Stephen Miller. That, at its core, is why the president trusts him so much, and relies on him to a degree that is matched by very few." That trust is a big reason Miller's reach extends far beyond the immigration policies for which he became famous during Trump's first term, which includedseparating migrant familiesas a deterrent to illegal immigration. Miller's deputy title doesn't do justice to the amount of influence he has in the White House. In a Signal exchangereported on by The Atlanticin March, Miller silenced Vice President JD Vance's questioning of a pending battery of military strikes in Yemen by asserting that Trump already had given the "green light." He has gained so much authority over such a broad spectrum of policies that Trump told NBC News' "Meet the Press" moderator Kristen Welker in an interview that it would be a "downgrade" if he appointed Miller as national security adviser, usually a high-profile and highly coveted role in any West Wing. "Stephen is much higher on the totem pole than that," Trump said. Trump "meant it" when he said that about Miller, the senior Trump adviser affirmed. "I don't know that there is any policy area where his guidance is not sought. The president might not always go with exactly what he wants, but his input is always listened to." Miller's influence stems from sharing Trump's vision for the country, his fierce public and private defense of Trump's positions, and his supply of a steady stream of policies to implement the president's agenda, according to people who work with him now or have done so in the past. The former Trump adviser said that Miller, who came of age in politics during the tea party era, is more tethered to the values of the Make America Great Again movement than many of his colleagues in the White House. "Stephen has broadened his lane, but it still centers on the forgotten man, the working man, Trump's America," the former Trump adviser said. "That's where he's coming from in all of this." In that way he is like Trump: an elite who embraces populism. Miller does so with even more zeal than his patron, which may be surprising given his background. He grew up in the cozy Los Angeles suburbs, graduating from Santa Monica High School, where prior alumni included the Brat Pack movie stars Emilio Estevez, Rob Lowe and Robert Downey Jr. Miller, however, never had Trump-level money, and his family lost its home when he was in school,forcing them to moveto a lower-rent area. Then he went to Duke, one of the nation's most prestigious private colleges, where he honed his conservatism before becoming a congressional aide. A staffer for then-Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., Miller was an early enlistee on Trump's first presidential campaign in 2016 and took over speech-writing duties and an immigration portfolio in Trump's first term. When Trump lost the 2020 election, Miller, who echoed Trump's lies about a rigged vote, turned his attention to founding America First Legal, a nonprofit that presaged the early days of Trump's second presidency by filingdozens upon dozens of lawsuitsin cases involving immigration, education, affirmative action and transgender rights. Miller is not a lawyer, but his vision is what has driven much of Trump's legal strategy in the second term. "Stephen Miller works around the clock to implement President Trump's America First policy agenda, and he is doing a phenomenal job," White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said. "The president fully trusts Stephen and for good reason — he delivers." Miller's plan coming into this term, said one person who has worked with him for years and remains an ally, was to overwhelm the court system in an effort to secure more powers for Trump. "Stephen Miller has been sharpening his teeth for this moment," the ally said, adding an assertion that he is the "most consequential" White House official since Vice President Dick Cheney. Likewise, a lawyer who is close to the White House described Miller as a singular figure in the Trump orbit who methodically prepared to win more unilateral power for the presidency, and by extension himself, even at the cost of losing some battles. "The courts aren't going to strike down all that they're doing, and, at the end of the day, they'll end up accomplishing more by flooding the zone," the lawyer said of the mindset driving Miller and his policy team, which includes Gene Hamilton and May Mailman — who, unlike Miller, have law degrees. "The content of many of these executive orders has his fingerprints," the lawyer close to the White House added of Miller. "You want to get something done in this White House, if you can get to Stephen Miller, there's probably no more effective way to get something done." His symbiotic relationship with Trump requires — or at least encourages — a willingness to parrot the philosophically peripatetic president, even when that means reversing course on policy at a moment's notice or misleading the public, according to people who have worked with him. Miller is "comfortable with misinformationto advance his cause," said one senior first-term Trump White House official who praised his patience and intellect. Critics are more blunt, labelinghis anti-immigrant rhetoric as "propaganda." While Trump has blocked refugees from most of the world from entering the U.S., his administration recently admitted several dozen white South Africans. The reasoning: what Trump administration officialscall a "genocide"against white farmers in the majority-Black nation, which codified discrimination during its apartheid regime. There is no evidence to suggest that there is a genocide. "What's happening in South Africa fits the textbook definition of why the refugee program was created,"Miller saidlast week. "This is race-based persecution. The refugee program is not intended as a solution for global poverty, and historically, it has been used that way." There's little question that Miller is the de facto immigration czar in Trump's Washington — the man the president relies on to turn ideas into action. A week before Trump's inauguration in January, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, reflected on Miller's primacy in an interview with NBC News. Grassley's committee is in charge of writing immigration policies for what Trump calls the "big beautiful" bill designed to implement his legislative agenda in a single fell swoop. But Grassley could not say what would be in that legislation. "The best place to get this answer is from Stephen Miller," Grassley said. It was a remarkable degree of deference from a 44-year veteran of the Senate, who is third in line to the presidency, to an unelected Trump staffer who elicited more eye rolls than legislative achievements when he worked on Capitol Hill as a communications aide about a decade ago. Not every Republican senator is waiting for marching orders from Miller. Sen. Mike Rounds, of South Dakota, replied tersely when asked if he speaks to Miller often: "Nope." In early April, Miller was the featured speaker at a meeting of Senate Republican chiefs of staff, where he pressed aides to encourage their bosses to provide a more fulsome defense of Trump's agenda — including tariffs and the programmatic and personnel cuts developed by Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, according to a person who was present. Miller's wife, Katie Miller, is a longtime Musk confidante who worked on his DOGE team, and the couple has formed a close working relationship with the wealthiest man in the world. The Miller ally said Katie Miller has become a powerful force inside the administration, and that the Millers, along with Sergio Gor, the White House personnel chief, are the only "untouchable" members of Trump's White House team. "Stephen has always preached loyalty to the president," said a second White House official. "He is ruthless with bureaucrats being seen as disloyal to the president and his agenda." It's hard to find an arm of the White House, or the wider administration, that doesn't have one of Miller's hands attached — or an argument that isn't phrased in his trademark bombast. On the first day of May, Miller strode into the White House briefing room to offer an aggressive defense of Trump's agenda — the "America First" platform he primarily drafted and executed — amid public concern that its tariff plank was tanking the U.S. economy. Breaking from generations of evidence, economic theory and conservative orthodoxy suggesting that American consumers want cheaper goods, Miller lectured the media on his view — already articulated by Trump — that families would be happy to pay more for toys made in the U.S. than those made in China. Despite his zealously anti-regulation position at most times, Miller even appeared to embrace the value of safety standards that drive domestic prices higher. "If you have a choice between a doll from China that might have, say, lead paint in it that is not as well constructed as a doll made in America that has a higher environmental and regulatory standard and that is made to a higher degree of quality, and those two products are both on Amazon, [then] yes, you probably would be willing to pay more for a better-made American product," Miller said. As he spoke, the French cuffs of his perfectly starched white dress shirt poked out from beneath a dark suit accented with a silky pocket square. Miller's arguments, echoing Trump's almost to the word, quietly vanished Monday as quickly as they had materialized, when the White House announced that the U.S. and China had agreed to back down from their punishing reciprocal tariffs amid the threat of shortages, price increases and long-term damage to both economies. The heat had finally become too much for Trump to bear. No matter how much power Miller wields, he seems well aware that it is derivative — and that it can be taken away as quickly as a tariff if he stands even a step away from his boss. "The president knows he won't leak," the senior Trump adviser said. "He knows he will be an unquestioned fighter for his agenda, and that brand of loyalty is what matters most in a lot of ways."
Stephen Miller re-emerges as an 'untouchable' force in Trump's White House Outside of President Donald Trump, no White House off...
