How Stephen Miller Became the Power Behind the Throne

No one has ever voted for Stephen Miller. Only a slim majority of American voters pulled the lever in favor of his boss, Donald Trump, in 2024 – and even then, voters were primarily concerned about the rising cost of living, not immigration, Miller’s obsessive focus. But over the past year, Miller has become arguably the most important figure in the second Trump administration — the maximalist force behind a maximalist presidency. Guided by the teachings of white supremacy like the dystopian novel The Camp of the SaintsMiller made the ethnic cleansing of the American body and the expulsion of millions of potential immigrants the central priority of the administration.

What makes Miller truly frightening is that he is exceptionally effective at achieving his ends. Steve Bannon described him as Trump’s “Prime Minister,” while White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt recently said so. The Atlantic that Miller “oversees every policy touched by the administration.” His fingerprints can be found all over ICE deployments in American cities, including the one that culminated with the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti on the streets of Minneapolis; the restitution of dozens of immigrants to a gulag in El Salvador without any due process; the attempt to eliminate the right to citizenship and thereby deprive millions of native-born Americans of their most fundamental constitutional rights; and, increasingly, Trump’s most provocative and unilateral foreign policy moves, from the kidnapping of Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela to his constant threats to annex Greenland.

Like Miller himself, none of this is popular. During Trump’s first year back in the White House, his net approval rating has steadily declined from a high of plus 4% to a low of minus 19% — about as bad as ever recorded at this point in a presidency — and Democrats are favored to take back the House in the midterms this fall. Voters are extremely concerned about the state of the economy, which continues to suffer from high inflation due to Trump’s high-profile tariffs, and have expressed strong disapproval of his immigration control policies in particular, particularly in the wake of the Minneapolis killings, which even many conservatives have struggled to defend. In a more rational administration, the path forward politically would be clear: Trump would marginalize (or ideally fire) Miller and take a less odious approach to policy. Instead, Miller appears to have only gained stature and influence within the administration.

How did the most powerful government in the world come to be dominated by this unelected, viscerally unattractive 40-year-old right-wing extremist from Santa Monica? Last year I reviewed Miller’s most authoritative biography, that of Jean Guerrero. A hate mongerfor this magazine, and I got the impression that Miller has a handful of talents: a willingness to attract and capitalize on negative attention (colloquially, he’s good at “trolling”); an unusual skill at navigating office power politics and flattering the right people (during Trump’s first term, Miller won over Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, even though neither shared his extreme anti-immigration views); and a rare sense of how to turn his ruthless dogmatism into policy.

Trolling is table stakes in the expanded MAGA universe, where countless people, including Miller’s wife, have pursued careers as influencers channeling the myriad frustrations of the American right. Miller, a frequent guest on Shock-Jock radio since high school, certainly could have gone that route. But it was Miller’s dogged instincts on Capitol Hill and his unwavering loyalty to Trump that ensured that his legacy would be more than just words, and that he would exert over a sitting president the kind of influence that slanderous figures like Henry Kissinger and Dick Cheney once did. The Venn diagram of capable Beltway operatives and ideologically committed neofascists has a very small intersection, but Miller sits comfortably in the center of it. He’s not the most colorful character in the second Trump administration, where competition includes Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Pete Hegseth, Kash Patel and Kristi Noem. But its impact on policy is outsized, even if the administration itself might be better served politically by doing something else.

“We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world — in the real world, Jake — that is ruled by force, that is ruled by force, that is ruled by power,” Miller recently told CNN’s Jake Tapper in defense of Trump’s expansionism in the Western Hemisphere. “These have been the iron laws of the world since the dawn of time.”

The Darwinian flourishes are pure Miller, but the underlying imperial hubris recalls the 2004 quote Ron Suskind received from a senior George W. Bush official, widely assumed to be Karl Rove: “We are an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you study this reality – wisely, as you will – we will act again, creating other new realities, which you can also study, and This is how things will work out. We are the players in history…and you, all of you, will just have to study what we do.

Given how the Bush administration’s invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq unfolded, there is a lesson here for Miller – and for us. It is true that with the power he currently wields, he can shape reality to a far greater extent than anyone should feel comfortable with. But domestic support for Trump and Miller’s agenda is far less than Bush and Rove once enjoyed for theirs, and neither financial markets, nor foreign governments, nor ordinary citizens facing ICE on the streets have passively bowed to their will. Reality is never solely the product of one small political clique, and it tends to frustrate and frustrate those who claim the right to shape it. It is much easier to outwit your colleagues to control the boss’s ear than to impose your will on the rest of the world. This too has been an iron law of the world since the dawn of time.