Trump goes to the mattresses with Stephen Miller
We’re sorry to see Susie Wiles out as White House chief of staff: She was crucial to President Donald Trump’s return to the Oval Office and the excellent start to his second term.You could not ask for a more loyal gatekeeper — one dedicated to forwarding Trump’s core agenda without pride or prejudice — nor a hand more deft at balancing attack and defense, conflict and cooperation.With her out battling cancer, removing her for large tracts of time, it makes no sense to blame Wiles for the GOP midterm massacre; others in the inner circle plainly bear more blame.News that she’ll be replaced by Stephen Miller removes almost all hope that the nation’s partisan warfare will ease after the elections. Miller represents the sharpest fighting edge of the Trump administration.When Trump says he wants to do deals with the Democrats, he has signaled that he’s going to bring his pit bull along.He probably feels he needs the menace of Miller to take on the Democrat majorities and fight back the inevitable tsunami of investigations that will flood the White House in January. Yet the appointment is going to raise some Republican hackles and increase the odds of an internecine war.For example, while former Homeland Security chief Kristi Noem and her consigliere Corey Lewandowski are most responsible for last winter’s ICE debacles in Minneapolis, Miller has always pushed the kind of full-on immigration-enforcement raids that flipped the issue from a plus to Republicans in 2024 to one for Democrats this year.On top of that, Miller and Trump are now guaranteed to push the boundaries of executive power, to the point that even those who believe in a strong executive could instead see a lawless one.
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Never miss a story.In short, the president is circling the wagons in a ...