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. “Susie Wiles, who has done an outstanding job, will be moving over to the Trump Political Operation,” Trump said in a post on his personal social-media website. “I want to thank her for her service as Chief of Staff—She has done a great job!”
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. “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 governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” he said, in remarks that would not sound out of place for a mid-20th-century German speaker.
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. I don’t have a family. I don’t have anything else. This is my life.” (He is now married with four children.)
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” and forcefully advocated for the administration’s tactics in Minneapolis throughout the campaign. After other Republicans begged him to change course, Trump wound down most of the operation shortly after Pretti’s killing and fired Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem a few months later. Miller stayed put.
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.
“We’ll, you know, look forward to working with them,” Trump told two New York Times reporters in a phone call on Election Night, referring to Democratic leaders. “We’ll probably work something out.” Similar messaging from House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer led to growing rumbles in Democratic circles about whether they should be elected House speaker and Senate majority leader, respectively, when the new Congress takes over in January.
A defter and more chastened Trump might have made life difficult for Democrats in Washington by trying to compromise with Democrats, 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. Outgoing Kentucky Republican Thomas Massie, a frequent Trump critic, plans to bring an impeachment vote against Hegseth later this month. Congressional Democrats are reportedly eager to target him with oversight hearings next year as well.
Indeed, nearly all of Trump’s second-term departures have been women. Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer resigned over reports of the toxic, harassment-fueled workplace that she allegedly cultivated. Trump dismissed Attorney General Pam Bondi for failing to prosecute his enemies and botching the Epstein files scandal. Noem was shuffled out of her role after the failed siege and occupation of Minneapolis, as well as a variety of corruption and personal-misconduct scandals. Kimberley Guilfoyle, the president’s son’s ex-girlfriend, lost her job as ambassador to Greece for soliciting payouts in writing from foreign billionaires in September. Katie Zacharia, a woefully inept hire who falsely described her legal credentials, only lasted four days as White House press secretary last month.
Trump’s chiefs of staff also have a tendency to not stick around for long. Wiles was the fifth person to serve in the position so far. The role is a stressful and grueling one under any president. Only three of the twenty-five people to hold the post since 1981 have served for an entire four-year term, and none have done it in the last twenty years. Most do not even make it to a second year. Wiles’ tenure was the second longest one of Trump’s tenure, and was awarded to her in thanks for masterminding Trump’s re-election campaign in 2024.
A White House chief of staff’s power and responsibilities can vary. Generally speaking, they oversee the political staff at the White House. They coordinate policy decisions by the president and various other portions of the executive branch. They liaise with Congress and foreign officials. They go on cable news shows and talk to reporters behind the scenes. Some chiefs of staff, like Jim Baker under Reagan or Rahm Emanuel under Obama, can become nationally known figures in their own right, wielding more influence than even top Cabinet officials.
Like her fellow Trump-era predecessors, Wiles fell on the weaker end of the spectrum. 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. By most accounts, Wiles had comparatively little influence to other prominent Trump allies. She found herself overshadowed by Elon Musk, the South African-born billionaire who destroyed federal agencies and laid off civil servants in the first few months of 2025, and by Miller himself, who oversaw the Trump administration’s sprawling mass-deportation agenda.
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. Vice President JD Vance, the putative GOP frontrunner for 2028, gets to spend the next two years publicly defending every extreme decision that Miller makes even as the electorate demands a new course. Other 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. George W. Bush faded out of public view in 2007 and 2008 to avoid tarring the rest of the GOP with his deep unpopularity after the Iraq War and Hurricane Katrina. Bill Clinton, stung by the Lewinsky scandal and his then-historic impeachment, rarely appeared on the campaign trail in 2000 as Vice President Al Gore sought to turn the page. 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.
