November 6, 2026

BUNKER TIME: Stephen Miller as chief of staff reveals Trump’s bunker mentality.

No one is more loathed among Democrats – and no one is more apt to do battle against them – than Miller. Or so apparently goes Trump’s own thinking. Sam Tanenhaus, the author of a perspicuous new biography of William F. Buckley, Jr., reminded me that Trump’s ghostwriter Tony Schwartz declared to the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, “I genuinely believe that if Trump wins and gets the nuclear codes there is an excellent possibility it will lead to the end of civilization.”

According to Tanenhaus, “Miller is the virtual version. The Don is going nuclear.”

He is indeed. But it’s also the case that in turning to the architect of his hardline policies on immigration, Trump may well accelerate the meltdown of his presidency. Confronted with a crushing midterm defeat, Trump’s impulse has been to wish it out of evidence. He’s spent the last few days mostly talking up the vanity building projects in Washington that irked voters.

The appointment of Miller is the latest sign that Trump has no intention of attempting to placate an angry electorate, let alone reach an accommodation with the Democrats that he has deemed communists. As it happens, this is the very language that Miller himself has sedulously employed for several decades. He is the protégé of the late David Horowitz, a lapsed communist who moved right during the Reagan era and who pioneered a new smash-mouth politics that branded Democrats as traitors. Like his mentor, Miller is in word and deed a Leninist who believes that there can be no accommodation, no quarter given to the enemy.  After his old mentor Jeff Sessions, who briefly served as Trump’s attorney general during his first term, fell out of favor, Miller didn’t hesitate to abandon him. 

Flashback:

JIM ACOSTA: What you’re proposing, or what the President is proposing, does not sound like it’s in keeping with American tradition when it comes to immigration. The Statue of Liberty says, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” It doesn’t say anything about speaking English or being able to be a computer programmer. Aren’t you trying to change what it means to be an immigrant coming into this country if you’re telling them you have to speak English? Can’t people learn how to speak English when they get here?

STEPHEN MILLER: Well, first of all, right now it’s a requirement that to be naturalized you have to speak English. So the notion that speaking English wouldn’t be a part of immigration would actually be very ahistorical. Secondly, I don’t want to get into a whole thing about history here, but the Statue of Liberty is a symbol of liberty lighting the world. It’s a symbol of American liberty lighting the world. The poem that you’re referring to was added later. It’s not actually a part of the original Statue of Liberty. But more fundamentally —

ACOSTA: So, you’re saying that that does not represent what the country has always thought of as immigration coming into this country?

—“The White House’s Stephen Miller Destroys CNN: ‘Cosmopolitan,’ ‘Outrageous,’ ‘Ignorant,’ ‘Biased,’” Scott Whitlock, NewsBusters, August 2nd, 2017.

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Posted at 5:15 pm by Ed Driscoll