Stephen Miller Is Going for Broke [View all]

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/10/miller-insurrection/684463/

No paywall link
https://archive.li/mcJEf

Stephen Miller spent his weekend, as he is wont to do, describing American politics as if the nation were in the advanced stages of civil war and as if he were dictating a message while racing to a mountain hideout to escape bloodthirsty guerrillas. “There is a large and growing movement of leftwing terrorism in this country. It is well organized and funded,” he wrote on X. “And it is shielded by far-left Democrat judges, prosecutors and attorneys general. The only remedy is to use legitimate state power to dismantle terrorism and terror networks.”

The provocation for this latest sweaty missive was an unfavorable judicial ruling (by a judge contravening President Donald Trump’s federal takeover of 200 National Guardsmen in Oregon). But violent defiance has become the animating vision through which Miller—and, therefore, on account of his sweeping influence over domestic politics, the Trump administration—views his conflict with Democrats, the media, the judiciary, or any entity that stands in his path.

The most consistent theme in Trump’s career is that any word or deed that he deems contrary to his political interests is illegitimate. Any unfavorable news story is libel, any election he loses is rigged, any unflattering fact pattern is a hoax, and almost anybody who opposes him should be locked up.

Miller’s career was defined, in its early stages, by a fanatical hatred of immigration. Over time, as Miller has emerged as the chief architect of Trump’s second-term agenda, his worldview and Trump’s have blended together.

“The Democrat Party is not a political party,” he said in August. “It is a domestic extremist organization.” Several weeks later, Trump seized on Charlie Kirk’s assassination to depict his own political opponents as accessories to murder. “For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals,” he said, in remarks reportedly written by Miller. “This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now.”

*snip*