How Stephen Miller Became the Left’s Most Despised Adversary

Stephen Dinan | May 8, 2025

(The Washington Times) — Liberals have erupted in dread as President Trump flirts with tapping Stephen Miller to become his national security adviser.

One pundit posted side-by-side pictures of Mr. Miller and Joseph Goebbels, comparing Mr. Trump’s deputy chief of staff, who is Jewish, to a man who ran the Nazi propaganda machine that helped exterminate 6 million Jews.

Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” broadcast a video casting Mr. Miller as a democracy-sucking vampire and declaring he “haunts the soul of an entire nation.”

The Nation, the grandfather of left-wing media, labeled Mr. Miller “monstrous” and “banal.”

Trump allies say the jabs, even those that stray beyond the pale, are to be expected for the most potent weapon in Mr. Trump’s White House.

Michael McKenna, who worked in the White House with Mr. Miller in the first Trump administration, calls him the president’s “Terminator.”

“He’s the underboss,” Mr. McKenna said. “He’s the most powerful guy in the Trump world.”

The joke used to be that Karl Rove was President George W. Bush’s brain. If so, Mr. Miller might be Mr. Trump’s righteous fury, particularly on immigration. Mr. Miller has believed in the “America First” philosophy for years.

He worked for a couple of Republicans on Capitol Hill before settling with Sen. Jeff Sessions, an Alabama Republican who was key in derailing big immigration deals.

It’s not just illegal immigration. Mr. Miller, 39, has criticized guest worker programs that increase competition for jobs.

He has publicly disagreed with Mr. Trump, who has offhandedly suggested that he wants to bring in more guest workers.

Like Mr. Trump, Mr. Miller knows no retreat, making him wildly popular in the MAGA movement.

After an administration official called the deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia a “mistake,” Mr. Miller declared that “no mistake was made” other than by a Justice Department attorney, later fired, who told a judge that a mistake had been made.

After serving as Mr. Trump’s director of speechwriting in the first term, Mr. Miller founded and ran America First Legal.

America First Legal was born out of Mr. Miller’s belief that Mr. Trump’s first presidential incarnation was derailed in the courts more than in the court of public opinion. His vision was to produce that same headwind for President Biden.

The group worked with Texas and other states to file lawsuits against Mr. Biden’s border policies.

America First Legal was also active in filing challenges to diversity, equity and inclusion programs at all levels of government.

Now back in the White House, Mr. Miller is more powerful than ever. He serves as deputy chief of staff for domestic policy and as homeland security adviser.

Those at the Homeland Security Department say unofficially that Mr. Miller is running the show along with border czar Tom Homan, where they have turned the weakest border in U.S. history into the most secure in history.

Immigration advocacy groups say the cost has been damage to America’s soul as a nation of immigrants.

Mr. Trump this week called Mr. Miller “a very valued person in the administration.” He said Mr. Miller may fill the national security adviser’s slot left open by the departure of Mike Waltz.

“Stephen Miller is at the top of the totem pole. I think he sort of indirectly already has that job,” the president said.

Immigrant rights advocates have come to fear and disdain Mr. Miller.

America’s Voice labeled him a “noted White nationalist,” and the American Civil Liberties Union decried what it called his “dystopian” vision. The Southern Poverty Law Center has accused Mr. Miller of “fearmongering and xenophobia.”

As Mr. Miller’s power grows, the revulsion is spreading to other corners of the liberal world.

Jim Stewartson, a liberal commentator who runs mind-war.com, called Mr. Miller “a dead-on Joseph Goebbels impersonator, in both substance and style.”

“Stephen Miller, of all the Trump advisers, has somehow managed to stay in the good graces of Donald Trump, when almost everyone else around him has been jettisoned in some way or another,” Mr. Stewartson heaved. “It seems to me this is because Miller is the genuine article, a psychopathic ideologue who truly wants nothing more than an ethnic cleansing of America and is willing to do anything to accomplish it.”

Many of the jibes home in on Mr. Miller’s hairline or angular features, but Mr. Miller’s upbringing particularly irks the left.

The Nation, in a massive piece for its April issue, wondered how a California-born, millennial, Jewish, Duke University graduate whose parents have advanced degrees and who lives in the District of Columbia could have emerged as anything other than a “garden-variety liberal Democrat.”

“Cognitive dissonance,” the publication concluded, though it also sniffed that Mr. Miller’s views aren’t the products of “serious reading.”

Steven A. Camarota, research director at the Center for Immigration Studies, whose work with Mr. Miller dates back years, said those who label him a lightweight or political opportunist don’t understand him.

“The fundamental thing about Miller to me is he’s sincere, loyal and knowledgeable, and that’s why he’s been so successful in shaping policy,” Mr. Camarota said.

Mr. McKenna said Mr. Miller spent the first Trump term figuring out how the government works. He spent the next four years thinking about what to do if Mr. Trump returned. Now he is a driving force behind the manic aggressiveness of Trump 2.0.

“That’s why they’ve taken off like a rocket ship,” said Mr. McKenna, now a Republican lobbyist and columnist for The Washington Times. “These guys were like, ‘We’re going to win, and here’s the stuff we’re going to do.’”

Asked for a historical comparison to Mr. Miller, Mr. McKenna said there is none.

With decision-making so singularly consolidated in Mr. Trump and his rotating case of aides, those who have survived, Mr. Miller and Peter Navarro, have exceptional access and influence.

Mr. McKenna said the closest historical comparison to Mr. Miller is Henry Kissinger, who, apropos of Mr. Trump’s recent ruminating, was President Nixon’s national security adviser.