The Daily - Stephen Miller’s Return to Power

Episode Date: January 27, 2025

At the center of President Trump’s aggressive first week back in office is a 39-year-old adviser, Stephen Miller. His ideas and ideology have animated the blitz of executive orders.Jonathan Swan, a White House reporter for The New York Times, explains Mr. Miller’s dramatic return to the White House, and why his power has never been greater.Guests: Jonathan Swan, a White House reporter for The New York Times.Background reading: Stephen Miller has built more power than ever.Mr. Miller, the incoming deputy chief of staff, told lawmakers that early action would include directives to give Mr. Trump more control over federal workers.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. Photo: Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

From the New York Times, I'm Natalie Ketroff. This is The Daily. At the center of Trump's aggressive first week in office is a 39-year-old advisor, Stephen Miller. It's his ideas and ideology that have animated the president's unprecedented blitz of executive orders. Today, my colleague Jonathan Swan explains Miller's dramatic return to the White House, and why his power has never been greater. It's Monday, January 27.

Jonathan, welcome back. Thanks for having me. I think a lot of us remember Stephen Miller from the first Trump term. But now that he's back, what do we need to know about who Miller has become and the role he's going to play this time around? Well, he's immensely powerful. I could make a case that he is one of, if not the most powerful, unelected people in America right now. He is Donald Trump's deputy chief of staff of policy, which may not sound that impressive,

but to take all the jargon away, he is in charge of domestic policy, full stop. President Donald Trump's second term in the White House began with a flurry of unilateral actions, and he's showing no signs of slowing down. So many of the executive orders that you've seen, Donald Trump's sign with his Sharpie in his first week in office, were the work of Stephen Miller.

Sir, this is an executive order realigning the United States refugee admission program. This is a proclamation guaranteeing the state's protection against invasion based on the current crisis at the southern border. This next order relates to the definition of birthright citizenship under the 14th Amendment of the United States. Birthright. That's a big one. And Miller's vision that he's articulated for decades

is now translated into these executive actions. So, okay, tell us how Miller got here. How did he arrive at the beliefs that are now defining these opening days and really shifting the country to the right, especially on immigration? Well, he actually came to these beliefs very early on. Stephen Miller was talking about this populist nationalist stuff as a child. He grew up in Santa Monica, I mean California in the 90s. He grew up in a fairly comfortable Jewish family. He was at this liberal high school and he was this provocateur. He was already attacking the left and making controversial anti-immigrant statements when

he was in high school. And so much so that his classmates made a documentary about him singling him out as a future politician. And you know, he runs for student government. Am I the only one who is sick and tired of being told to pick up my trash? There are plenty of janitors who are paid to do it for us. And when I heard what he said, I was outraged because that shows... Campaigning on the kids' rights to leave a mess so that the janitors should pick up their trash because they're paid to do so. He complained about the school's Spanish

language announcements, complained about you know the colorful festivals of minority cultures and described this decline as he saw it of a more traditional version of American education. I will say and I will do things that no one else in their right mind would say or do. So all of this that you're seeing now was visible as far back as high school. And I have to imagine, Jonathan, I mean, he's in LA, he's in Santa Monica.

This is generally a kind of liberal environment. And he's going against the grain here. So there's a part of that that's about, you know, contradicting the people that are around him, the environment around him. It also just sounds like there's a piece of this that is really genuinely xenophobic. He is extremely hostile to immigrants.

He has always, as far back as high school, rejected the idea that immigration is a net positive for America. And he's been very consistent in that. And it's worth noting, yes, he grew up in this very liberal environment in Los Angeles, but it was also a moment of a huge influx of immigrants in California where there were many conservatives in the state who were railing against it. So it's not like his ideas were coming out of thin air and he really plugged into this right wing ecosystem.

He would call up Larry Elder, a very well-known right-wing commentator in California, who was an early mentor to Stephen Miller. He was obsessed with Rush Limbaugh, who obviously was a giant in right-wing broadcasting. And, you know, he was really rebelling against the cultural sensitivities of his high school. And you saw that continue through college. How so? What do you mean? So Stephen Miller goes to Duke University and something happens in 2006

that really defines his experience there. The investigation of rape allegations against Duke University's lacrosse team is still going on. This extraordinary incident that happens at Duke where members of the lacrosse team at the school were accused of rape. An anonymous woman's cry for help shocked a nation. And it became this huge national story. You had members of the faculty coming out, condemning them before anything was proven.

Now for the top story tonight. Exactly what's going on at Duke University. condemning them before anything was proven. Now for the top story tonight. Exactly what's going on at Duke University? Joining us now from Raleigh, Stephen Miller, columnist for the Duke Chronicle, a student newspaper. And Stephen Miller becomes the face of the defense. You, a student, pretty much the only person who'll talk to us. What's going on? Well, you have a situation here where, like a lot of college campuses you have this segment of professors that's very powerful and very very far to the left

suddenly he's on t v just realize ruined your first concern is that somebody's falsely and you don't don't tell me what my first concern is and thrusts him into the national conversation you had three apparently uh... well-to-do white lacrosse players accused of raping a poor black stripper single mother in Durham. If you hadn't had that racial element, there's no way this kiss could have continued for that long.

Defending these players at a time when the prevailing wisdom at Duke University was that these players were guilty. And the idea that in America you would pursue a case against three people when the evidence suggests not that they did it, but that they didn't do it, to me is beyond unconscionable. And these lacrosse players were declared innocent. And this was a really important moment for him because here he was taking a contrarian position against the prevailing liberal orthodoxy and he ended up being vindicated. Okay.

He's proven right. He must be feeling pretty emboldened. What does he do next? He goes to Washington. He goes to Capitol Hill and he ends up working for Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama. Senator Sessions in the early 2010s was a pretty fringe figure in the Republican Senate Conference. If you take your mind back to the 2012 election, Barack Obama beats Mitt Romney. And when the Republican party after that election sat down, you know, the grand figures in the party got in a room together and said, what happened?

What do we need to change, et cetera? Their famous autopsy basically said, we need to be nicer to immigrants. We need to do more to reach out to Hispanics. And that was the prevailing wisdom on Capitol Hill among Republicans. The idea was broaden the tent. We can win elections if we bring Latinos into our coalition. Yes, but very specifically by being more compassionate, quote unquote, when it came to immigration, that sentiment became operationalized in Congress. So what you had was the so-called Gang of Eight, which was a bipartisan group of senators who got

together and figured out a pathway to comprehensive immigration reform. And you had Republicans like Marco Rubio played a really significant role in this bill. So they came up with legislation that sought a pathway to citizenship for millions of people who are in the country illegally. And they also took some measures to tighten border security. And Stephen Miller and Jeff Sessions identified this bill as the big fight that they were going to wage for the future of the party, for the future of the country, and Stephen Miller became kind of famous in Washington circles for haranguing reporters late at night with emails, with lurid stories about immigrants committing crimes, for working behind the scenes with conservative media, for working every lawmaker

he could. And it really was a sort of David and Goliath in terms of the politics of it in Washington and the money. So even Miller and Jeff Sessions at that time were very much a minority voice in the party among the elites in Washington, but they were far more in tune with the Republican voters, with the base. Right. It sounds like they are betting at this point, Miller and Sessions, that while there is a consensus among the Republican establishment that this is the right way to go, that they actually know what voters care

about and that this bill would not be popular with the base of voters that they're trying to win over. Yes, and they were right. Because once they activated this opposition movement, these lawmakers in the House, their phones were being lit up by angry voters, angry constituents saying, do not do this. And the bill never went through the House, their phones were being lit up by angry voters, angry constituents saying, do not do this. And the bill never went through the House. So they killed it. So this is a huge victory for Miller, another instance in which it's him against the world in what you said was this kind of uphill battle. He comes out on top. And yet, Republicans

in his own party, it sounds like, are still swatting him away like a fly. I mean, he's still an outsider, even among conservatives at this point. No question. The Washington Republican establishment at that time saw Stephen Miller as an irritant and dismissed him. And you know, it's interesting now, you know, when my colleagues Maggie Haberman, Charlie Savage, David Fahrenheit and myself reported out this story,

you know, you talk to people who were in influential positions back then, they can't believe where he's ended up. But that all changed when Donald Trump launched his campaign for president in 2015. Tell us about that. Well, it was almost a religious experience for him watching Donald Trump come down that escalator.

Wow. Jeff Sessions was his vehicle at that time, but Jeff Sessions does not have the charisma to be a true national figure. Jeff Sessions was never going to win the presidency. Here is this celebrity, Donald Trump, every American knows who he is, gives this speech where he says that Mexico

is sending rapists across the border. I mean, Stephen Miller could have written that speech. And it's this moment of exhilaration for Stephen Miller. He didn't know Donald Trump at that point, he wasn't wired into his inner circle, but he starts over a period of months getting in touch with Donald Trump's team, offering ideas and eventually he gets absorbed onto the Donald Trump team and they see immediately his value. He would stay up all night writing speeches. This was his whole life.

It was all he cared about. He was obsessed, particularly with the immigration issue, but obsessed with getting Donald Trump elected. And so he became this indispensable figure for Donald Trump. It's interesting. It's like in Trump, Miller finds this ideological soulmate in a way and a guy who can really help move his vision from the fringes to the mainstream. And in Miller, Trump finds a workhorse who is willing to stay up all night and design a kind of campaign that appeals to voters. Exactly.

And you know, the other element was Trump trusts him. Trump has always been very paranoid about leakers around him, and he's never seen Stephen that way. He's always viewed Stephen as someone he can completely trust. Okay. So Donald Trump obviously wins. How does Miller start to put his imprint on the first term? So Miller comes into government.

He really doesn't know a lot about how the federal government works. He's super aggressive. He wants to get things done. He wants to close the border and expel immigrants and do all the things that they've been talking about on the campaign, but does not necessarily have the wherewithal at that time to execute. One of the early stumbles was the travel ban against Muslim majority countries. It was very sloppily drafted, poorly coordinated, and it ended up being struck down. They had to redraft it.

They implement the infamous zero tolerance policy where they separate parents from their children at the border. But after a period of bad media coverage, Donald Trump reverses that order. And that was something that Stephen Miller had advocated for. And so Stephen Miller found himself thwarted at many levels throughout the first couple of years of the presidency. But by 2020, he had really gotten his footing. He'd learned a lot about where the levers of power

were in the government. And by the end, they used COVID to effectively seal the southern border. They implement Title 42, which is to declare a public health emergency at the border, which basically gave them the ability to immediately turn people back. It would be hard to overstate the impact of that policy. I mean, it literally reshaped the immigration system. Completely. For Miller, it sounds like this first term is kind of a mixed bag, right?

I mean, he has a lot of success, as you just said, in reshaping some of the rules of the game on the issue he cares most about, immigration. But at the same time, his lack of West Wing experience and know-how gets in the way of achieving his full vision. That's right. And when Donald Trump leaves office in early 2021, Stephen Miller gets to work for the next four years planning what they would do in a second term if he ever retook the presidency and planning how they would get through any and all obstruction from the left for this return to power. We'll be right back. Jonathan, what did Miller do exactly during those four years to put himself in a position

to more effectively execute his vision? So, Stephen Miller does a few things. One is he starts a nonprofit called America First Legal. And what he does with this group is he basically builds in his mind the right-wing version of the ACLU. He'd spent the previous four years in frustration with very effective left leaning groups, sued the Trump administration on all sorts of policy areas, and Stephen Miller wanted to create a version

of that on the right. But the most important thing he did immediately after they left office was he demonstrated his undying loyalty to Donald Trump. Remember, when Trump left office, he was a pariah. He was a defeated president, but also an impeached president twice over and came close to being convicted by the Senate. Many people wanted to move on from him.

They saw him as the past, not the future. And at this moment of abandonment... Joining me now, former senior advisor to Trump, Stephen Miller. Stephen Miller very publicly showed that he never left Donald Trump's side. Well, first of all, the president did a stellar job. And all credit goes to him. He went on television praising Trump, defending Trump. The treatment Donald Trump has gotten,

one false allegation after another, one investigation after another. He made very clear that he wasn't going anywhere. This was one of the president's signature achievements. And when he's on TV, he's defending Trump, but he's also pushing forward his immigration agenda. We bequeathed the most secure border in US history. He went on Fox News.

Seal the border, deport all the illegals. He spoke at conservative conferences. That's the short answer, right? And he made sure that an anti immigration perspective and a pro-Trump perspective were staying front and centre among conservatives.

The military has the right to establish a fortress position on the border and to say no one can cross here at all. And the closer to the election we got, the more specific he got in his plans. And the last thing Stephen Miller does is he leverages his credibility and his connection to Trump to build relationships.

What does that look like? Well, there's two elements to it. So number one is on Capitol Hill. Stephen Miller knows that he's going to need a lot of money to do what Donald Trump calls the largest deportation operation in American history. That involves building massive detention camps in the desert to hold migrants

while you're waiting to fly them out of the country. It involves a huge amount of resources to round up immigrants, arrest them. So he very methodically builds relationships in the Republican House and in the Republican Senate. The second category that was really important is rich people. He builds incredible donor relationships and raises a ton of money for the nonprofit, more than $40 million. But there's a quiet relationship that he builds that only became visible pretty recently and he still is very secretive about it. And that's his relationship with Elon Musk. So Musk had been very secretive about his political spending.

He did not want people knowing what he was up to, but he was secretly funding a bunch of advertising against transgender rights, other issues. And Stephen Miller's group was associated with this spending. So he was operating in secrecy as an advisor, political donations advisor to Elon Musk. And that relationship became super important as Musk then became all in for Trump, spent more money than anyone else trying to elect Donald Trump. Jonathan, it's not lost on me, obviously, that this guy who was made fun of at one point in Washington

is now making friends in high places and really cultivating the kinds of allies that he needs, I mean, the richest guy in the world, for example, to make sure that he can, I mean, the richest guy in the world, for example, to make sure that he can wield his power efficiently. It sounds like he is actively trying to make up for strategic holes that may have been there in the first term. That's right.

The first advantage Stephen Miller had in the Four Years Out of Power was he had a plan. He had the space to work on policy plans. And that was really evident to me when myself, Charlie Savage and Maggie Haberman did this big story in late 2023 on Trump's immigration plans. And we did an extensive interview with Stephen Miller. And if you go back and read our story in New York Times, copy paste, copy paste, and it's what you're seeing right now. He had a fully formed vision and it is exactly what they're doing right now. So he had the plan, but he also had these big thoughts of execution that were really important. It's what I'll just call flood the zone. His idea of flood the zone is you do so many things at once, so many aggressive, controversial actions at once, at speed, that your opposition is scattered and almost defenseless.

When it's one of 50 or 100 actions that are extremely controversial, there's only so much bandwidth for the opposition to muster resistance, muster resources, muster outrage, muster legal action. So you just flood the zone, you do so many things at once that your opposition, they might stop some of them, but they can't stop all of them. Overwhelmed, overwhelmed, overwhelmed. Okay, but Jonathan, I think it's worth noting that just last week Miller's strategy ran into something of a wall. This federal judge knocked down the executive order, ending birthright citizenship.

The judge said, I'm quoting here, I've been on the bench for over four decades. This is a blatantly unconstitutional order. Where were the lawyers when this decision was being made? So I'm wondering, does this mirror the sloppiness of the Muslim ban in the first term? Does it raise questions for you about whether Miller's four years of preparation did actually put him in a better position to execute his vision? No, I don't think this has anything to do with sloppiness. They knew this was going to get challenged in court.

They knew that this was radical, audacious policy. So this is not a matter of sloppiness. This is a matter of them testing the limits and seeing what they can get away with very deliberately. Is that part of the flood the zone strategy? Yeah, it is. I mean, look, they know that some of the actions they're taking are not going to pass legal muster.

That's a feature, not a bug. They're doing so many things at once to crack down on immigrants, to deport immigrants, to block immigrants from entering the country, that the aggregate is going to be hugely restrictive, even if certain individual actions fail in the courts. Okay, we're just at the start, obviously, of this administration. But when I think about what the likelihood of Miller having success here long term is, I have to ask about something that you mentioned earlier, which is the potential for moderating forces within Trump world, people that oppose some of his

agenda. Do those people still exist? Are those forces still there? No. If people are searching for internal opposition in the West Wing to the Trump-Steven Miller ideology, you're not going to find them. They don't exist anymore. Where you will find obstacles are in Congress.

Republicans have very tight majorities and we've already seen how dysfunctional the House Republican majority is. And so there's real questions there. You'll find obstruction potentially in the court system. It's not a given that all their policies will sail through. Frankly, if you're looking for restraint on Stephen Miller's maximalist impulses on immigration in particular, it's Donald Trump. Donald Trump is the restraining force on Stephen Miller?

Yeah. Really? How so? Well, he's not as hardcore as Stephen Miller is on immigration. Trump is very sensitive to the stock market. He does not want to see the stock market tank under his tenure. And if there are actions on immigration that would cause inflation, you know, deporting farm workers and others, that's something that's going to really make Trump think twice

about following through. And the other one is media coverage. I mean, we saw in term one, he did not tolerate that period of really aggressive, wrenching media coverage, particularly on television about family separation, these horrible images of crying children and what have you. And so Trump backed off that policy. So Trump in combination with the stock market and media as his kind of own guard rails is actually probably the closest thing you have to a restraint on the full Stephen Miller ideology.

And how does Miller respond when Trump is not fully aligned with him, when they disagree? With complete deference. And I'll give you the perfect example of that. There's been this huge debate on the right recently about H-1B visas, these high school visas, the tech companies love to bring in smart engineers and what have you from overseas. Stephen Miller has spent a good deal of his adult life rallying against these visas, but Donald Trump supports them. From all accounts, Stephen Miller has done very little, if anything, to try to dissuade Trump from that position

recently. I often find when I meet people who never interacted with Stephen Miller, they've only consumed him through Fox News or whatever. They have an impression of him that he is this fire breather, kamikaze pilot, my way or the highway, fight to the death, whatever. Actually the opposite, extremely pragmatic, a very canny political survivor. You don't survive as long as he has in Trump's inner circle without being like that because the person you're working for, Donald Trump, does not really have firm principles or firm ideology.

He's completely transactional. He's got a few gut impulses. And if you think that you can shift him on everything, you turn out like Steve Bannon. You don't stay in his inner staff circle. So he has learned how to operate in Trump world and how to survive in Trump world. And that's why he is one of the originals who still remains and is one of the most effective

members of the current staff. Jonathan, I have to say, just thinking about Miller's bio, that guy, the guy who kind of backs down from a fight, who concedes strategically, He's come a long way from the high schooler who was this strident ideological warrior who, in some cases, was starting fights to make a point, to go against the grain. He's a different person. His gut remains the same, but he's learned a lot. He's learned a lot about how to get what he wants.

And knowing that you're not going to get everything you want and knowing that you might have to set aside a fight for the moment because the person that is most important to you, Donald Trump, may not agree and you know that you're a staffer and you work for him. And he's not going to get everything he wants this term, but he's going to learn. He's going to keep learning. And he might be blocked here, or he might be blocked there. But if there's one thing that we know about him by this point, it's that he won't stop. Jonathan, thank you so much. Thank you.

On Sunday, the immigration crackdown that Miller helped craft continued to take shape. The president of Colombia said that his country had turned away military planes carrying Colombian deportees. He said Colombia would not accept any deportation flights from the United States until the Trump administration created a process to treat Colombian migrants with, quote, dignity and

respect. In response, Trump threatened a barrage of retaliatory measures against the country, including sanctions and 25 percent tariffs on all Colombian imports. Late Sunday night, the Colombian president, Gustavo Petro, backed down and agreed to let deportation flights into the country. The White House said in a statement that because the Colombian president had agreed to all of its terms, the tariffs and sanctions that Trump had threatened would be, quote, held in reserve.

We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. Former South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem was sworn in as Homeland Security Secretary on Saturday, putting her in charge of the agency that's at the heart of Trump's immigration crackdown. The department runs Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Noem is a close Trump ally who was once seen as a potential running mate for the president. And on Sunday, Pete Hegseth was sworn in as defense secretary after overcoming a claim

of sexual harassment and accusations of abusive behavior and public drunkenness. He was narrowly confirmed by the Senate over the weekend, with Vice President J.D. Vance casting the deciding vote after a 50-50 tie. The final vote was the slimmest margin for a defense secretary's confirmation since the position was created in 1947. Today's episode was produced by Mary Wilson, Jessica Chung, Nina Feldman, and Eric Krupke. It was edited by Brendan Klinkenberg with help from Paige Cowitt. Fact check by Will Peischel contains original music by Alicia Bietup and Marian Lozano

and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. That's it for the daily. I'm Natalie Ketroff. See you tomorrow.