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Will Stephen Miller Cost Republicans the House and Senate?

The cruelty, chaos, and incompetence of Miller's mass deportation dreams have mortally wounded Trump's political standing

Dan Pfeiffer

Feb 10

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On a recent episode of Pod Save America, my co-host Jon Favreau said that Stephen Miller would be to blame if Republicans lose the midterms.

My initial reaction was: huh.

That feels like a lot of agency to assign to a White House deputy chief of staff. And if you listen to Pod Save America regularly—or follow Jon on Twitter—you know he has a deep-seated (and entirely understandable) hatred of Miller.

But the more I thought about it, the more it made sense.

Trump is surrounded by some of the most soulless people to ever darken the corridors of power. But Stephen Miller stands first among evils.

Look, nothing would make me happier than seeing the smug, hate-filled Miller face the public reckoning he deserves. He is someone who should be exiled from polite society to the 4chan message boards, where his extremist worldview is more at home. But Miller’s central role in Trump’s emerging political disaster also helps explain both the roots of Trump’s problem—and the lessons Democrats should take from this moment as we think about strategy in the months ahead.

Stephen Miller Is Co-President

For Miller to bear the lion’s share of the blame for a potentially calamitous midterm, he would need real power to shape outcomes.

Democrats have a long habit of exaggerating the influence of Republican strategists. For decades we complained about Lee Atwater. During the Bush years, Karl Rove became the villain du jour. Often, we overstated the importance of these aides, which conveniently let the president off the hook and inflated their book advances after they left office.

When it comes to Stephen Miller, however, Democrats may actually be understating his influence.

Miller is technically the deputy chief of staff for policy. In most administrations, that is an important role—but one focused largely on coordinating the policy process across a range of domestic issues. Miller’s portfolio is far broader and more powerful than anyone who has ever held that position—or almost any position in the White House.

As Josh Dawsey and Tarini Parti recently reported in The Wall Street Journal:

Miller was influential in Trump’s first term, but his power has expanded in the second one. He personally drafted or edited every executive order the president signed, and faced little opposition from administration officials to his work to reshape immigration policy. Miller helped come up with the idea to blow up drug boats, officials said, and to deport migrants to a prison in El Salvador using the wartime Alien Enemies Act, an action now under court challenge.

As this and other reporting makes clear, Miller is more influential than any cabinet secretary, the chief of staff (his nominal boss), or even the vice president. His position at the top of the internal hierarchy was on full display when he shut down J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio in the now-infamous group chat about a military strike on Yemen that accidentally included a reporter from The Atlantic.

And there is no issue on which Miller wields more power than immigration—which is precisely the problem.

Miller has driven the aggressive, high-profile ICE raids. He set the impossible enforcement quotas that require agents to pick up everyone—not just people accused of serious crimes. He orchestrated the administration’s disastrous response to the killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti. And he has used his influence with Trump to block any effort to de-escalate or shift course.

Trump’s mass-deportation campaign is Miller’s passion project. Trump obviously wants the spectacle, but the details—the tactics and the cruelty—are Miller’s.

Immigration Is Dragging Trump Down

Let me stipulate something up front: Trump’s biggest political problem remains affordability. He ran on lowering prices and then turned around and raised them with a series of ill-considered tariffs. Even without tariffs, affordability was always going to be a challenge. He wildly overpromised.

Immigration, by contrast, was supposed to be his strength. It was one of the central reasons he won. It energized his base, persuaded swing voters, and consistently divided Democrats. For years, our party struggled to talk about immigration without litigating the issue on Trump’s terms.

That is no longer true.

Trump’s approval rating on immigration has dropped roughly twenty points over the past year. He is now about eleven points underwater.

And unlike his collapse on affordability, this is not because voters think he failed to act.

He is paying a political price for how he is acting.

A recent Marist poll found that 65 percent of Americans say ICE’s actions have gone too far, and 62 percent say ICE is making the country less safe.
In a Quinnipiac poll, 59 percent say the ICE shootings in Minneapolis are a sign of broader problems with the agency.
Large majorities support independent investigations into the killings, believe the Trump administration has not been honest about what happened, and want Kristi Noem removed.

Even parts of Trump’s own base are uncomfortable with what ICE is doing. As Greg Sargent notes, fresh data from Marquette shows that a majority of working-class Americans—and even half of rural Americans—disapprove of ICE’s handling of enforcement. Majorities also oppose deporting long-time residents who have jobs and no criminal records.

And beyond the polling, ICE’s campaign of terror has broken into the culture in a way we have not seen since Trump’s first term.

Even relentlessly non-political celebrities, athletes, podcasters, and social-media personalities are posting about ICE. The killings in Minnesota jolted a public that had begun to slide into a sense of resignation about Trump.

This is not just coastal elites yelling into the void. At a recent professional wrestling event, fans were literally chanting “Fuck ICE.”

Stephen Miller has managed to turn even professional wrestling crowds against Trump’s immigration policy. That is a remarkable feat of malevolent incompetence.

History suggests Trump was always likely to face a difficult midterm. Voters almost always swing back against the president’s party. But the size of that loss—and Trump’s ability to recover over the remaining three years of his term—will be shaped by how dramatically the public has turned against his immigration agenda.

Stephen Miller took what was Trump’s greatest political strength and transformed it into a glaring vulnerability.

Democrats no longer need to fear talking about immigration and ICE. Public opinion on immigration enforcement has shifted significantly, and Americans are increasingly critical of how federal agents are operating — with majorities in recent polls saying that ICE’s actions have gone too far and that enforcement is making the country less safe. More voters now view the administration’s approach to immigration negatively, and even independents and some moderate Republicans are questioning aggressive tactics in places like Minneapolis after the killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti. This growing unease divides Republicans and presents Democrats with a political opening they can responsibly seize heading into November

That is why, if Republicans lose the House and/or the Senate, Stephen Miller will deserve much of the blame.