If further testimony was required that Donald Trump doesn’t back down from a fight, then his ouster on Friday of Susie Wiles and appointment of Stephen Miller as his White House chief of staff is it. Wiles is a savvy pol who helped steer Trump to victory in 2024 but hardly an ideological MAGA bedmate. By contrast, Miller is an alter Kämpfer, or old fighter, in the movement. His motto isn’t America but Trump First.
“I am pleased to announce that Mr. Stephen Miller, the current Deputy Chief of Staff of the Trump Administration, and one of my most trusted advisors, will become the Chief of Staff starting Monday, November 9, 2026,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Susie Wiles, who has done an outstanding job, will be moving over to the Trump Political Operation. I want to thank her for her service as Chief of Staff – She has done a great job!”
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.
The bunker mentality that Trump is fostering as he builds his golden ballroom may serve him better than it does the GOP. Miller’s new high-profile job is a gift for Democrats. For the remnant of Republican senators and congressmen, the news that Miller will be directly guiding White House operations must be coming as a rude shock. Talk about shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic! If Trump continues to navigate the White House into ever more turbulent waters, he will threaten to capsize the GOP completely by 2028.
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