As President Trump has flirted in recent days with tapping Stephen Miller to become his national security adviser, those on the left have erupted in dread.
One progressive pundit went so far as to post 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,” in a new video, casts Mr. Miller as a democracy-sucking vampire, declaring he “haunts the soul of an entire nation.”
The Nation, the grandfather of left-wing media, has labeled Mr. Miller “monstrous” and “banal.”
Trump allies say the jabs, even those that stray beyond the pale, are to be expected for a man who has become the most potent weapon in Mr. Trump’s Republican 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, where the aide has been a true believer in the America First philosophy for years.
That played out on Capitol Hill, where he was a staffer for a couple of Republicans before settling with then-Sen. Jeff Sessions, an Alabama Republican who was a key figure in derailing the big immigration deals lawmakers used to make a habit of writing and trying to pass.
And it’s not just illegal immigration. Mr. Miller has been a critic of guest-worker programs that bring in foreign workers to compete for jobs.
Indeed, it’s one area where he has publicly disagreed with Mr. Trump, who has a penchant for off-handedly suggesting he wants to see more guest workers.
Like Mr. Trump, Mr. Miller knows no retreat, making him wildly popular in the MAGA movement.
After one administration official called the deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia a “mistake,” Mr. Miller went on the offense, declaring “no mistake was made” — other than by the Justice Department’s lawyer telling a judge that one was made before that attorney was fired.
After serving as Mr. Trump’s director of speechwriting in the first term, Mr. Miller spent the next four years out of the White House founding and running America First Legal.
AFL was born out of his 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 make President Biden face that same headwind.
The group worked with states such as Texas in suing over Biden border policies.
AFL was also active in the diversity, equity and inclusion space, filing challenges at all levels of government.
Now back in the White House, Mr. Miller is more powerful than ever, serving as deputy chief of staff for domestic policy and homeland security adviser.
Unofficially, those at the Homeland Security Department say Mr. Miller is running the show along with border czar Tom Homan, where they have turned the worst border in U.S. history into the most secure in history.
Immigration 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” and said he’s a possibility to 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 over the years.
America’s Voice labeled him a “noted white nationalist,” and the American Civil Liberties Union decried his “dystopian” vision. The Southern Poverty Law Center has a massive write-up crediting him with “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 at Mr. Miller are cheap shots, homing in on his hairline or angular features. But it’s Mr. Miller’s upbringing that 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 weren’t the product 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’s 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 GOP 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 hasn’t been one.
With decision-making so singularly consolidated in Mr. Trump and his rotating case of aides, those that have survived — Mr. Miller and Peter Navarro — have exceptional access and influence.
Mr. McKenna said the closest historical comparison to Mr. Miller he could see was Henry Kissinger — who, apropos of Mr. Trump’s recent ruminating, was once President Richard Nixon’s national security adviser.
