"What do you hear about what people think on the inside about Miller's power?" asked Wilentz, shortly after another revealing segment in which Taylor speculated that even President Donald Trump's inner circle no longer sees him as fit for his duties.
"It's almost absolute," said Taylor. "You know, he would never say that ... Stephen is very, very careful to always be entirely deferential to the president." However, he said, in one revealing incident in 2018, Miller "was growing really, really frustrated with ... the slow-walking that was happening over at the Department of Homeland Security when it came to some of the president's more outlandish ideas. He wanted to do a lot of things that just, our lawyers knew would so clearly break the law, and you know, not only did we not want that for the country, but people like me didn't want to go to prison because of it, right?"
And so Miller persuaded Trump behind the scenes to give him effective control of DHS, Taylor continued: "It wasn't some public announcement, but he'd gone to the president and said, 'Look, I'm tired of this, you know, basically give me the authority to make some of these decisions over at DHS and essentially override the Department.
"And he called me to tell me this. I remember where I was. I was driving on Capitol Hill, and it was the words he used that stuck with me. He said, 'think of this as my coronation." That's what he called it. He called it his coronation, that he'd gotten the president to empower him to take on these new duties."
"There's a lot of royalist thinking it seems to me, automatic royalist thinking," Blumenthal interjected.
"There is, though," said Taylor. "And that was, I think, the most revealing thing that I ever heard come out of his mouth. And Stephen rarely — you really rarely get these unguarded moments with them, he's extremely guarded, and that was sort of an unguarded moment from him but, I think, illustrative of not just where his head is at, but also how this administration, like you said, thinks of governance is, not in terms of democracy and checks and balances but, you know, how can you consolidate total rule. And so Stephen certainly has that inside this administration. He's got much more authority than he had before, and you are seeing what that looks like if left unchecked."
A key example, he added, is the deployment of the military to crush anti-deportation protests in Los Angeles, which has Miller's "fingerprints all over it."
"So, Kristi Noem, who is the chief bureaucrat, the secretary of DHS, doesn't act like an actual cabinet secretary, and I say that besides her cosplay and you know various numerous costume changes," said Wilentz. "She's under the thumb of Stephen Miller, and I wonder what people on the inside say about that and how they feel about what's going on there?"
"I think there's a recognition in the Department that the current secretary is not a policy heavyweight," said Taylor. "The result is ... what can you do if you, you know, don't have a command enough of the issues to run that department, or at least to be able to stand up to the White House and make decisions? Well, all you can do is PR, and I think that's the role she's settled into, is essentially the president's Homeland Security PR person. And it's not unreasonable or outlandish to say that Stephen Miller is running the Department of Homeland Security.
"I very much believe it and I know that day-to-day, that tactically that is what's happening."
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