White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller has reemerged at the White House and is stronger and more determined than ever to push through President Donald Trump’s MAGA policies – and he has a plan for that.
Miller, who also doubles as Trump’s Homeland Security adviser, built a reputation during the president’s first term for his “creative zealotry” – particularly on immigration – as he unearthed arcane presidential powers to circumvent court orders, according to journalists Nick Miroff and Jonathan Lemire.
While his proposals would sometimes amuse government lawyers and officials in the West Wing and inside the Department of Homeland Security, “no one is laughing now,” the writers pointed out Wednesday in the Atlantic as Miller barrels forward with a new ground plan.
“The White House point person on immigration is pursuing a strategy that is bedeviling his opponents and could provoke a constitutional crisis,” wrote Miroff, who covers the Department of Homeland Security for The Washington Post, and Lemire, a contributing editor for the Atlantic and former MSNBC host.
But Miller’s approach this time around is different, they added.
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“He has unleashed an everything-at-once policy storm modeled after the MAGA guru Stephen K. Bannon’s ‘flood the zone’ formula,” the pair of experts told readers. “Drawing on policy ideas worked up in conservative think tanks during the four years between Trump’s terms, Miller’s plan has been to fire off so many different proposals that some inevitably find a friendly court ruling, three administration officials told us.”
The tactic gives the top Trump aide “multiple ways to seal the border, shut down the U.S. asylum system, and ramp up deportations,” according to Miroff and Lemire. But the administration’s bold use of the Alien Enemies Act over the weekend and refusal to comply with a court order was Miller’s “most brazen gambit yet,” they added.
“Legal scholars say that the Trump administration’s deportation flights have pushed the country closer to a constitutional crisis than any other moves it has made,” the two concluded in the Atlantic piece.
Miller has joined other administration officials, including Trump, in sharply criticizing the federal judge who issued the order related to the deportation flights over the weekend.