Anti-Trump conservative and political commentator Charlie Sykes blasted White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller Friday as being “[President Donald] Trump’s malign homunculus,” blaming the official for feeding into the president’s “worst instincts.”
“Unchecked and undisciplined, Trump now openly muses about being a dictator, despite the fact that his mind is a bag of incontinent ferrets,” Sykes wrote on his Substack “To the Contrary” on Friday.
“But, besides his bizarre cabinet of misfit toys and toe-suckers, Trump has assembled a team that very much knows what it is doing. There is clearly a twisted vision and ideological blueprint behind the concerted shock and awe of the last eight months. This is where Trump’s malign homunculus comes in.”
Miller served as Trump’s senior policy advisor during his 2016 presidential campaign, and has remained a close ally of the president ever since. He’s also been hugely influential in both Trump administrations, having authored the Muslim travel ban in 2017, as well as having been the architect behind much of the president’s immigration policy, including the policy of separating migrant children from their families.
“There is nothing covert or subtle about Stephen Miller’s id; he is not the source of Trump’s fetish for cruelty or brutality (that is a pre-existing condition), or for his racism and xenophobia (ditto),” Sykes wrote.
“But he feeds and inflames Trump’s worst instincts. More important: Miller is the chief ideologue and architect of their implementation. So when he speaks – and tells us who he is and what he intends to do – attention ought to be paid.”
Sykes went on to note a recent appearance of Miller’s on Fox News, where he would label the Democratic Party as being a “domestic terrorist organization” when speaking with Sean Hannity.
It’s that language, Sykes argued, that made Miller particularly dangerous given his influence on Trump, and his ability to sway the president to embrace one policy or another.
“This is not (merely) the ranting of a fevered extremist,” Sykes wrote. “This is the man who has the ear of the President of the United States. And we are seeing the consequences rolled out on a daily basis.”