After “a few days of licking his wounds” following the GOP’s historic midterm defeat last week, President Donald Trump was “already back to his old ways” and seeking “revenge against his enemies,” former Department of Homeland Security Chief of Staff Miles Taylor argued Monday.
But according to Taylor, a fatal flaw in the president’s newly promoted top aide is poised to “catastrophically” sink that campaign.
Last week, Trump announced that Stephen Miller, his deputy chief of staff, would replace Susie Wiles as White House chief of staff effective Monday. The announcement sparked panic, with critics having long accused Miller — the architect of Trump’s hard-line immigration and deportation agenda — of harboring white nationalist views.
But Taylor, who worked alongside Miller during Trump’s first term, argued that the same trait fueling those fears could ultimately be Miller’s undoing.
“I think his promotion is (in the end) good news for the political opposition. Stephen Miller always overreaches. Always,” Taylor wrote in an analysis published Monday on his Substack.
Miller was the driving force behind the 2017 travel ban on several Muslim-majority countries, the 2018 practice of separating migrant families at the border, the deployment of troops to American cities and the immigration crackdown in Minnesota. Each was ultimately reversed or scaled back amid court defeats, public outrage and mounting political pressure.
“His instinct is to drive to the extreme and keep driving until something stops him. Something always does. The problem is that we have to get to the extreme first. That’s what I mean when I say he will fail catastrophically,” Taylor wrote.
“The catastrophe cuts both ways. He’ll create chaos in this country unlike anything we’ve lived through so far in Trump 2.0, because for the first time there’s no one in the building to slow him down. And that chaos is going to do what family separation and Minnesota did, which is [to] infuriate the American people to the point that the president is forced onto his back foot until he topples over.”