President Donald Trump’s new chief of staff will take a controversial White House tactic for bypassing Congress “to a whole new level of aggression” during the last years of Donald Trump's presidency, columnist Bret Stephens warned Thursday.
In a discussion with New York Times journalist Frank Bruni, Stephens argued that Trump’s choice of Miller communicated clearly how the lame-duck president would be spending his remaining two years in office.
“His choice of Stephen Miller as his next chief of staff says it all: two years of bruising political combat; no outreach to Democrats; no grace in defeat; no acknowledgment of political reality; no interest in giving another Republican a fighting chance to succeed him,” Stephens said.
Bruni, who has written for the Times since 1995, pressed Stephens on whether Trump and Miller could do “concrete damage” by sidelining Congress, or whether it would mostly be “ugly theater.”
Stephens cautioned Bruni not to underestimate the damage Miller could cause.
“Miller is going to take Barack Obama’s notorious motto from 2014, ‘I’ve got a pen and I’ve got a phone’ — meaning that he intended to bypass a hostile Congress through executive orders — and take it to a whole new level of aggression, all of it with a view toward achieving two things: making Democrats look weak or goading them into overreaction,” Stephens said.
Stephens continued, “I don’t envy Hakeem Jeffries and … uh, whoever becomes Senate majority leader,” referencing the growing opposition among Democrats to electing Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) as majority leader.
Democrats won control of both chambers of Congress in last week’s midterms, and their new majorities take over when the next Congress convenes Jan. 3. Miller, who served as Trump’s deputy chief of staff, has been the architect of Trump’s hard-line immigration and deportation agenda.