Two governors understand the authoritarian threat Stephen Miller poses to the nation, according to an analyst, who argued that's why they're some of the only elected officials who are meeting the moment.
President Donald Trump's influential deputy chief of staff is using the MAGA disinformation machine polarize and inflame the debate over his dictatorial crackdown on Democratic-led cities and states, which The New Republic's Greg Sargent wrote forces Americans to take sides in the standoff – driving many of them to accept authoritarian rule.
"Miller believes that if he supercharges the debate over Trump's abuses of power with enough propaganda, he can polarize it and nudge low-info voters into accepting authoritarianism," Sargent wrote.
"Do Democratic leaders broadly have their own theory about this moment? It’s unclear," Sargent added. "But here’s what we can divine right now: Governors J.B. Pritzker of Illinois and Gavin Newsom of California do have one. They grasp Miller’s theory of the case, and they are responding in kind, with their own war for attention, on the intuition that voters will side with the rule of law over authoritarian dictatorship — if they are presented with this as a clear choice."
Trump is threatening to invoked the Insurrection Act, which he's been itching to do since his first term, and judges who've blocked him from sending troops into Portland and other cities have noticed that he's making up facts to justify his invasion.
"The specter of Portland 'burning' is dimwitted MAGA propaganda," Sargent wrote. "But Trump is now nakedly threatening to invoke the notorious nineteenth-century act if Democratic governors or the courts lawfully exercise their roles in our constitutional schema, in a way that displeases him."
In an inverse of reality, Miller declared that judges were "insurrectionists" for blocking Trump from deploying troops in American cities based on outright fabrications or old video footage he saw on Fox News, and Sargent said the White House adviser seems to be pushing the president to declare war on the country's own citizens.
"Miller appears to want Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act," Sargent wrote. "It’s likely that Miller, a master manipulator lurking furtively behind the despot’s throne, frequently uses the word 'insurrection' about Trump’s opponents to lodge it deep in Trump’s brainstem and make invocation of the Act more likely."
Strong majorities of Americans oppose Trump using the military for immigration crackdowns and law enforcement, but Newsom and Pritzker understand that Miller believes that opposition isn't strong enough to survive constant onslaught on social media.
"In this understanding of politics," Sargent wrote, "what really matters is the political attention economy, and how conflict plays within it. Supercharging searing civil tensions over jarring high-profile events drives attention, jolts low-propensity voters out of their information ruts, and compels them to really take sides."
"Pritzker and Newsom see it as a defining challenge of this moment that Trump is consolidating authoritarian power daily, and using it to subjugate and dominate Blue America as if it’s akin to an enemy nation within," he added. "If Democrats sit this debate out, Miller has calculated, Trump’s deceptions can flood public information spaces, persuading low-info, low-attention voters that his autocratic encroachments constitute a proportional response to the civic unrest he keeps propagandizing about."