Panic ensued Friday after President Donald Trump announced that Stephen Miller, the White House’s deputy chief of staff whom critics have long accused of harboring white nationalist views, would be replacing Susie Wiles as White House chief of staff.
“Trump crawling into the bunker with Miller for the next two years is, to state the obvious, not good news,” warned Josh Dorner, a Democratic political communications strategist.
According to CNN’s Kristen Holmes, Trump was reportedly “furious” with Wiles following Republicans’ historic electoral defeat earlier this week, with past reporting hinting that Wiles would be scapegoated if the GOP lost the midterms.
Trump still gave Wiles a warm send-off, writing in a social media post Friday that she had “done a great job” as his top aide and revealing that she would be “moving over to the Trump Political Operation.”
Now, with Miller set to begin his new role as Trump’s top aide on Monday, critics feared the worst.
“Stephen Miller is basically a white supremacist,” argued Ernesto López Vallet, a Spanish political scientist and legal scholar, according to an automatic Grok translation from Spanish. “The most radical psychopath in the entire MAGA world, directly responsible for the ICE murders. Full bunker mode already.”
The architect of Trump’s hard-line immigration and deportation agenda, Miller came under intense scrutiny in 2019 after the Southern Poverty Law Center published roughly 900 emails he exchanged with Breitbart editors in 2015 and 2016. In them, Miller shared articles from the white nationalist website VDARE and urged the outlet to write about “The Camp of the Saints,” a French novel, widely described as “racist,” that is popular among white nationalists and neo-Nazis.
The scrutiny has only intensified since. Last year, The Steady State, a group of more than 330 former national security officials, likened Miller’s speech at Charlie Kirk’s September 2025 memorial service to rhetoric from Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels. Actor Robert De Niro called Miller “the Goebbels of the cabinet” in October 2025.
“Oh he’s going full Führerbunker huh,” wrote Adam Carlson, a pollster, election analyst and founding partner of Zenith Research.
Markus Batchelor, a progressive activist and national political director of the liberal advocacy organization People For the American Way, reacted to Miller’s promotion with two words: “Jesus Christ.”
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