Stephen Miller’s Wrecking Ball

By Michael Warren

Thursday, July 02, 2026

 

One of the most striking facts about Regime Change, the expertly reported new book on President Donald Trump’s second term from New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, is how much White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller dominates its pages.

 

The 40-year-old senior Trump aide is so central to the administration’s policy, messaging, and image that he has more entries in Haberman and Swan’s index than virtually every member of Trump’s Cabinet, including Vice President J.D. Vance and White House chief of staff Susie Wiles. Only Secretary of State Marco Rubio, former President Joe Biden, and Trump himself have more entries. That’s powerful company, and Miller fits right in.

 

So it’s notable that the reader’s introduction to Miller in the book is a description of one of his early screw-ups in this second Trump term. In the second week of the administration, the White House’s Office of Management and Budget issued a memo ordering a temporary pause on all non-Medicare and Social Security funds disbursements. The idea was to disrupt the woke priorities and initiatives of the Biden administration and the deep state with a big, shocking flex of power. This kind of thing was right up Miller’s alley.

 

The authors report that a member of Miller’s team, May Mailman, had pushed OMB to issue the memo, reflecting the new deputy chief of staff’s overarching desire to move—and move quickly. Miller himself was publicly defending the memo as necessary for achieving the new president’s goals of dismantling the previous administration’s woke goals.

 

But in the real world, the broadly written memo was causing confusion and panic. Money for programs like Medicaid was frozen, prompting a bevy of lawsuits. On the same day Miller touted to CNN’s Jake Tapper that the OMB’s memo was “clear as day,” a federal judge blocked its implementation. Suddenly, Miller’s orchestrations were a big problem, and he began damage control—for himself. Haberman and Swan describe a series of duplicitous machinations straight out of Game of Thrones.

 

“Miller distanced himself from the memo so thoroughly that some senior West Wing aides thought he had no idea it was in the works at all,” they write. “With his new purview firmly established, Miller could scarcely afford any early missteps.”

 

Miller would later tell colleagues that his team never saw a draft for the OMB memo before it went out, directing the blame to Mark Paoletta, the OMB general counsel who had edited but not drafted the memo. The president’s outrage about the public-relations headache the memo caused, stoked further by the White House’s “weak” decision to rescind the memo, prompted conversations about whether someone should be fired for the snafu. Paoletta’s name was mentioned as a sacrificial lamb, but figures like Vance and OMB Director Russ Vought pushed back.

 

Incredibly, nobody mentioned Miller and his team’s role—despite the fact that he had pressured OMB for the memo, demanded maximalist language, and prioritized taking action over checking and double-checking the details. Trump’s attention soon turned to offering up a new distraction, while Miller escaped without a scratch.

 

The incident provides a more complete and complex picture of Miller, with the authors describing his actions as more chaotic and far less meticulous than they may seem from the outside—puncturing the “evil genius” persona that he himself actively cultivates.

 

The reality is that Miller, much like Trump himself, crashes through roadblocks and hurdles, paying no heed to the rules—not the rules of government, and not the rules of collegiality. He’s less of a mastermind and more of a bully, less a crafty strategist and more an unstoppable blunt force. His methods recall the children’s book about a family going on a bear hunt and facing various obstacles along the path. We can't go over it. We can't go under it. We've got to go through it!

 

That gets Miller what he wants, but only to a point, and often at great long-term cost to the cause of Trumpism. A strategy of fear, intimidation, and a refusal to ask permission can mow down quite a bit of opposition, but when Miller runs up against more immutable barriers, such as federal judges or public outrage, he finds a way to slink out the back and let someone else take the blame. Miller’s posture is to be all-powerful, and, failing that, fade into the wallpaper. In this way, he is a purer, more refined version of the man to whom he has dedicated the past decade of his professional life.

 

Take immigration enforcement, Miller’s primary and nearly single-minded concern. His approach to implementing Trump’s restrictionist platform is described in various places in the book as “applying immense pressure” on the government agencies to pump up their arrest and deportation numbers. When the results failed to live up to his standard of arresting 3,000 illegal immigrants a day—as it turns out, deporting illegal immigrants in the interior of the country is a lot harder than it sounds—he resorted to yelling at officials on phone calls and threatening to fire everyone at Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security.

 

All the while, in private conversations with administration colleagues that the authors reported on, Miller was seeding the idea that Kristi Noem was the source of the frustrated progress. The homeland security secretary and her deputies were bungling the procurement of detention facilities. Noem’s messaging about targeting the “worst of the worst” violent criminals was muddying the mission. Noem’s incompetence, not the goal of mass deportation itself, was the problem.

 

The secretary had, of course, done herself no favors during her tenure at DHS, from her expensive, silly TV ads urging illegal immigrants to self-deport to her frequent travel, aboard a private jet, with her aide and rumored boyfriend Corey Lewandowski. So when the Miller-driven maximalist approach to arresting and deporting illegal immigrants deep within the country reached its bloody end this past winter—when federal officers in Minnesota in two separate incidents killed two American citizens protesting the government’s actions—it was Noem and DHS who took the blame.

 

“[S]hortly after the two shootings, Miller told associates he was furious—not about the overall restrictionist immigration policy or the efforts to shut down liberal protests, which he had driven himself, but about the way it had all been carried out,” Haberman and Swan write. “The immigration agents were supposed to be there to create a ‘barrier’ between protesters and immigration arrest teams, he would say publicly. In private, he laid the blame at the feet of Noem, who for a year had answered not just to the President, but also to Miller.”

 

One of the central themes of the book is that, unlike in the first term, Trump has a better understanding of where his own powers have no or only weak limitations, and he is exploiting that knowledge to do more of what he wants. Unencumbered by the sort of internal guardrails that sometimes fenced him in, Trump is taking bigger swings, acting even more on gut and instinct. The same appears to be true, only more so, with Miller.

 

But if Trump and Miller were different men—less monomaniacal, more methodical, more introspective about what stymied them during the first term—this blow-by-blow account of the first 18 months or so of Trump 2.0 might be a happier story from their perspective. As it stands, the president’s approval rating is hovering just under a dismal 40 percent. His efforts to dramatically force his will through executive actions are frequently thwarted by the federal judiciary, including the Supreme Court. His party risks losing its majorities in this fall’s midterm elections thanks in large part to his attention to pet obsessions like tariffs and a war with Iran at the expense of the pocketbook concerns of inflation he ran on.

 

The Trump-Miller approach of taking a wrecking ball to our civic infrastructure rather than trying to co-opt or outsmart the opposition may have successfully destroyed much of what has so infuriated the MAGA populists about Washington. But there’s been practically no permanent reconstruction atop the rubble, no lasting new edifices on which Trump will be able to credibly slap his name, no lasting legacy of what Trump’s governance has wrought.

 

If this is how the Trump era ends, the things that the president so loves about his most intense aide—what Haberman and Swan describe as Stephen Miller’s “bulldog mentality, his instinct to turn the dial up on controversy, and his way of framing issues and acting on them with blunt, Godfather-inflected language”—will have been a big part of why the Trump project failed to deliver on its promise for a new golden era.