We were entering a highly combustible period before Stephen Miller was named White House chief of staff.
The public branded President Donald Trump a loser decisively last Tuesday, and he’s not a man who loses well. Neither does it appear Democrats plan to win well.
Losing well requires humility, and Trump has none. After appearing uncharacteristically reflective on 60 Minutes with Ross Douthat Sunday evening, he reverted to form Monday, claiming rigged voting machines had caused his midterm wipeout.
Democrats, meanwhile, have no grace, and winning well requires it. Since the summer of 2020, they’ve been possessed by an ideology whose only principle is that past injustice demands present injustice, so long as it’s aimed at the right people. It is Manichean by design and vicious by habit.
WOW! President Trump just said the 2026 midterms may have been RIGGED
"Some early voting 'dumps' were so large that it was impossible to win, no matter how many people went to vote. It’s all about the machines, which are far more important than the voter!"
Pretty much the… pic.twitter.com/PEfWb1e3Sx
— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) November 9, 2026
Whoever wins the coming clash, the nation will lose it.
Miller’s appointment hastens that clash and makes it uglier. Miller has been the West Wing’s voice of immoderation, pushing for escalation and the aggressive use of force at every turn.
Even by this administration’s standards, Miller stands out. His predecessor, Susie Wiles, spent much of Trump’s second term trying to temper him, sparring with him over how wide to cast the deportation net. In May 2025, Miller walked into ICE headquarters and, as the Washington Examiner reported, eviscerated the agency’s senior officials for low arrest numbers, demanding 3,000 arrests a day — several times what they’d been managing — and asking why officers weren’t at Home Depot or 7-Eleven.
Then in January, after federal agents shot and killed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, Miller anchored the administration’s response in a lie: that Pretti was a “domestic terrorist” and “would-be assassin” who had set out to “massacre” federal agents, a line Kristi Noem reportedly delivered at his direction. Bystander videos quickly contradicted it.
As the city seethed, he and Trump entertained invoking the Insurrection Act to put troops on American streets — an idea Vice President JD Vance reportedly pushed hard.
The pattern is clear: When a crisis threatens the president, Miller never retreats. He widens the fight.
This is precisely what endears him to nationalist hard-liners, for whom compromise is surrender and the midterm rebuke is just another reason to dig in. This faction, led by New Right figures like Miller and Steve Bannon, seems indifferent to the political cost of using the state as a weapon. Coalition-building, persuasion, compromise: For them, it’s all a relic of a liberal democratic past, one they believe the country has outgrown and that the Left long ago abandoned.
As they like to put it, they “know what time it is” — the time to use state power to crush the opposition. To care what the median voter thinks, let alone fret about the Constitution, is to be a squish, and possibly a traitor.
The Left, meanwhile, salivates at the prospect of Trump’s White House behaving recklessly enough to bring the country to the brink. Their project runs on the specter of vast and powerful right-wing villainy. They could only sell their radical agenda to ordinary Americans as the last line of defense against something worse. Miller and company seem hellbent on supplying that something worse, or at least the appearance of it, handing the Left exactly the contrast it craves.
Fortunately, the nation isn’t buying either side’s radicalism. On the white-hot topic of immigration, an Economist/YouGov poll from August found that only 24% of Americans want every illegal immigrant deported, and just 6% want them all to stay. Most land somewhere in between: 41% say only those who have committed serious crimes should be deported, and 29% say most should go, with exceptions for long-settled residents and those married to Americans.
The progressives and the nationalist hard-liners will make the most noise, but the nation still lives in the sensible middle, weighing the need for order against legitimate concerns about cruelty, especially when children are involved.
That’s exactly why both extremes want chaos in the streets: It’s the only thing that can prove them right.
For the Left, the chaos of Minneapolis in January, which they seized upon and exacerbated, served as proof that Trump and Republicans really were authoritarians. The Department of Homeland Security’s militarized and masked agents roaming the city streets made the Left’s own chaos tactics appear like legitimate resistance in the eyes of the general public. And each confrontation moves them closer to remaking America as an oppressor-and-oppressed morality play.
For the nationalist hard-liners, disorder justifies ever more force and makes crushing opponents with the full power of the state look like governing. It also opens the door to running “law and order” political campaigns, a la Nixon ‘68, that play to their dispositions and strengths, and ultimately to power they never intend to give back.
Beneath these cynical calculations runs a darker undercurrent, and it’s what frightens me most: Both sides have come to see politics not as a contest between legitimate opponents, but as a war between good and evil. No one has expressed that conviction more starkly than Miller himself.
Speaking at Charlie Kirk’s memorial in September 2025, Miller addressed the Left directly. “You have nothing. You are nothing. You are wickedness. You are jealousy. You are envy. You are hatred,” he said.
Of his own side, Miller said, “We will prevail over the forces of wickedness and evil. … We have beauty. We have light. We have goodness. We have determination. We have vision. We have strength. We built the world that we inhabit now, generation by generation.”
There is, of course, an element of make-believe in all of this, of little boys playing knights with cardboard swords and shields. An unfortunate byproduct of widespread prosperity is a restless, bored citizenry in search of a fight to bring life meaning. Miller’s holy war rhetoric reflects a sad combination of spiritual poverty and grandiose self-regard, the kind that can make a man believe he’s saving Western civilization from his office in the West Wing. It’s the same affliction that sent keffiyeh-draped Columbia students storming Hamilton Hall in solidarity with third-world terrorists. Their lives are too easy, and they desperately want to matter.
But make-believe becomes dangerous when it holds real power. An ominous preview of the Miller-led White House came shortly after his promotion was announced, when a slew of nationalist hard-liners, including Miller himself, War Secretary Pete Hegseth, Jack Posobiec, and Benny Johnson, posted the same three words: “Patriots in control.”
It’s a slogan from QAnon, the online movement that cast Trump as a messianic warrior battling a demonic deep state of globalist pedophiles. It began on 4chan in October 2017 and receded after the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol, but it has slowly crept back into the lexicon of the online Right over the past year.
THE WAR DIDN’T SINK REPUBLICANS. THE ECONOMY DID
QAnon was the original cardboard-swords LARP of the MAGA movement. Its prophesied “storm” of mass arrests never came. Yet it was built on the same apocalyptic struggle between light and darkness Miller voiced at Kirk’s memorial, the same vision that now appears to animate the most powerful office in the world.
With Miller in control, dark times lie ahead.
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[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
