On Friday, November 6, Donald Trump announced on Truth Social that Stephen Miller, described as “one of my most loyal advisers,” would replace Susie Wiles as chief of staff starting Monday. Wiles “will join Trump’s political team.”
- This reshuffle comes three days after the Republicans’ defeat in the midterm elections.
- Rather than bending his policy line, he entrusts his cabinet to his most radical ideologue at a moment of increasingly visible chaos, to whom he owes boundless loyalty.
Nominated deputy chief of staff for policy and Homeland Security adviser in January 2025, Miller will thus assume control of the presidential agenda, the executive apparatus, and domestic security.
- He takes office as three major deadlines converge: an accelerated diplomatic push on Ukraine ahead of the U.S.-hosted G20, a difficult realignment of the Republican Party after its rout, and the arrival in January of a Democratic majority that promises to open investigations into the administration and the Trump orbit.
The departure of Susie Wiles could unsettle the White House’s balance.
- As the first woman to hold this post, Wiles was the stand-in authority around the president. In January 2025, she pledged to “keep troublemakers away from the West Wing.”
- Coming from Florida’s political scene, where she led campaigns for Rick Scott and then Ron DeSantis, she embodied more the professionalism of the apparatus than a doctrine.
- While part of the MAGA movement demanded her removal, on October 18 Trump insisted there was “zero chance” he would replace her.
- In his first post-defeat interview, Steve Bannon, notably less present at the White House under Wiles, had called for her ouster.
Unlike Wiles, Miller is an ideologue.
- Born in Santa Monica in 1985 to an Ashkenazi Jewish family, he was involved in high school in opposing Mexican-origin student associations. Discovered by commentator David Horowitz, who remained his mentor, he co-organized in March 2007 a debate on immigration with Richard Spencer, who would become a leader in the American white supremacist movement. In 2009, he became press secretary to Senator Jeff Sessions, eventually leading communications, and with him co-authoring in 2015 an “Immigration Manual for the New Republican Majority.”
- His political views appear unfiltered in more than 900 emails sent to Breitbart editors between March 2015 and June 2016, later handed to the Southern Poverty Law Center by a former Breitbart staffer. In these messages he recommended treating the novel The Camp of the Saints by Jean Raspail. He also proposed reviving content from American Renaissance, a white supremacist site, and expressed admiration for the 1924 immigration law, which established quotas by nationality. According to the SPLC, he echoed the “great replacement” theory.
He was able to convert his views into public policy during the first term, taking a more central role in domestic policy upon Trump’s return to the White House.
- As the president’s senior adviser throughout the first term, Miller drafted the Muslim-majority travel ban signed on January 27, 2017. He also defended the “zero tolerance” policy, family separations at the border in spring 2018, and the termination of the DACA program which protected young people who had arrived as children. This decision was ultimately blocked by the Supreme Court in June 2020.
- Returning to the White House in January 2025 as deputy chief of staff for policy and Homeland Security adviser, he effectively runs immigration policy. The American press has described him as the real leader, surpassing the Homeland Security Secretary, Kristi Noem, who left the administration in March 2026.
- He is also portrayed as the architect behind deploying the National Guard to Democratic-leaning cities and intensifying ICE operations, which left at least fourteen people shot between September 2025 and February 2026, with several killed, including two American citizens who died in Minneapolis in January 2026.
Like several other figures in Donald Trump’s second White House, Stephen Miller played a key role in contesting the 2020 defeat.
- On December 14, 2020, the day of the Electoral College vote, he said on Fox & Friends: “As we speak, an alternate slate of electors in the contested states will vote, and we will forward these results to Congress.”
- He named Georgia, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania—three states carried by Biden—and claimed that Trump could still be certified the winner.
- He was the principal author of Trump’s January 6 speeches, including the one delivered that day in front of the White House.
- Miller testified on April 14, 2022 before the House select committee, questioned about his involvement in drafting that text and whether the president was trying to incite the crowd by uttering the phrase “Fight like hell.” He testified again before a federal grand jury in April 2023, but was never charged.
Miller, radicalized early on immigration, advocates an interpretation of Western history based on an extreme premise: decolonization was a mistake and the West should therefore embark on a process of recolonization.
- In a text published on January 5, while the U.S. military operation in Venezuela was underway, he describes the post-1945 era as a “reverse colonization.”
- According to him, the West dismantled its empires, financed its former colonies, and opened its borders, granting newcomers “preferential legal and financial treatment relative to native citizens.” For him, “the neoliberal experiment has, in essence, been a long form of self-punishment for the places and peoples who built the modern world.”
- The National Security Strategy reiterates this analysis, describing Europe as threatened by “civilizational erasure.” Trump commented: “If this trend continues, many of these countries will become unlivable.”
It is highly likely that Miller’s arrival as chief of staff will be followed by a hardening of the White House’s trajectory and the opening of several new fronts, both domestically and geopolitically.