Trump’s Rasputin – The Real Power Behind the Throne

 

Trump’s Rasputin – The Real Power Behind the Throne

Stephen Miller – Self-appointed constitutional expert with no legal training

“Stephen Miller works around the clock to implement President Trump’s America First policy agenda, and he is doing a phenomenal job… The president fully trusts Stephen and for good reason — he delivers.” 

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt

In what is an increasing trend in the Trump administration: appointments to high-level cabinet and sub-cabinet level jobs in fields of extreme complexity often requiring advanced degrees and specific experience… are individuals lacking both. Head of the Department of Defense: Pete Hegseth, who never advanced beyond the rank of major in the Minnesota National Guard but was a weekend Fox News host. Surgeon General Nominee: Dr. Casey Means, a conspiracy theorist and advocate of psychedelic drugs as a bona fide medical treatment, whose medical license is listed as “inactive.” Head of Health and Human Services: Robert Kennedy, Jr, an environmental lawyer with no medical or health-related degrees who is infamous for his questionable conspiracy theories about medical science. Etc. But the most powerful and most senior advisor to the President is a 39-year-old former speech writer and self-proclaimed legal expert (particularly on matters of constitutional law) with no legal training whatsoever. Stephen Miller.

As rumors of Miller’s taking the recently departed Mike Walz position as senior National Security Advisor to the President spread, Trump asked why Miller would accept such a demotion within his administration. Miller seems to enjoy embracing extreme rightwing positions, many times requiring that constitutional provisions be downgraded or ignored and often embracing positions that would seriously harm Trump’s constituency. But the underlying psyche of so many MAGA constituents seems to welcome such harm, as noted by Jos Joseph writing for the May 15th The Hill: “We have watched as they said no to educational, health care, environmental, wage and economic improvements while voting for politicians who seem hell-bent on keeping them in their current position, no matter how bad it may be… Despite all the doom and gloom, his core support has not eroded, according to poll numbers.

“The answer to this is pretty simple. Trump voters are okay with suffering, as long as other people hurt more. To them, it shows that the status quo is being preserved and the changes to America that they fear are being mitigated.” And when it comes to inflicting that kind of pain, no one has been more effective than Stephen Miller, Trump’s most senior advisor. Writing for the May15th NBC News, Jonathan Allen, Matt Dixon, Katherine Doyle and Sahil Kapur, describe the most powerful presidential advisor since Dick Cheney who, as VP, helped direct George W Bush’s presidency: “Outside of President Donald Trump, no White House official has accumulated more influence in this administration than Stephen Miller, the 39-year-old anti-immigration crusader whose brain and bare-knuckled tactics have been deployed to drive the agenda for the commander in chief.

“Not Vice President JD Vance. Not chief of staff Susie Wiles. Not anyone else…. It is Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff for policy, who loaded up scores of executive orders for Trump to sign in his first months back in office — on topics ranging from the declaration of a national emergency at the southern border to dismantling diversity programs in the federal government and withdrawing the U.S. from the World Health Organization…‘Stephen is the president’s id,’ said one former Trump adviser who knows Miller well. ‘He has been for a while. It’s just now he has the leverage and power to fully effectuate it.’…

“A staffer for then-Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., Miller was an early enlistee on Trump’s first presidential campaign in 2016 and took over speech-writing duties and an immigration portfolio in Trump’s first term.” As Trump’s unambiguous guru, Miller has embraced Trump extreme anti-immigrant and anti-citizen-by-birth demonizing vectors with the zeal of a hand-rubbing villain in literature’s most diabolical tales.

As the gleeful implementer of the policies of Project 2025, Miller is the force behind Trump’s rolling tsunami of executive orders, his embrace of Trump’s treating Attorney General Pam Bondi and the entire DOJ legal team as Trump’s personal law firm with a clear directive to overwhelm the entire judicial system with extreme positions in the hopes of rendering the judiciary helpless to deal with the pressure. And Miller has enough lawyers within Trump’s ambit to support that unrelenting attack on the system… and the individual judges who fail to tow the party line.

“One of the first executive orders he prepared for Trump, signed on Inauguration Day, would end the 14th Amendment’s guarantee that people born in the United States are automatically citizens. [In early May], he said that the White House is considering suspending the right of habeas corpus — a constitutional protection against unlawful detention — as the administration seeks to continue its deportation program. Like the birthright citizenship order and many other Trump actions, parts of the deportation effort have been impeded on constitutional grounds by federal judges.

“Miller’s voice is the one arguing vociferously — and without evidence — that ‘Marxist judges’ are executing a ‘judicial coup’ by identifying limits on the president’s authority. ‘President Trump built much of his current political success by standing with the American people on immigration, and doing what others have been unwilling or unable to do: close the border,’ said one top Trump adviser. ‘There has been no bigger advocate of that in the history of the country than Stephen Miller. That, at its core, is why the president trusts him so much, and relies on him to a degree that is matched by very few.’ …That trust is a big reason Miller’s reach extends far beyond the immigration policies for which he became famous during Trump’s first term, which included separating migrant families as a deterrent to illegal immigration.” NBC News

As Trump begins to deploy the US military is a recently manufactured 170-mile Army base along our southern border – to trap migrants into an unwitting criminal trespass as they enter this vast and often unmarked new installation, facilitating immediate deportation without due process – you can see Miller’s handwriting all over this initiative. Miller has worked tirelessly to push Congress and the judiciary aside so that Trump can rise as America’s autocratic leader. 

I’m Peter Dekom, and I suspect very few of us would really like to live in Stephen Miller’s vision of America, which he has been so effective in creating.