What better day to appoint the nation’s best-known white supremacist to head your government?

— Garrett M. Graff, 9 November 2026

I’ve spent this last year working on this new book about the story of progress and retrenchment in American history, about how progress is never linear nor guaranteed. My thesis is that the great beauty of the American experiment, despite the fact that we’ve never achieved our Founding creed, is that each generation takes up the challenge and works the hard work of making our country better, of making our imperfect nation a more perfect union.

We timed the book to come out right after the midterms because we hoped that it would inspire Americans to pick up the mantle of progress and recommit themselves to the hard work of making America better.

What better day to appoint the nation’s best-known white supremacist to head your government?

There’s been a fair bit of catastrophizing about Stephen Miller’s ascendence as chief of staff. Miles Taylor, the one-time “Anonymous” of Trump’s first term, wrote, “I spent two years working with Stephen Miller. His appointment as White House chief of staff is among the most dangerous personnel decisions in the history of our republic. I say that without reservation.”

Not to underplay Taylor’s reaction, but I’m not sure it represents the true danger it may first appear; Miller is an effective bureaucratic monster, yes, but he’s widely disliked, generally known for his reputation as a screamer, and narrowly focused on the most destructive and widely hated aspects of Donald Trump’s presidency. He is unlikely to make the White House function better, smoother, or more collegial, and, in fact, quite the opposite — it’s almost surely going to lead to more bitter infighting and leaking. POLITICO called him a “wartime consigliere,” which maybe he is, but he’s a tactician, not a strategist — less Von Clausewitz and more cage-fighting pit-bull. In a moment when the Trump administration should be uniting against the new Democratic congress and forceful new governors at the state level, Miller will almost certainly lead to more internal division. (It appears that he’s already begun cleaning out Wiles’ allies — deputy White House chief of staff Richard Walters also resigned Friday.)

What is clear is that Stephen Miller is one of the most aggressively and openly racist officials ever to hold high office in the US government. He has been the key architect of Trump’s two signature crusades: Its immigration crackdown, with all of its constitutional and legal violations, and the Central American boat strikes that seem to be obvious violations of international law and are surely crimes against humanity. He has turned his own personal obsession with the Somali population in Minnesota into a cruel national vendetta.

Miller’s biographer, Jean Carolyn Guerrero, told MS NOW’s Jacob Soboroff yesterday, simply, “He’s a sadist.”

To understand where Stephen Miller sits in the constellation of the Trump administration, it’s worth unpacking Donald Trump’s MAGA movement a bit — and what all of that might say about the next two years to come.

A half-century ago, Ronald Reagan famously described what then represented the American conservative movement as a “three-legged stool” supported by distinct factions that together united under the “GOP” umbrella. In Reagan’s era, the three were (1) Fiscal Conservatives and Free-Marketers (think: Lower taxes, deregulation); (2) Defense Hawks (strong military, anti-Communist); (3) Social and Religious Conservatives (Evangelical Christians, opposition to abortion). In broad terms, this model powered the Republican Party from roughly Richard Nixon through George W. Bush.

Today, that alliance bears virtually no relationship to the MAGA movement — but the basic model still holds up: Donald Trump’s MAGA has his own three-legged stool, represented in what are now clearly the three most powerful people in the Trump administration: Trump, Miller, and Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget.

Second-term Trumpism is a three-legged stool of (1) White supremacists; (2) the Trump crime family; and (3) the architects of Project 2025. Each leg or pillar of this movement has a strong outside constituency and a specific set of outside backers who are worth understanding as well. Each pillar to a certain extent operates independently of the others and, to a certain extent, doesn’t care about what the other pillars of the alliance are doing as long as they can continue to work unimpeded.

Kevin Elliott outlined a version of this theory online about a year ago, and it’s only become more stark in the time since.

Here’s how to understand what you might call a “Grand Unified Theory of Trumpism”:

Miller represents a specific pillar of the MAGA movement, one that has been central to Trumpism ever since his first day on that golden escalator in 2015 — it is, in many ways, the actual policy goal captured in the “Make America Great Again” motto itself, the fear that the country is being overrun by minorities and immigrants, that the supremacy and centrality of Christian white men in American is under sustained attack and in danger of being lost. As we’ve seen time and again, in the political backlash to Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, the George Floyd protests of 2020, and what MAGA broadly slurs as “DEI,” MAGA’s inherent promise is to return the country to a 1950s-esque moment when white men were the undisputed heads of household and workplaces and everyone went to church on Sundays.

Miller has been the driving force in both Trump terms behind the immigration crackdowns, enabling Border Patrol chief Greg Bovino’s illegal raids and authoritarian invasions of major American cities. He’s the force behind the “3000 arrests a day” quotas that have transformed ICE and the Border Patrol strategies from targeted enforcement to basically stopping, arresting, and assaulting any brown person they find on America’s streets.

It’s almost impossible here to grasp all the different ways that Miller has upended US policy — and altered the direction of America’s future here. Last year, as I wrote earlier, the US had net negative migration. The traditional policies of refugee asylum have been turned on their head and in 2027 the US is set to spend a half-billion dollars resettling 17,500 white South African “refugees.” In the 2026 fiscal year, all but three of the 3,000 “refugees” admitted into the US were South African. That’s not a typo. Just three.

As Reuters reports, “In fiscal year 2024, by contrast, the Biden administration ​brought in ⁠more than 100,000 refugees from dozens of countries.”

MAGA’s white supremacy has of course been on naked display since the Charlottesville rally in 2017, and it continues to poison America’s streets. Just yesterday, the most prominent racist not working inside the White House, Jake Lang, interrupted a Diwali celebration in Seattle.

Over at the Pentagon, Pete Hegseth is the prime architect of an unprecedented attempt to dramatically alter the composition and posture of the upper ranks of the military. He has quickly and unapologetically pushed out top women and people of color from top jobs in the military, and has repeatedly and extensively blocked their promotions. The Council on Foreign Relations — not exactly known as a bastion of radical language — said last fall that Hegseth “is purging female and minority officers from military positions and removing them from promotion lists. U.S. national security will pay the price.”

As CFR’s Linda Robinson wrote, “Women’s photos, historical exhibits, and scholarly literature have been removed from military installations, service schools, and academies. Advisory committees and affinity groups that enhance their performance have been dissolved. Hegseth has denounced and resisted implementing the Women, Peace, and Security Act of 2017, a law signed by President Donald Trump designed to promote the participation of women in the military and peacemaking. Hegseth has ordered testing of male service members for testosterone levels to promote what he called a “high-T military.” In a further exclusionary move, the department has separated transgender personnel from military service, reversing a 2021 decision to allow them to serve openly. Despite a federal court ruling that the action likely violated service members’ constitutional rights, the Supreme Court has allowed the ban to continue while litigation is pending. Together, these steps are altering the character of the armed services in both composition and culture—without the consent of Congress or evidence that would justify such a shift.”

(In a delicious moment of poetic justice: One of the women admirals Hegseth fired — who still doesn’t know why she was fired! — just ran and won election to congress for Nancy Mace’s old seat in South Carolina and starts congressional orientation today as well.)

At the same time, Hegseth has been centering religion and Christian nationalism in wildly inappropriate ways.

The Outside Support: Much of this pillar is consistent with the Silicon Valley movement of “techno-fascism” and its push to undo America’s liberal democracy and replace it with an authoritarian state. If you haven’t had the chance yet to read Gil Durán’s THE NERD REICH, it’s an eye-opening window to the ideology that Peter Thiel has embraced and how it’s shaped his creation and would-be Trump heir apparent JD Vance.

I explored this pillar in great depth just before the election, examining both the tidal wave of corruption and how Trump’s is literally bulldozing national landmarks like the East Wing of the White House to build himself monuments.

I’ve argued since the first weeks of this Trump term that understanding Trump’s presidency requires rethinking how the government operates: That our normal constitutional view of the president being both the head of government and head of state breaks down due to Trump’s complete disinterest in actually running government. Instead, we now have a government that’s more like the United Kingdom, with a king and a prime minister. Trump wants to be the king, do the glitzy things and — most of all — crime, grift, and corrupt anything he can to make a buck.

How deep does the Trump interest in grifting go? One online theory holds that Trump is trying to force the government away from using “artificial intelligence” toward “super intelligence” because the island nation of Anguilla owns the .ai domain name and is making a big buck on selling domains to AI companies, but Melania Trump’s native country of Slovenia owns .si and owners of those domains are now profiting off Trump’s new name.

There’s very little evidence that Trump is meaningfully engaged in the policy of his administration, and — in fact — quite the opposite: The White House’s daily activities increasingly look like they’re designed to keep a doddering dementia patient entertained. Trump’s first response after the historic party loss and repudiation last week was … to take reporters on a tour of his ballroom.

To that end, it seems clear that Trump currently cares more about his Trump Arch and remaking the East Potomac golf course than anything on Stephen Miller’s agenda.

The Outside Support: The world’s oligarchy, from domestic enablers like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos to cryptocurrency backers, foreign heads of state and governments — Qatar! — and oligarchs who understand that the way to Donald Trump is through his pocketbook.

Russell Vought is the bogeyman in the nightmares of civil servants the government over. As much as Stephen Miller grabs the headlines, it seems clear that Vought is set to leave as big — and perhaps even a bigger — mark on America’s future, as he works quietly behind the scenes to dismantle the core precepts and functions of the US government and career civil service. In some ways, Vought represents the “old guard” of the Reagan era small-government conservatives and the old sobriquet of Grover Norquist, who quipped, “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” But his vision — and certainly his execution — is the most radical we’ve seen inside American government since the New Deal.

It’s not the stuff that draws headlines — it’s easy to forget on a daily basis that Vought is plugging away at OMB, undermining scientists, destroying centuries of expertise, destroying talent pipelines, deregulating industry, and DOGE-ing entire agencies (almost certainly illegally) — but Vought’s efforts are reshaping America’s business climate, the future government, and our national economy in profound and damaging ways. And he’s not alone: Project 2025, which the national media so lap-doggedly assured voters was just a fever dream, has been broadly implemented across many sections of government. Linda McMahon has basically stopped the Education Department from doing anything. Much of the country’s support for basic scientific and medical research, and the basic foundational research of higher education, has been dismantled. Just read Eli Saslow’s amazing profile yesterday of a US scientist newly forced overseas to continue her research and you can get an inkling of how hard it will be to undo the damage wrought by Vought.

The Outside Support: This push is the most classically Republican efforts, and it’s supported and appreciated by the traditional business communities that vote and donate to Republicans, from the energy industry to Wall Street.

These three pillars aren’t independent or mutally exclusive among Trump allies and appointees. There are obvious areas — like RFK Jr.’s Health and Human Services — where these pillars overlap in the Venn diagram of policy goals. And there are some MAGA figures who transcend one pillar — Steve Bannon, of course, is in it for the racism, the grifting, and the drowning of the US government. And similarly some of the outside support transcends a single pillar — Silicon Valley is behind Trump for the techno-fascism, the oligarchy, and the deregulation. Elon Musk, in particular, is clearly on board for the white supremacy, the corruption, and the destruction of the US government.

And yet all three of these pillars, and the communities and constituencies they represent, were broadly rejected by voters Tuesday. As Adam Serwer writes in The Atlantic, America seemed specifically to reject the white supremacist future of Trumpism.

Trump’s decision to promote Stephen Miller indicates that the administration will continue ahead unabated as best it can. Reuters has an impressive and interesting article about how Miller and Vought are likely going to try to govern without congress in the months ahead, and Trump is already touting himself as “Mr. Veto.”

What that will look like, and how successful it might be, is a wide-open question — and there’s a lot that Democrats at the state and federal level can do to arrest and slow the damage and destruction in all three pillars. Miller’s impact might be limited; as Brandon Friedman says, being White House chief of staff is enormously powerful — but it’s a job with remarkable and awe-inspiring breadth. The job is consumed on a daily basis by all manner of activities just to keep the basics of government functioning, and it will pull Stephen Miller away from his favored activities of berating immigration officials.

One question some smart people like Brian Beutler are starting to talk about is how important Trump is to Trumpism going forward? Could MAGA excise Trump and proceed with pillars #1 and #3 with far less public revulsion and behind the scenes success? Maybe? As Beutler writes, “Trump is corrupt, incompetent, disgraced—these things have been true all along—but now he’s crippled, too. He’s crippled by a state of denial, and the total collapse of his popular appeal. Without a loyal base, he has no impunity, and without impunity, he can’t govern, because forging consensus is alien to him.”

GMG

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Source:

• Garrett M. Graff, Understanding the Grand Theory of Trumpism, Doomsday Scenario, 9 November 2026

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