Desperate to change the narrative just days after a catastrophic election for his party, President Donald Trump jettisoned Susie Wiles as his White House chief of staff and replaced her with Stephen Miller.
“Stephen Miller will be the new Chief of Staff,” Trump told reporters outside of the White House on Friday afternoon. “I wanted to make a change. I think Susie has done a very good job, but... We gotta make moves. Sometimes in life, you have to make moves.”
“Sometimes in life, you have to make moves.”
So true!
The move comes just weeks after Trump insisted reporting that he was making calls about whether to replace Wiles was fake news.
“TOTAL FAKE NEWS Politico doesn’t care about facts, integrity, or honest journalism — it’s why I kicked them out of the White House!” the president said in a statement after Politico reported in mid-October that he was considering replacing Wiles. “Susie Wiles is my loyal and longest serving Chief of Staff — there is a reason for that. She has been with me since the beginning, is my trusted advisor, and has my COMPLETE confidence. President DONALD J. TRUMP.”
Ahem.
While Wiles emerging as the sacrificial lamb to atone for the massive midterm losses is a big story, Trump’s decision to replace her with Miller, who had been serving as deputy chief of staff at the White House is, actually, the real news here.
Why? Because Miller, the architect and chief cheerleader of the Trump administration’s hard-line immigration policies, was picked by the president to send a very clear message: He is not backing down after suffering a major rebuke from voters. If he is going down, he is going to go down swinging.
Miller has ascended in Trumpworld thanks to his unapologetic hard edges. The president is drawn to fighters like Miller, who never, ever back down — even when they are clearly in the wrong.
This, from a seminal New York Times profile of Miller back in 2017, does a very good job of painting a picture of the man who will now run the White House:
Mr. Miller has rocketed to the upper reaches of White House influence along a distinctly Trumpian arc — powered by a hyper-fluency in the politics of grievance, a gift for nationalist button-pushing after years on the Republican fringe and a long history of being underestimated by liberal forces who dismissed him as a sideshow since his youth.
Trump’s decision to elevate Miller seems to mark a total strategic reversal by the president.
"My message is congratulations to the Democrats, and I look forward to working with you for the good of our country,”𝕏 Trump told CBS News’ Weijia Jang on Tuesday night.
Uh….
Working together with Democrats on bipartisan solutions is not really Miller’s thing. Like, at all. He is a partisan warrior who is loathed by Democrats (and plenty of elected Republicans too!).
In picking Miller, Trump is sending a very clear signal: He will he not be moving toward the ideological center — choosing instead to re-dig in on the confrontational and boundary-pushing approach that has defined the first two years of his second term.
If I might quote “Dodgeball” here:
It seems, candidly, political malpractice to lean further into a strategy that was flatly rejected by the American public just days ago. And yet, that appears to be exactly what Trump is going to do.
