Stephen Miller Is Taking His Fascist Horrorshow International
Goodbye border protection, hello border expansion?
Long the most openly fascistic member of Donald Trump’s inner circle, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller is a man whose unvarnished disdain for people of color has led him to champion the closing America’s borders, the separation of migrant families, the end of birthright citizenship, and mass-deportation as state policy.
But in recent days we’ve seen a peculiar evolution. Miller’s policy portfolio has jumped America’s borders, straying from homeland security to international affairs. He’s attending high-level foreign policy dinners with heads of state, and even popped up in a literal war room. And he’s begun touting policies that would take the United States from sealing its borders to expanding them — to annex the territory and peoples of Greenland. This power-hungry man with unbridled contempt for Latin Americans has even been floated as a potential viceroy for Venezuela.
In the infamous Vanity Fair profile of Susie Wiles, Trump’s chief of staff, she described Miller as one of her off-leash “junkyard dogs.” Apparently, he has been given a whole new yard to shit in.
The Stephen Miller we’re familiar with does his damage close at hand. As Trump’s homeland security advisor, Miller is the architect of the administration’s cruelty-is-the-point deportation regime, which has deployed masked federal agents to target anyone with questionable immigration status. This has meant not only arresting hardened criminals — the “worst of the worst” routinely touted by Trump — but construction workers, kitchen staff, church leaders, and business owners.
The administration has targeted law-abiding migrants who show up for their court dates, as well as mixed-status families — seeking to speed-run immigrant parents out of the country, with their U.S. citizen children in tow. Large numbers of Americans have been lawlessly detained. Masked federal agents routinely batter Americans who challenge their brutality. On Wednesday, a young mother, poet, and legal observer was shot in the head and killed by an unaccountable ICE officer.
“All of the militarization, not only of ICE, but of our National Guard and our cities is being driven by Stephen Miller,” Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.) told The Contrarian’s Jen Rubin in an October interview, insisting Miller is “out of control.”
Miller is extremist. On social media, he has had several recent mask-off moments (though in truth, we’re not sure the mask was ever on in Miller’s case). This has included repeatedly endorsing calls for “remigration” — a buzzword from the European far-right that entails the mass expulsion of non-whites from the West.
Miller’s desired endgame is an America resembling an exclusive club, with far fewer members. On New Years Eve, he reposted a Homeland Security meme on X calling for “100 Million Deportations” — which would involve removing nearly a third of the U.S. population.
In Miller’s view, America’s greatness is tied to its whiteness. He’s whinged that the United States squandered the society that pioneered the automobile, first flight, and the space race by choosing “to open our borders to the entire third world for sixty years.” (Nevermind that a more-multiracial America has since pioneered the Internet, the iPhone, and Artificial Intelligence.) Miller couches this bigotry in language of the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, alleging, against fact, that American society was “remade to redistribute wealth, resources, property and opportunity from Americans to non-Americans” for the political benefit of the Democratic Party.
Americans who have heard of Miller hold him in contempt. His favorability rating, per a recent YouGov poll, is 17 percent. And his signature policies are making Trump extremely unpopular. Trump’s approval rating on immigration sank to a low of 38 percent in a December AP poll. Which may explain why Miller is being set loose in a different policy arena.
This change has been as sudden as it has been jarring. First, Miller showed up at a Dec. 28 Mar a Lago dinner with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. Miller is not a diplomat. He doesn’t have any special touch on Eastern Europe — aside from being descended from dirt poor emigres from what today is Belarus. Yet he represented the American side along with Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
A day later, Miller was included in Trump’s bilateral meeting with Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu at Mar a Lago, where he once again dressed the part of a diplomat.
The substantive nature of the shift was underscored a few days later, on Jan. 3, when Miller accompanied top security officials in the ad-hoc situation room at Mar a Lago, where Trump monitored the military’s sequestration of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, dubbed “Operation Absolute Resolve.”
In the wake of Maduro’s capture, Trump insisted that the United States will “run” Venezuela. There is little clarity on what this means in practice. But Miller has even been lofted by the Washington Post as being likely to enjoy an “elevated role in overseeing post-Maduro operations in Venezuela.”
The White House emphasized continuity in Miller’s national security role, providing a quote from press secretary Karoline Leavitt about the team overseeing Venezuela: “The members of President Trump’s national security team who have always executed Venezuela policy,” she said, “including Vice President Vance, Secretary Rubio, Secretary Hegseth, General Caine, Director Ratcliffe, and Deputy Chief of Staff Miller, will continue to execute Venezuela policy.”
But the hard launch of Miller as a foreign policy hand has included demands to expand U.S. territory in ways that seem incongruent with Miller’s longtime obsession with sealed borders. In league with his wife, Katie Miller — a former Trump official who is remaking herself as a conservative influencer — Stephen Miller is now demanding the annexation of Greenland.
On January 3, Katie Miller posted an AI-generated map of Greenland, overlaid with the stars and stripes, adding the message: “SOON.” Asked about this provocative message by CNN’s Jake Tapper, Stephen Miller insisted: “Greenland should be part of the United States…. That is the formal position of the U.S. government.”
In demanding annexation of a fellow NATO power’s territory — a move that would likely collapse the defense alliance — Miller also displayed utter ignorance of the Danish territory. “By what right does Denmark assert control over Greenland?” he asked of a land that saw its first Norse settlers in the 900s, centuries before Columbus arrived in the Americas. “What is the basis of their territorial claim?” Miller demanded…of a territory that has been a continuous Danish possession since the 1720s.
Tapper’s interview was unusually revealing. As the topic switched back to the U.S. meddling in Venezuela, Miller’s attraction to foreign policy — at least the way Trump is conducting it — became clearer. Trump’s deputy described the administration as living in the “real world” that Miller insisted “is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world,” he insisted, “that have existed since the beginning of time.”
Historian Heather Cox Richardson sees Miller as the tip of the spear of the Trump administration’s campaign to topple the rules-based international order. “That is fitting for somebody like Miller, who is all about power,” she said in a recent video explainer, describing Miller as “quite a disturbed individual” who is entranced with the notion that, “with the might of the United States, the people in charge can do anything they want.”
Miller appears to view foreign policy as a new arena where he can flout what he’s called “international niceties” and exercise his need for spiteful control, including by telling a Hispanic petrostate what to do — at the barrel of a gunboat.
Had Miller lived during Hitler's regime in the 1930s and 1940s, he would have been the top executioner of Jews for the Nazis. He is the most despicable man alive.
Miller and Trump both view international security and domestic security as one thing, and they view the use of military force to achieve them as theirs to wield. Fortunately, the courts have pushed back on the use of the National Guard for domestic security, but with the expansion of ICE, you can be sure that Miller will find a way around those decisions.