Make New York Post a Preferred Source President Donald Trump, with White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, speaks during an event to sign executive orders related to birthright citizenship and the polysilicon industry, in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., August 6, 2026. REUTERS There’s bad press, and then there’s the coverage of Stephen Miller’s promotion.
In making Miller his new chief of staff, President Trump unleashed an avalanche of pent-up resentment toward his new top aide.
The cruelest cut came from Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, the Democrats’ House leader who wants to be the next speaker.
He said his team would not work with Miller, whom he labeled a “stone cold racist.”
The outrageous slander said more about the embattled Jeffries than it does Miller.
Still, there is no arguing with the reasonable view that the new White House chief’s style is not one that endears.
Miller is whip smart and has a voluminous knowledge of government, laws and court precedents on immigration, all of which he routinely unloads on questioners in a machine-gun cadence.
His demeanor often conveys contempt and his habit of talking down to people has made him a favorite whipping boy for Dems and their media handmaidens.
Part of that reaction stems from the fact that Miller is the ultimate Trump loyalist and has been with the president since the 2016 campaign.
As far back as his college days at Duke, Miller had a laser-like focus on immigration, which was long before Trump entered politics.
As such, Miller’s promotion from policy deputy to former chief of staff Susie Wiles to her replacement seems almost inevitable.
To judge from the river of bile flowing his way, detractors assume Miller will usurp all of Trump’s responsibility to set the agenda, and will be the only White House contact for the Dem congressional majority.
As The New York Times put it in a bizarre front-page headline, “Miller pursues agenda voters have rejected.”
Memo to the Gray Lady: Trump will remain president for the next two years, and the Dem Congress will not control the government.
Some of the anti-Miller hyperbole reflects how the president’s harshest critics tend to see the aide as a reflection of what they regard as Trump’s inner darkness.
Indeed, Trump himself has admitted agent mistakes in a few cases that involved shootings and promises to dial back aggressive actions.
Yet it is only fair to see Miller in other crucial ways because the personal dislike for him overshadows three key points.
First, he has never been a policy maker, and while he has served as an adviser of Trump’s immigration stances, he doesn’t make the policy he is called upon to explain and defend.
Second, it is critical to remember that Trump’s consistent hard-line on immigration is a major reason why he was first elected in 2016, and again in 2024.
In both cases voters, among other things, wanted a sharp change from years of lax border enforcement.
The third point is that the immigration disaster Trump inherited in his second term was not seen as crucial by Dems or the lefty media, and still isn’t.
They supported Joe Biden’s open-border policy, which was a total disaster.
Biden’s decision to open the gates to 12 million or more illegals, without any assessment of who they were and how they would support themselves created an unprecedented problem that remains unsolved.
The 12 million or more entries dwarfs all historical comparisons.
A prior era of mass migration, the 30-year period from 1890 to 1920, saw about 18 million immigrants come to America.
To think that anywhere near those numbers could be seamlessly absorbed in a four-year term a century later is insane.
In fact, it’s not clear even Biden believed the influx could be managed.
Although he appeared to be concerned about the policy he supposedly had approved, his response was to make his incompetent vice president, Kamala Harris, the border czar.
The president said nothing as she dodged the assignment after a few fumbles.
Biden’s director of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, consistently claimed to Congress that the border was safe and secure, even as drugs and migrants flowed in like a river.
For his lies and inaction, Mayorkas was impeached by a divided House of Representatives on charges that accused him of “willful and systemic refusal to comply with the law,” but the move was rejected by the Senate.
Meanwhile, no Dem official in any blue state complained about the endless surge of unemployed and often unemployable men showing up in their cities.
Take New York’s then mayor, Eric Adams, who threw open Gotham’s doors to all comers.
His only complaint was to call Texas Republicans racists because they were sending buses full of migrants to New York and other blue cities.
The Republicans had a clear purpose — to share the pain and cost so those mayors would lobby Biden to close the border.
Adams’ only demand even as Midtown Manhattan was flooded was that Albany and Washington help fund his extravagant Welcome Wagon, which included free housing, food, transportation, education and medical care.
According to estimates, the city and state spent a combined $15 billion over a four-year period on the illegal newcomers — and many expenses are ongoing.
In his 2024 campaign, Trump repeatedly targeted ballooning costs, the ignorance about who the newcomers were, and cases of violent crime and murders committed by illegals.
There was no serious counterargument, just the Dems’ usual knee-jerk charges of racism and xenophobia, all of which were amplified by left-wing media.
Those outlets embraced the cases of high-profile illegal immigrants Trump tried to deport.
A telling example involved Kilmar Abrego Garcia, which most of the media identified as simply a “Maryland man” who was “wrongly deported.”
In fact, he was in the US illegally, and authorities believed he was a member of the deadly MS-13 gang, a human trafficker, and wife-beater.
Similarly, attempts to deport foreign students who engaged in anti-Israel protests and riots were met with hysteria.
Trump, in a 2023 campaign speech, laid out what his policies would be and cited the Hamas invasion of Israel that year.
He declared that “we’ll terminate the visas of all of those Hamas sympathizers, and we’ll get them off our college campuses, out of our cities and get them the hell out of our country.”
The Times countered those promises with a hysteria of its own making.
In a reflection of the paper’s anti-Trump agenda, a headline on a column by radical writer Michelle Goldberg declared that the Mahmoud Khalil case “Is the Greatest Threat to Free Speech Since the Red Scare.”
The approach allowed little or no coverage of cases where illegal migrants were charged with murders, rapes and other horrific crimes.
Now that Miller is Trump’s top gun and Dems control Congress, what’s old will be new again.
Don’t be shocked when the energized left demands open borders.
