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INSIDE STEPHEN MILLER’S SECRET PLAN TO NORMALIZE TRUMP’S DICTATOR
RULE  
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Greg Sargent
October 8, 2025
The New Republic
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_ He wants to supercharge searing civil tensions to get
low-information voters to embrace their inner authoritarian. Exactly
two Democrats appear to fully grasp this. _

Stephen Miller, Photo from Southern Poverty Law Center

 

Stephen Miller has a theory about this political moment. As President
Trump expands his lawbreaking and dictatorial rule, the powerful MAGA
disinformation apparatus—at Miller’s direction—is supercharging
public attention to the debate over Trump’s conduct in a way
that’s designed to deeply polarize it. That will force Americans to
take a side in that standoff, Miller clearly believes, driving them to
embrace authoritarian rule, though perhaps without understanding it in
exactly those terms.

Do Democratic leaders broadly have their own theory about this moment?
It’s unclear. But here’s what we can divine right now: Governors
JB Pritzker of Illinois and Gavin Newsom of California do have one.
They grasp Miller’s theory of the case, and they are responding in
kind, with their own war for attention, on the intuition that voters
will side with the rule of law over authoritarian
dictatorship—_if_ they are presented with this as a clear choice.

This week, Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act after a
federal judge blocked him from sending the National Guard into
Portland, in a ruling that sharply noted
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is making up facts about crime there as his pretext.

“It’s a burning hellhole,” Trump said
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that tries to pretend there’s no problem.” Trump declared
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enact the Insurrection Act “if people were being killed and courts
were holding us up, or governors or mayors were holding us up.”

The specter of Portland “burning” is dim-witted MAGA propaganda.
But Trump is now nakedly threatening to invoke the notorious
nineteenth-century act if Democratic governors or the
courts _lawfully_ exercise their roles in our constitutional schema,
in a way that displeases him. This would unshackle vast and
dangerously vague authorities
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domestically deploy the military, powers nominally reserved
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extraordinary domestic unrest or civil breakdown. Trump would invoke
it based on sheer fabrications, or possibly on old footage of
Portland he saw on Fox News
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Yet it’s no accident that this comes right after Miller loudly
denounced [[link removed]] the
Portland ruling by that judge—a Trump appointee, no less—as
“legal insurrection.” Miller declared that it’s
“insurrection” when judges assume for themselves “powers that
have been delegated by the Constitution to the president.” Miller is
also insisting
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“have no conceivable authority” to restrict the commander in chief
from “dispatching members of the U.S. military to defend federal
lives and property,” meaning in Portland.

Of course, here in non-MAGA reality, the judge was
merely interpreting
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Trump breached the limits Congress has already placed on that
presidential authority. She concluded that Trump doesn’t have
unlimited power to simply declare that the conditions permitting him
to federalize a state’s National Guard have been met. In other
words, as Harry Litman argued
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TNR, facts matter. But that’s precisely what Miller denies. His
argument, in essence, is that Trump’s power to declare by fiat that
those conditions have been met _really is_ quasi-absolute.

To that end, Miller appears to _want_ Trump to invoke the
Insurrection Act. Recently, Miller was asked directly if he’s
discussed the idea with Trump, and he evaded the question
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Miller, a master manipulator lurking furtively behind the despot’s
throne, frequently uses the word “insurrection” about Trump’s
opponents to lodge it deep in Trump’s brain stem and make invocation
of the act more likely. As The xxxxxx’s Andrew Egger notes
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Miller’s goal is to supplant the rule of law with the “rule of
Trump,” a personalist form of rule that answers to Trump the man and
no one else.

Yet there’s another dark aim here that’s worth appreciating.
Miller is working overtime to polarize the public debate about
Trump’s increasingly dictatorial abuses of power. And he’s doing
so quite consciously. He relentlessly depicts
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with a vast, inchoate class of violent criminals and insurrectionists
operating in every shadow of American life. Miller seizes on every
attention-grabbing moment he can to amplify the point, even if—and
this part is crucial—it looks likely at first to reflect negatively
on Trump.

Consider what happened after ICE raided an apartment building in
Chicago last week. As Garrett Graff chronicles
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media coverage was brutal: It depicted jackbooted federal agents
busting down doors and dragging children, some naked, out into the
dark streets.

Yet MAGA was undaunted. State-sponsored propaganda video
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the affair as akin to an action movie featuring the thrilling
spectacle of defeated-looking migrants in handcuffs. Miller went on
Fox News
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the operation as an enormous triumph.

Amid all this, Miller’s public battle with Illinois Governor JB
Pritzker has been particularly noteworthy. Pritzker went on CNN and
tore into
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ICE raid, vividly depicting it as a lawless action targeting U.S.
citizens in order to provoke a response and justify more thuggery
later. Pritzker called
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“Trump’s invasion,” deliberately using a term Miller uses for
immigrants. Miller eagerly took the bait:

The rub here is that both these men _want_ this fight. To be clear,
the public is squarely with Pritzker: A new CBS survey
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that 58 percent of Americans oppose Trump’s National Guard
deployments. And G. Elliott Morris’s recent poll
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opposition to National Guards assisting ICE at 51 percent to 37
percent.

But in Miller’s worldview, polls like that only register shallowly
held convictions, _at best_. In this understanding of politics—and
you should read Brian Beutler
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Drutman
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this—what really matters is the political attention economy, and how
conflict plays within it. Supercharging searing civil tensions over
jarring high-profile events drives attention, jolts low-propensity
voters out of their information ruts, and compels them
to _really_ take sides.

Pritzker and Newsom are now plainly motivated by an understanding like
this one. Pritzker has plunged very deeply into the public argument
over Trump’s troops in Chicago. In urgent moral language
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has told his state’s residents that Trump represents a dangerous
threat to their way of life. Newsom has done the same. After Trump
tried to dispatch California’s National Guard into Portland,
Newsom warned [[link removed]]:
“America is on the brink of martial law.”

In short, Pritzker and Newsom see it as a defining challenge of this
moment
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Trump is consolidating authoritarian power daily, and using it to
subjugate and dominate blue America as if it’s akin to an enemy
nation within. And they are shaping their approach accordingly.

Miller plainly believes there’s a latent majority out in the country
that can be sleepwalked into authoritarianism. If Democrats sit this
debate out, Miller has calculated, Trump’s deceptions can flood
public information spaces, persuading low-info, low-attention voters
that his autocratic encroachments constitute a proportional response
to the civic unrest he keeps propagandizing about.

What’s notable, in one sense, is how badly this project has failed.
Despite months of effort, Trump and Miller have not come close to
manufacturing the sense of fear or trauma out in the country they’d
hoped for. But in the nascent Pritzker-Newsom understanding, assuming
this will all take care of itself—that voters will resist
Trump-Miller agitprop without prompting—is insufficient. We’ve
learned, hearteningly, that majorities seem to harbor a deep
attachment to liberal rights and liberties, one that instinctively
recoils at masked kidnappings, at hypermilitarized vehicles on urban
boulevards, at the trappings of totalitarian dictatorship. But this
must be _activated_. That takes conflict and controversy—powerful
imagery and language that rivets attention.

It’s not clear many Democrats understand this. Some Democrats
have confided
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reporters that they see this topic as a “trap” enticing them into
a losing debate about crime. But why assume voters will automatically
believe Trump’s occupations are actually about combating crime? This
throws in the towel, right up front, on communicating to voters what
this debate is really about: that Trump’s abuses should be utterly
abhorrent to anyone who values living in a free society.

Do Democrats, broadly speaking, have a theory of this moment that’s
consciously matched to MAGA’s authoritarian politics? They need one.
Because guess who does have a theory of the moment? Miller does. And
he’s amassing unprecedented power to put it into practice as we
speak.

_Greg Sargent is a staff writer at The New Republic and the host of
the podcast The Daily Blast
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seasoned political commentator with over two decades of experience, he
was a prominent columnist and blogger at The Washington Post from
2010 to 2023 and has worked at Talking Points Memo, New
York magazine, and the New York Observer. Greg is also the author
of the critically acclaimed book
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Uncivil War: Taking Back Our Democracy in an Age of Disinformation and
Thunderdome Politics. _

* Stephen Miller
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* dictatorship
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* secret government
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