Stephen Miller, one of Donald Trump’s fiercest allies and architect of the administration’s hardline deportation agenda, will now be the White House chief of staff. The role is a promotion for Miller, who currently serves as an adviser. Trump said that Miller will start the job on Monday 9 November, less than a week after Republicans’ crushing defeat in the midterm elections.
Wiles will now take a role in Trump’s political operation, which includes his Super Pac Maga Inc. On social media, she said that serving the president has been “the honor of a lifetime”. Wiles has been in the president’s orbit for over a decade, and prior to her role at the White House, she managed, alongside Chris LaCivita, Trump’s winning 2024 presidential campaign.
Trump later told reporters that he decided to promote Miller because he “wanted to make a change”. He praised Wiles, and said that Miller had been by his side “from the beginning”. “Sometimes in life you have to make moves,” the president said.
Meanwhile, Democrats blasted Trump’s decision, after Republicans faced a drubbing in the midterm elections. Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, said that the president “learned nothing from his historic defeat”, and Congressman Robert Garcia – poised to be the chair of the House oversight committee – advised Miller to “lawyer up”. Garcia said that in the majority, Democrats on his panel will “continue to investigate [Stephen] Miller for his misconduct, and we will fight against his hateful policies in Congress and the courts”.
This concludes our live coverage of the second and final Trump administration at the end of a momentous week. We leave you with the news:
The elevation of Stephen Miller, the architect of Donald Trump’s brutal and unpopular mass deportation agenda, to White House chief of staff suggests that the president has no intention of rolling back the crackdown, even after voters delivered a sweeping rebuke by electing Democrats to every House seat along the US border with Mexico.
While Trump’s hardline supporters were thrilled, there was bipartisan dismay at the news. “Stephen Miller belongs nowhere near the Oval Office,”the NAACP president said. “He belongs before a judge. He’s a thug who will be remembered as the architect of Trump’s vile and authoritarian regime.”
Republican congressman Marlin Stutzman, who said on Wednesday, “I think Stephen Miller should be fired this morning”, told Semafor appointing Miller was a “horrible decision.”
Senator Chris Murphy was released from a hospital on Friday following treatment for a stroke and plans to spend several weeks at a rehabilitation center as he works to recover, the Connecticut Democrat said in a statement.
Multiple reporters said that the phrase “wartime consigliere” had been used by the White House to describe Miller, which is a reference to what a close adviser to mafia boss is called in The Godfather. The phrase has been used repeatedly in recent years by people close to Trump to describe what he is looking for in a right-hand man, who will use slash-and-burn tactics to defend him at all costs.
As social networks continue to fill with anger at the selection of Stephen Miller as White House chief of staff, the White House released a taxpayer-funded ad to promote the Trump aide, in the form of a hype video starring the man himself posted on official government social media accounts.
The Associated Press reports that the US secret service said a suspect has been taken into custody and charged after officers found him in a vehicle near the White House with multiple guns, claiming he heard voices in his head telling him to kill Donald Trump.
The arrest Thursday night happened after secret service officers approached a man “acting suspicious” in a parked car, according to a Homeland Security statement. US officials said the suspect – identified as Ronny Yordrix Guanipa Chrinos – went on to describe voices in his head that were telling him to come to the nation’s capital and kill the Republican president.
Progressive Democrat Aisha Wahab has been re-elected to Congress to represent California’s 14th congressional district, defeating fellow Democrat Melissa Hernandez, for a House seat formerly held by Eric Swalwell, who resigned in April over sexual misconduct allegations he has denied.
Wahab, a former California state senator, previously won a special election to serve out the rest of Swalwell’s term in August, when she also beat Hernandez, the president of the board of directors for the Bay Area Rapid Transit agency.
After his speech in Florida on Friday, a reporter asked Donald Trump about a phrase White House officials are using to explain his choice of Stephen Miller as his new chief of staff.
“Mr President, there’s people describing Stephen Miller as your ‘wartime consigliere’ – do you agree with that characterization?” the reporter asked.
“Well, he’s a great fighter,” Trump replied. “He’s been with me right from the beginning, 2015, he was with me from before 2016, 2015, and he’s very loyal, smart, does a great job. He’s been an MVP every year. He’s been just great. So we’re very happy with him – and he’s gotten great reviews.”
That final remark was perhaps an indication of just how cloistered the president is, given that there has been widespread anger at dismay at his choice of Miller from Democrats and some Republicans, but the White House issued a press release on the appointment which claimed “The news was met with widespread praise”, followed by quotes lauding Miller from five dozen current and former administration officials, Republican lawmakers and pundits.
Multiple reporters said that the phrase “wartime consigliere” had been used to describe Miller by White House sources on Friday, which is a reference to what a close adviser to mafia boss is called in The Godfather.
The phrase has been used repeatedly in recent years by people close to Trump to describe what he is looking for in a right-hand man, who will use slash-and-burn tactics to defend him at all costs.
In 2020, Matt Gaetz, a Republican congressman from Florida at the time who was later Trump’s first choice to be attorney general in his second term, told the New York Times that Trump’s choice of Mark Meadows as his fourth White House chief of staff was “a great move” since “he’s a great wartime consigliere and we’re heading into election season.”
In 2023, as Trump faced multiple criminal investigations, Steve Bannon described his legal adviser Boris Epshteyn as “a wartime consigliere.”
The role Trump seems to be looking to fill is one that was first played in his life by Roy Cohn, his former personal lawyer and fixer, who had been a top aide to senator Joseph McCarthy during investigations into supposed communist infiltration of the US government in the 1950s.
It was Cohn who had first advised Trump in 1973 to respond to the federal government’s allegation that Trump and his father had violated laws against racial discrimination in housing by refusing to rent to Black tenants, by going on the offensive and countersuing the government for $100bn.
In 2017, when the support for Trump’s campaign from the Russian government was under investigation, Trump was enraged that his first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, decided to recuse himself instead of undermining the probe. “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” the president reportedly asked aides.
On Tuesday, voters resoundingly rebuked Donald Trump and his brutal mass deportation campaign that sent military tanks and masked agents though residential streets.
But on Friday, the president doubled down. He named Stephen Miller – the architect of the administration’s most aggressive immigration policies – as his chief of staff.
It was never likely that Trump – who rose to political prominence on the promise that he would expel immigrants en masse from the US – would dampen his agenda, even after voters rejected Republican candidates up and down the ballot, near and far from the southern border, in blue and deep-red states.
But the elevation of Miller – a zealous, anti-immigrant crusader who has been by Trump’s side since the president’s first term – is an ominous signal that the deportation machine that Trump has built up over the past two years will be driving ahead at full speed.
Miller more than any single other person is responsible for unleashing a series of violent immigration raids across US cities this year and last, for sending hordes of masked agents in military gear through residential streets to round up undocumented immigrants. He has pushed the administration to all but shut down legal immigration as well. In his previous roles – as a deputy chief of staff and policy adviser – he has stuck close to Trump’s side and stoked the president’s most extreme instincts.
“The elevation of Stephen Miller to White House chief of staff signals a doubling down on the administration’s cruelest impulses,” said Faisal Al-Juburi, the co-chief executive of Raíces, a Texas-based humanitarian aid and immigration services non-profit. “Miller’s promotion guarantees an acceleration of mass deportations and of brute force unleashed within our neighborhoods.”
After immigration agents shot and killed Alex Pretti, a nurse, amid immigration raids in Minneapolis, it was Miller, according to the Wall Street Journal, who raised the idea that Trump could invoke the Insurrection Act to send in military troops.
The US Department of Justice moved on Friday to dismiss the lawsuit it brought against the state of California, in which it sought to keep roughly 20,000 ballots it alleged went to noncitizens from being counted.
The supreme court ruled against the Trump administration on Monday, after several lower courts sided with California officials, who argued the federal government was seeking to interfere in state-run elections.
The request to dismiss the case comes three days after the final votes were cast in the midterm elections and about a week before a scheduled hearing where a special master would have been asked to evaluate the accuracy of the list provided by the federal government.
California officials argued that the list is out of date and includes legitimate voters — a sentiment that the federal judge presiding over the case echoed in his blistering order denying the federal government’s request.
Democrat Nancy Lacore won her party’s 254th seat in the House, defeating Republican Jenny Costa Honeycutt in the race to replace Republican Nancy Mace in representing South Carolina’s first congressional district.
Lacore is a former Navy vice admiral who served as chief of the Navy Reserve before she was fired last year without explanation by the former Fox News weekend host Donald Trump chose as defense secretary, Pete Hegseth.
Lacore’s victory ensures that the Democrats will have at least 254 seats in the next Congress, with 19 races still to be called, nine of which are led by Democrats. Republican have currently won 162 seats.
Mace chose to run for governor instead of re-election to the House, but finished a distant fifth in the Republican primary in June before starting a podcast, Get Maced, that she recently used to promote the racist conspiracy theory that “Radical Islam Is CONQUERING America From Within”.
Reading aloud from prepared remarks to NASA officials at Cape Canaveral in Florida on Friday, Donald Trump ran through a list of what he called evidence that Americans were “the greatest pioneers explorers, inventors and innovators who ever lived.”
“America is the nation that dreamed and created the modern world,” Trump said, peering at a teleprompter from beneath a USA cap. “We laid the railroads, harnessed electricity and invented the lightbulb, the telephone, the airplane, the assembly line, the television, the microchip, the personal computer, the internet, GPS, the smartphone, and almost every other thing- think of it – almost every other thing that’s worth mentioning.”
He then looked out at the audience and veered off-script to comment: “That’s a cool list, though, when you think, huh? How about a little piece of each of them? Wouldn’t that be nice? You wouldn’t be sitting here right now. You’d be someplace else.”
The president then returned to his prepared remarks, looking back at the teleprompter and saying: “We charted the human genome to cure diseases,” but stumbled badly over the word “genome” which he pronounced “guh-nome”.
Despite Trump’s attempt to claim that the US deserves credit for sequencing all the DNA in human chromosomes, the Human Genome Project was, in fact, the work of an international network of geneticists.
The president made the flub minutes after boasting about the fact that his uncle, John Trump, had been a long-tenured professor at MIT. Trump has repeatedly claimed that his uncle’s intelligence and scientific knowledge was passed on to him through his genes, giving him an innate understanding of complex scientific questions, from the novel coronavirus that caused a global pandemic in 2020 to nuclear weapons.
Donald Trump, remarkably, gave yet another speech on Friday, delivering remarks at the John F. Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida in his official capacity as president, which were, nonetheless, threaded through with partisan political talking points.
The president emerged to the theme tune from his rallies, God Bless the USA, and mimed dancing, before starting his speech by celebrating the victories of two Florida Republicans, Byron Donalds, the governor-elect, and senator Ashley Moody.
The pair were the only two candidates Trump rallied for in the past month who won competitive races.
He then praised members of his administration who were present, singling out the US ambassador to the United Nations, Mike Waltz, for “the way you took on, the Cubans”. Waltz was recently engaged in a spat with a Cuban official at the UN which played on heavy rotation on Fox News, the president’s window on the world.
Trump then suggested that he was glad that the US stock market plunged after the Republican wipeout at the ballot box, on fears that companies building AI data centers might not be as free to push ahead with regulation by a Democratic Congress.
“Yesterday, you know, our country lost $3 trillion, all because of an election,” Trump said. “If we were to gain $3 trillion, I probably would have been more unhappy. But you know what that means; that means that they thought somebody else did well in an election.”
“By the way, I was not on the ballot, just in case you had any question,” he added. “Because if we were on the ballot, we would’ve won but we weren’t.”
Senator Chris Murphy was released from a hospital on Friday following treatment for a stroke and plans to spend several weeks at a rehabilitation center as he works to recover, the Connecticut Democrat said in a statement.
“Thank you for the outpouring of support my family and I have received over the last few days,” Murphy said. “I want to be direct with you, so here is my diagnosis. Last Saturday afternoon, I felt something was not right with my body and called 9-1-1 out of an abundance of caution, and I’m glad I did. I was diagnosed with a small bleed in the thalamus region of my brain.”
“The doctors are very encouraged by the progress I’ve made so far. In order to take my recovery seriously and get back to work on the quickest timeline possible, I will be spending several weeks at a rehabilitation center after being discharged from the hospital today,” he continued.
The senator also released a statement from Dr Jose Suarez, the chief of neurosciences critical care at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. “Senator Murphy experienced a small hemorrhagic stroke. He has shown tremendous progress, and at the current rate of improvement, we expect that he will make a full recovery following rehabilitation,” the doctor said.
The morning after the midterm wave that swept away dozens of his colleagues, congressman Marlin Stutzman, an Indiana Republican who held his seat, told voters that Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda was a major factor, and called on the president to fire its architect, Stephen Miller.
“The press ran with it, the Democrats ran with it, and it looked bad on us – the deportation effort,” Stutzman said on Wednesday. “President Obama deported more illegals than what President Trump has. But you know what? he didn’t he didn’t go out and talk about it the way that, you know, we did. I mean, frankly, I think Stephen Miller should be fired this morning. I mean, there needs to be some changs at hte White House.”
Asked by Semafor on Friday what he made of Trump’s decision to not fire but promote Miller, Stutzman told the outlet it was a “horrible decision.”
Several newly elected Democrats and Senator Bernie Sanders have renewed calls for datacenter moratoriums in the days after the US midterm elections. The sweeping Democratic victory, which was buoyed in part by backlash to the tech industry, has added momentum to efforts to slow down the multi-trillion-dollar buildout of the controversial facilities.
On the social media platform X, Sanders posted a call for an immediate national datacenter moratorium this week. “Americans don’t want Big Tech oligarchs wrecking the environment, gutting jobs and threatening humanity’s future,” Sanders said on Wednesday.
Sanders was joined by several Democrats, including Representative Yassamin Ansari of Arizona – a state where Elon Musk’s SpaceX has proposed a datacenter project that would span more than 700 acres.
“Top of the Democratic agenda on day 1 needs to be a pause on advanced AI development, regulation of this out of control industry, and a ban on artificial superintelligence,” Ansari posted Wednesday on X. Musk mocked her post in a retweet, and the two sparred, with Ansari forecasting congressional hearings, telling the centi-billionaire: “See you soon.”
The pushback to the buildout of datacenters, which tech companies need to power the AI products that have become central to their businesses, was one of the most visible issues of the midterms. Opposition to datacenters figured heavily in campaigns across the US, while voters passed dozens of local ballot measures aimed at restricting datacenter projects in their states.
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
