TEHRAN — Just days after Republicans lost control of Congress in Tuesday’s elections, President Donald Trump appointed Stephen Miller as White House Chief of Staff on Friday. Miller, key architect of the administration’s immigration and deportation strategy, replaces Susie Wiles and officially begins his duties on Monday.
Democrats took both chambers in what was described as the most decisive political rout in half a century.
For a few days, Trump sounded almost conciliatory and said he could strike an immigration deal with the opposition.
Then he announced the swap on Truth Social. “I wanted to make a change,” he told reporters before flying to Florida. Asked what Miller should do differently, he answered in four words: “Just run things well.”
Miller is a 41-year-old pro-Israel Jewish hardliner who has served as deputy chief of staff for policy since January 2025.
He has reportedly drafted or edited nearly every executive order Trump has signed, runs a daily 10 a.m. call with agencies to collect new ideas for the crackdown, and has had some agency posts report directly to him, around cabinet secretaries. After the election, he ran that call as usual and never acknowledged the result, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Some ICE officials now reportedly fear their work will get more dangerous. Polls suggest the enforcement tactics he designed turned off many voters and helped cause the losses.
Wiles takes the fall
Trump has accepted no blame. He reportedly berated Wiles in front of guests at the East Room watch party on election night, and has turned on James Blair, who ran his outside political operation.
Wiles and other advisers had told him until last weekend that Republicans could keep the Senate. Steve Bannon demanded her removal publicly on Friday. Her allies say she is paying for a strategy Trump largely wrote himself.
Wiles previously worked as a consultant on Benjamin Netanyahu’s 2020 election campaign in Israel and reportedly helped advance pro-Israel interests within the White House during her tenure as chief of staff.
Katie Miller, the new chief of staff’s wife, spent weeks lobbying for him, Politico reported, urging people to call the president and phoning about half a dozen of them after the vote, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent among them.
Other names discussed included Bill Pulte, Lee Zeldin and Sergio Gor, and the thought of Pulte in charge alarmed many inside the administration.
‘A dangerous xenophobe and reckless extremist’
Wiles made clear she did not see her job as protecting the country from the president. Miller is far more willing to push legal boundaries.
In June, Will Scharf, the White House staff secretary, warned in memos against Miller’s proposals to suspend detainees’ right to challenge their detention in court and to invoke the Insurrection Act.
In an April 29, 2025 memo to Wiles, he reportedly wrote that only Congress can suspend habeas corpus, and only in cases of rebellion or invasion, which was Miller’s proposed route for stripping detainees of the right to challenge their detention in court.
Furthermore, with budget director Russ Vought, Miller is charting a second-term agenda of executive actions that need no approval from Congress, and he is helping plan the response to the investigations Democrats have promised.
He has seen this before. Miller is one of two top West Wing staffers who were there in 2018, when the House flipped, and the subpoenas arrived.
Associates say his first test will be Trump’s demand to punish perceived enemies. The president has fumed that the Justice Department is too slow against alleged leakers, reporters who publish classified material and political opponents.
Schumer, who is expected to lead the Senate, said Trump “learned nothing from his historic defeat.” Jeffries, headed for the speakership, called Miller “a dangerous xenophobe and reckless extremist” and demanded he be fired.
Republican praise came mostly from the cabinet and from allies such as Sens. Eric Schmitt and Mike Lee. Rep. Marlin Stutzman of Indiana called the move a “horrible decision.”
Exiting Rep. Don Bacon said the president’s inner circle is “living in a bubble” and that when he and colleagues warned Miller’s staff the approach would cost the midterms, “he didn’t believe it.”
Miller’s answer on X was to vow to “Fight with all of our soul to support our President.” Rep. Robert Garcia, set to chair the Oversight Committee, had an answer ready: “Stephen Miller should lawyer up.”
‘The reason we lost is the war’
“The reason we lost is the war,” Vice President JD Vance wrote on X the morning after the Midterms results came in. Trump, asked about it, called that “largely true” because the war “drove gasoline up a little bit short-term,” then added that he would launch it again.
Only days earlier he had called it “a very soft war,” and in late October he promised fuel prices would “drop like a rock” once it ended. At one point oil topped $100 a barrel, and the national gasoline average jumped nearly 50 cents in a week.
Vance’s four-point fix for the party starts with ending the war and ends with a call to “change our relationship to Israel.”
A report carried by Fox News said Vance has privately called Netanyahu “wrong on everything” about Iran, and that Netanyahu pressed Trump to resume the war before Trump held off.
Miller has defended the war in public, but the New York Times reported that his pitch for the job was to wind it down, a campaign of aggression that core supporters see as a betrayal. Some Republicans are already demanding “War” Secretary Pete Hegseth’s ouster.
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