Three days after Republicans lost the House and the Senate, President Trump picked his new White House chief of staff. Not a fence-mender. Not a dealmaker who could work a Democratic Congress for the next two years. Stephen Miller.
You have to admire the sense of humor.
Susie Wiles is out. On Friday Trump posted that Miller, his deputy chief of staff and one of his “most trusted advisors,” takes over Monday. Wiles moves to the political operation. She lasted 21 months, longer than any chief of staff in either Trump term.
What the chimps know
Chimpanzees show who’s boss with an offensive, visible display, by throwing shit.
Enter the most offensive, smelly shit he could find: Stephen Miller.
Trump picked the man Democrats find most offensive and put him in the most visible chair in the West Wing. He dares them to throw it back.
The Democratic leadership and the mainstream media are going to lose their minds over this. The rage machine will go into gear. Trump just gave them a booster shot of TDS.
The rage has no target
Chief of staff needs no Senate confirmation. The Democrats taking the gavels in January cannot block Miller, vote on him or reject him. Every hour of outrage spent on this appointment is an hour spent on something they have zero power to change.
That is what makes it good bait. The throw doesn’t need to land. It needs the other side to throw back, on cable, on X and in fundraising emails, so the whole thing looks like a fight in the monkey house.
The media rage machine will take the bait because, in my opinion, rage pays and the mainstream media are heavily invested in the Never Trump movement. A Miller story gets clicks. A story about an executive order’s legal basis does not.
What the voters actually said
Tuesday’s wave was about the number on the pump. The Boston Globe summed up the cycle as “It’s gas prices, stupid.” Exit polls had voters more than twice as likely to say their finances were worse rather than better. In one late poll, independents, the voters who swing elections, named gas prices more often than either party’s base.
Nobody voted for a grand agenda. Yet on election night, Texas senator-elect James Talarico, who won by 12 points, stood at a podium emblazoned “Love Thy Neighbor,” with supporters waving matching signs behind him, and told his crowd he had “a mandate the size of Texas.” His list: get big money out of politics, unrig an economy that only benefits the top 1%, pass universal health care, invest in teachers, and end the “forever wars” driving up prices.
Sorry, Senator. It was a mandate the size of Rhode Island. Lots of votes, thin mandate: affordability, the very issue Democrats lost on just two years ago.
Voters did not ask Congress to pass laws forcing bakers to make cakes for gay weddings.
What the rage machine gets for its trouble
Let’s say corruption was a big issue for some voters, mostly Democrats. So what will Democrats be able to show for it? Who gets brought to justice? What stops it from happening again? When you vote for a president like Trump, you get that behavior. The laws cannot be rewritten for one man’s personality, and the Supreme Court has already weighed in on many of these questions.
Expect two years of corruption headlines. But corruption that matters is corruption that breaks the law, and that bar keeps rising. The Supreme Court narrowed federal bribery law in McDonnell (2016) and Snyder (2024), and gave presidents immunity for official acts in 2024. Trump’s Justice Department controls prosecutions until January 2029. Congressional committees can subpoena and refer. They cannot charge anyone.
Not being a selfless Boy Scout might be bad citizenship. It is not a crime.
Jared Kushner is the most visible target. He negotiates for the president, but he takes no salary, calls himself a volunteer, and was never designated a special government employee, so he has filed none of the financial disclosures that officials file. The White House says ethics lawyers signed off on that arrangement. He’s a businessman, and businessmen do business.
So if Democrats scream for two years and nobody goes to jail, what do they get? Maybe some brownie points for the optics. And if they did put someone in jail, Trump’s get-out-of-jail pardon pen would fix it. They achieve nothing. They won’t even be able to pass legislation to rein in that kind of behavior, because Trump holds the veto pen too.
What caused the “corruption” was electing Trump, and he was elected because Democrats did a bad job. Twice. Even after his first term, they did a bad job again. And it didn’t start with Biden. Trump came right after Obama. Don’t confuse Obama’s likability with his job score. He had his own tsunamis: Democrats lost 63 House seats in 2010, the biggest midterm loss since 1938, and the Senate in 2014. Put the blame where it belongs. We don’t need new laws or more fruitless investigations.
The Democrats need to do a better job, so we don’t end up with someone like Trump as president.
What do we know for sure?
The circus has come to town.