October 7, 2025

Hi readers, Cameron Peters here — it’s Tuesday morning. 

President Donald Trump is pushing harder to deploy National Guard troops to Portland, Oregon, and Chicago over the protests of state and local leaders. While deployments in Portland have so far been blocked by a federal judge, Texas National Guard troops could arrive in Chicago as soon as today. 

White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller has emerged as one of the public faces of the administration’s efforts to deploy troops to cities, as well as its heavily militarized immigration crackdown in Chicago. I spoke with my colleague Andrew Prokop about why Miller in particular is worth paying attention to, what he's said that's raising some alarm, and what he might be after. Read on for our conversation:

⮕ Start here

Stephen Miller is looking for a fight

Cameron Peters

So, what has Stephen Miller been up to recently?

Andrew Prokop

Since the Charlie Kirk killing, Stephen Miller has been saying these kind of increasingly extreme things about the Democratic Party, about the left in general, about how the left is like a terror conspiracy of some kind, involved in not only Charlie Kirk's murder, but also what he calls the “planned and coordinated armed attacks on ICE officers by violent extremists.”

Miller has been trying to implement Donald Trump's mass deportation agenda by unleashing ICE in increasingly aggressive fashion in liberal cities, and there have been occasional protests against ICE. There's been occasional on-the-ground resistance, and in some cases real violence, and any time such protests or resistance materialize, Miller has seized on it to argue that there is a criminal, left-wing, terroristic conspiracy to prevent ICE from doing its work, and that therefore what needs to happen is some kind of broader crackdown against the Democratic Party and the left in the United States of America.

Cameron Peters

What do we know about what Miller is trying to accomplish with all of this? 

Andrew Prokop

What is most evident are his tweets, which are quite extreme. Often public officials in positions like his would try to lower the temperature in controversial situations like this, to try to prevent bad things from happening. He's doing the exact opposite. He's trying to turn up the temperature as much as possible and it seems inevitable that if the temperature keeps rising, bad things will happen. And related to that, he seems to want to persuade law enforcement officers that they are in grave danger from a conspiracy by the left that wants to dox them, to kill them, to kill their families, and that as a result, their loyalty should be further cemented with Donald Trump, who is on their side.

What is Miller's ultimate goal, besides trying to deport more unauthorized immigrants? I think we can't prove that for certain, but this kind of playbook of intense polarization, this effort to drive law enforcement further into alignment with the president and in support of a sort of crackdown of some kind, this inflammatory rhetoric that seems just designed to cause further problems — none of it points anywhere good. All of it seems to herald more instability ahead.

Cameron Peters

Tweets aside, how much power does Miller actually have to make good on these threats? 

Andrew Prokop

That is a lot less clear. There's been a lot of talk on the right of exposing the funders of Antifa, but as I understand it, that might be a bit of a wild goose chase. It's not really clear there are funders to find, but then others have suggested this might just be a pretext for some kind of broader inquiry into progressive foundations, donor organizations, and so on. But that is something that would have to play out in the various investigations in the federal government, and I'm not sure that would have immediate results that we could see.

Cameron Peters

Miller’s rhetoric seems to be escalating. What, if anything, are you looking at in his response going forward? 

Andrew Prokop

Miller seems to think that confrontation and conflict between Donald Trump and federal law enforcement versus Democratic politicians and local officials in blue cities is good for Donald Trump, that this is a good political strategy.

The question is whether he has ambitions even beyond that, whether this isn't just about shoring up Donald Trump's support with voters and whether there is a more dangerously authoritarian motivation here as well when it comes to trying to centralize power. It remains unclear if he can actually pull off something like that: It's easy to talk big and stoke confrontations, but what actually happens when the confrontation is stoked may not be in his control. It's a dangerous situation. Any number of things could go wrong, and it remains to be seen what exactly he will be able to accomplish with this.

Today’s edition was produced and edited by me, staff editor Cameron Peters. Thanks for reading!