Gregory Bull/AP Photo
Migrants, including many Haitians, leave Mexico to cross into the United States for their appointments with officials to seek asylum, March 13, 2024, seen from Tijuana, Mexico.
This article appears in the October 2024 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
In the winter of 1945, Franklin D. Roosevelt traveled to Yalta to meet with Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin to make decisions on the war’s endgame and the shape of the postwar world. FDR had met repeatedly with Churchill and his entourage during the war, and once, in Tehran in 1943, with Stalin and his aides. Looking across the table at Stalin’s advisers, however, he saw one he hadn’t met before.
“Who’s that?” Roosevelt asked Stalin.
“That’s Beria,” Stalin replied, then adding helpfully, “my Himmler.”
I cite this exchange as a way of describing, as this issue of the Prospect endeavors to do, the stakes in the upcoming presidential election. And I can think of no better way to begin that discussion by noting that Donald Trump has his own Himmler: Stephen Miller.
I hasten to explain that I don’t mean Miller plans or desires to kill anyone; by all available evidence, his is not an agenda of extermination. But anyone who remembers Trump’s war on undocumented immigrants during his previous go-round as president can have little doubt that it will be Miller who will be charged with carrying out one of the few specific pledges that Trump has made repeatedly in the course of this year’s campaigning: forcibly rounding up all 12 million undocumented immigrants (in the ABC debate, Trump put the “real” number at 21 million), placing them in concentration camps along the border, and expelling them to their nations of origin, even if they’ve lived and worked in the United States for many decades, even if they’re the parents of children who are U.S. citizens.
It was Miller, after all, who ran Trump’s war on immigrants when Trump was in the White House previously. It was Miller who devised and championed the short-lived policy of banning all immigration from seven Muslim countries. It was Miller who devised and championed the practice of separating children, even infants, from their parents at the border, with utter indifference to how and whether these families could ever be reunited. It was Miller who capitalized on the pandemic to lock out all immigrants at the border on the basis of public health. And it was Miller who ran roughshod over administration officials who lacked sufficient zeal to expedite the arrests and expulsions of the undocumented.
Unlike many Trump administration functionaries, Miller was a hard-working and diligent channeler of Trump’s most brutal instincts. He made clear those were his instincts, too, and dealt harshly with colleagues whose cruelty he found lacking. (One such insufficiently zealous figure was Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, whose resignation Miller effectively forced.)
I dwell on Miller because it’s clear he will be the anti-immigrant czar of a second Trump administration, almost certain to prompt Trump to call out the National Guard when big-city police fall short in arresting immigrants, and to use the threat of force, and force itself, when both immigrants and citizens resist the mass arrests, the concentration camps, and the deportations. Nor will his portfolio be limited to immigration: During Trump’s term as president, his title was senior adviser, in which capacity he was—and surely would be in a second Trump term—the most avid proponent of a top-down civil war on the media and other elements of our civil society opposed to autocracy and the right-wing politicization of the administration of justice.
I also dwell on Miller because if Trump prevails at the polls, Miller will not be the odd man in this time around. In 2017, Miller was more of a freelancer. There was not yet a full cadre of dedicated Trumpians with whom Trump could fill his administration. From James “Mad Dog” Mattis to William Barr (a zealous right-winger but not an election denier), there were powerful appointees who hadn’t drunk all of Trump’s Kool-Aid. Miller, by contrast, wasn’t merely the dedicated delivery boy of Trump’s furies; he brought furies of his own to the fray.
This time around, the entire Trump administration will be staffed by the fury-filled. This will be the Stephen Miller presidency.
MUCH OF THE DISCUSSION OF A SECOND TRUMP TERM has focused on economics and foreign policy: what across-the-board high tariffs would do to Americans’ cost of living, what the renewal of Trump’s expiring tax cuts would do to our already stratospheric levels of inequality, and what Trump’s affinity for foreign autocrats would mean for defenders, both foreign and domestic, of democracy. Despite the lip service that both Trump and J.D. Vance have given to the cause of American workers, their policy toward organized labor will surely be that of Trump’s designated “efficiency czar” Elon Musk, whose call for the immediate firing of striking workers who seek a voice on the job was echoed by Trump in their two-hour meandering discourse on X.
Despite Trump’s drumbeating for economic nationalism, the tariffs he slapped on Chinese and other imported products during his presidency did nothing to jump-start a return of American manufacturing. To the contrary, it was President Biden’s turn to industrial policy that prompted the first measurable increase in factory construction that the nation has seen in decades. The tax credits going to companies that mean to build electric vehicles or computer chips or other elements of a green economy increased domestic factory construction by more than 70 percent over previous years.
Likewise with infrastructure. Despite Trump’s annual proclamations of “infrastructure weeks,” the dollar amounts he asked Congress to provide for rebuilding roads, bridges, airports, and the digital infrastructure were so meager that Congress could never construct a plausible program with them. Biden, by contrast, won sizable bipartisan support for the massive repair job that the nation needs, and without which a renewed industrial sector (or any economic sector, for that matter) cannot flourish.
Evan Vucci/AP Photo
Trump adviser Stephen Miller
Trump’s personal stake in the quiet movement of money across borders may also stand at odds with his vows of economic nationalism. It’s unimaginable that Trump would do anything to impede the characteristically concealed and laundered shifting of vast sums of money from country to country, autocrat to autocrat, that has become a regular feature of global capitalism. Indeed, it’s a good deal more imaginable that Trump might personally benefit from such movements of money. The insufficiently explored allegation that Trump was offered $10 million in cash from the government of Egypt five days before he became president suggests that, well, he might.
Trump’s version of economic nationalism focuses, like his immigration policy, on walling off the country to outsiders. But he is too existentially bound to his personalized version of laissez-faire capitalism—namely, tax cuts and deregulation—to do what’s required for a more vibrant and egalitarian domestic economy. During his presidency, the funds needed to rebuild industry and infrastructure were instead showered on corporations, whose taxes were cut from 35 percent to 21 percent. Now Trump is proposing to lower those tax rates even more. By contrast, industrial-policy investments have become a hallmark of today’s Democratic Party, and would surely be prominent in a Kamala Harris administration.
Harris has made clear that if elected, she’ll augment Biden’s signature investments in the industrial and transportation sectors with major investments in what she terms “the care economy”: helping working- and middle-class families find affordable child care and elder care, permanently expanding the Child Tax Credit, and enacting paid family and medical leave. She’s also broadened her economic agenda to include tax breaks for small businesses. Like her care economy package, this is a cross-class pitch that Latinos and Asian Americans in particular (both groups that have high levels of small-business formation) might welcome.
This economic stool, however, still needs a third leg: a commitment to a “build economy” that surpasses Harris’s vow to have the government aid in the construction of three million new homes over the next decade. To address the anxieties of working-class men—a demographic where Democrats desperately need to do better—she should pledge to create an outreach agency funneling willing workers into the construction unions’ apprenticeship programs, with appropriations to enlarge those programs, and tax credits and other funding to raise the homebuilding target well above three million. That would be both good long-term policy and good long-term and short-term politics.
Though the funding for all these long-overdue investments in working- and middle-class America will come from higher taxes on the rich and corporations, my colleague David Dayen has pointed out that some leading Democrats have already committed themselves to tax cuts of their own. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, for instance, has called for ending the limit on the federal income tax deduction for state and local taxes based on property assessments. Such cuts would constrict Harris’s ability to fund her expansions of assistance to working- and middle-class Americans. As president, Harris would have to rein in some of her colleagues to deliver on her promises. And should she win, it’s those promises that will have been a clear factor in her victory.
But other factors will be in play as well.
PERHAPS THE STRONGEST CARD IN HARRIS’S HAND is the 21st-century version of Warren Harding’s 1920 Republican presidential campaign: Her election would mark a return to “normalcy.” To be sure, for Trump and the MAGA faithful, the presidency of a Black-Asian woman who is also a mainstream Democrat has nothing “normal” about it. To them, it signals the further fall of America into something new, unsettling, and subversive of the white and patriarchal America of whose restoration they dream.
But both non-MAGA Americans and swing voters alike know that a second Trump stint inescapably brings with it a loud and unending war on enemies both real and imagined, a constant disruption of the civic order through his lashings out at those against whom he harbors a raging fury for political and personal affronts. That’s why Joe Biden used this normalcy frame successfully in 2020: He called it a battle for the soul of America.
Harris similarly offers the prospect of a White House not wrapped up in the private hatreds of a wounded narcissist or the public hatreds of a casual bigot. Her claim to normalcy is that she’ll do the public’s business minus the obsessive personal insecurities that structure everything Trump does.
Trump’s enemies list is both dangerous and ridiculous; his inability to keep his daily rants from sounding ridiculous can lead a wearied public to discount the dangers they present. But in a second Trump term, the danger will be far greater than it was in the first. A second Trump administration will be almost uniformly staffed with aides who share his bigotries and hatreds, and have no hesitation wielding the power of the state, as untrammeled as the Trumpian courts will allow, against these “enemies.” One of those aides will be Stephen Miller. Trump’s Himmler.
That’s what’s at stake in this election.
