And The Miller, He Has Served Us Worse Than That

Stephen Miller became White House Chief of Staff yesterday, replacing Susie Wiles.

Many people are probably nonplussed by Miller's promotion.  True, he has engineered the deportation of immigrants and is most obviously responsible for the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, along with many others, but a lot of them probably see Miller's elevation as being little more than a change of title and an addition of minor responsibilities, mostly just running the White House staff and delegating authority.  They would be severely mistaken.

Contrary to popular wisdom, the White House chief of staff, not the Vice Presidency, is the second most powerful position in the nation.  The White House chief of staff oversees policy implementation and directs the agenda.  And Miller's agenda is both in line with Trump's agenda and more extreme at the same time.  Trump obviously felt a need to shake up the staff after the Republican losses in last week's midterm elections, and he found Wiles to be ineffective, but only revenge against the voters and the Democratic Party can explain why he chose someone as fascistic and as ruthless as Miller to implement his agenda.

This is especially concerning in light of Trump's advanced age and advanced dementia, because, well, all you have to do is look at Ronald Reagan's two terms.  President Reagan had gotten somewhat discombobulated after the 1981 assassination attempt against him.  Much of Reagan's successes in his first term were the work of White House Chief of Staff James Baker, who had visibly aged in four years.  Art Buchwald famously said that he wanted Baker to admit that he was the real President with an actor playing the part.  Baker was so exhausted that he switched jobs with Treasury Secretary Donald Regan at the start of Reagan's second term, allowing a man whose name was two letters different from the President to run the country to and make people who were corrected for calling President Reagan "President Regan" realize they were right all along.  When Regan was ousted over his handling of the Iran-contra affair and his failure to shield the President from the fallout, former U.S. Senator Howard Baker of Tennessee replaced him, giving up his plans to run for President in 1988 and, as the joke went, become President in 1987.  Reagan's last chief of staff was Kenneth Duberstein, whom I called our first Jewish President.

Miller, apparently, is our second.

My point - and I do have one - is this: White House chiefs of staff have exponential power in running a presidential administration when the President himself is limited in his abilities due to age or overall health - or just plain lazy, a charge Former House Speaker Tip O'Neill justifiably made against President Reagan.  But what do you do when the President is not only a psychopath, and a demented old psychopath at that, is managed by a 41-year-old psychopathic far-right chief of staff at the height of his cognitive abilities?

Even if Trump weren't so old and demented, Miller would still be a problem.  George H.W. Bush was a far more attentive President than either Reagan or Trump, and he was greatly skilled in foreign policy, but for the first half of his single term, he let White House Chief of Staff and former New Hampshire governor John Sununu direct domestic policy, and because Sununu was an arch-conservative, we're still dealing with his legacy today.  We don't have a dedicated commitment to fighting climate change because of how Sununu handled the issue - or didn't handle the issue - as Bush the Elder's right-hand right-wing man. 

Trump has none of Reagan's vision or Bush the Elder's seriousness.  As a result, Miller will likely have more power than any White House chief of staff in recent memory.

Be afraid.  Be very afraid.