Wednesday, February 25, 2026
Trump’s 2026 State of the Union: A Master Class in Demagoguery
by MARK GABRISH CONLAN • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
On February 24, 2026 President Donald Trump gave his State of the Union Address, the second of his second term. Admittedly, the first one from March 4, 2025 was given the historically pettifogging title “Address to a Joint Session of Congress” on the ground that a newly elected (or re-elected) President could not be fulfilling his constitutional mandate to “from time to time give Congress Information on the State of the Union.” But in both these speeches, Trump not only directly insulted the opposition party, he made clear his determination to govern the country alone, without input from Congress, the judiciary, or the American people, which judging by opinion polls are increasingly unhappy with his job performance.
Trump started speaking at 9:11 p.m. Eastern time. Within four minutes, he’d already indulged himself no fewer than three times in one of his most annoying rhetorical quirks: saying that something he really likes is the greatest the world has ever seen. It was a fascinating speech from a pathological standpoint, though I’m not saying that to hint that Trump is mentally ill or suffering from age-related dementia the way his father, Fred Trump, did with Alzheimer’s disease. Trump is actually a brilliant public speaker, and in the State of the Union he was mostly at the top of his game, though he did seem to tire as the speech wound on and on and on (107 minutes, the longest on record, breaking the 99-minute record Trump himself set last year).
Trump indulged to the max one of the tricks his Republican predecessor Ronald Reagan brought to his State of the Union speeches: inviting a litany of heroic Americans to sit in the audience and be called out by name. Trump went Reagan one better and actually pinned the Congressional Medal of Honor on two World War II servicemembers, both nearing 100 years of age, during the speech. He also gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Connor Hellebuyck, goaltender for the U.S. Winter Olympics hockey team, which had just won the gold medal in overtime two days earlier. Trump had extended invitations to both the men’s and women’s hockey team, but the women’s team had wisely turned him down because of scheduling conflicts.
One got the impression from the all-white faces that turned up when Trump introduced the men’s hockey team that Trump picked them to honor because hockey is one of the few sports left played mostly, if not exclusively, by white people. In fact, that was the tone throughout the speech. Trump, both literally and figuratively the son of a Ku Klux Klan member (Fred Trump was one of seven people arrested at a Klan rally in New York City on Memorial Day, 1927), picked a lineup of heroes to honor that, with two exceptions (a Venezuelan dissident politician named Enrique Gonzalez and his niece Alejandra), were all white.
Immigrants Are to Trump What Jews Were to Hitler
Throughout his State of the Union speech, Trump repeatedly demonized what he called “illegal aliens” and said they were at the root of all America’s ills – when he wasn’t blaming them on the Democrats and his political opponents generally. As he did throughout the speech on issue after issue, Trump proclaimed victory; he said, “In the past nine months, zero illegal aliens have been admitted to the United States.” While he then paid lip service to documented immigrants – he said, “We will always allow people to come in legally, people that will love our country and will work hard to maintain our country” – what that means in practice is, “We will always allow people to come in who are white, speak English, and have politics similar to mine.”
The one group of people to whom the second Trump administration gave blanket refugee status to were Afrikaners, white Dutch-descended South Africans who claim the current Black government of South Africa is discriminating against them. The claim is false; in fact, as part of the peaceful settlement ending South Africa’s apartheid regime and transitioning the country to majority rule, the Black South Africans had to guarantee they would maintain white ownership of most of the land and much of the country’s economy. That’s been a flash point of discontent for many Black South Africans ever since the change happened in 1990, in which they’ve seen most of the country’s wealth remain in white hands even though state power is now held by Blacks.
In his State of the Union speech, Trump boasted that the day before “I hosted a ceremony with Americans who lost their treasured loved ones to the scourge of illegal immigration. People came into our country. How we allowed this to happen with our open borders. These are the angel moms and families that for decades our government betrayed and our media totally ignored. Totally. It was terrible. Hard to believe, actually.” One particularly horrific case he cited was that of Iryna Zarutska, an 18-year-old Ukrainian woman who, Trump said, “was riding home on the train when a deranged monster who had been arrested over a dozen times and was released through no cash bail, stood up and viciously slashed a knife through her neck and body. No one will ever forget. … She had escaped a brutal war, only to be slain by a hardened criminal set free to kill in America [who] came in through open borders.”
There’s just one problem with that story: according to the British newspaper The Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/25/trump-state-of-the-union-factcheck), Iryna Zarutska’s alleged killer, DeCarlos Brown, Jr., was not an undocumented immigrant. “Trump has long insisted that non-citizens are responsible for violent crime throughout the U.S.,” wrote the Guardian staff. “Data show that relative to undocumented immigrants, U.S.-born citizens are more than twice as likely to be arrested for violent crimes, and 2.5 times more likely to be arrested for drug crimes.” But Trump has never let the facts get in the way of his anti-immigrant jihad.
One of the low points in Trump’s war on immigrants has been his attacks on the Somali community in Minnesota. While at least he didn’t accuse Somalis of stealing and eating people’s pet dogs and cats the way he did in his September 2024 debate with Kamala Harris – which, as I wrote then, was exactly the sort of scurrilous group libel against Jews the Nazis used to “justify” their mass murder – he did say that in Minnesota, “members of the Somali community have pillaged an estimated $19 billion from the American taxpayer. We have all the information. And in actuality, the number is much higher than that. And California, Massachusetts, Maine and many other states are even worse.” (Other estimates put the amount of the alleged fraud at $9 billion.)
During the occupation of Minneapolis by agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) in early 2026, which resulted in the killings of American citizens Renée Good and Alex Pretti, Trump justified his refusal to allow the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to cooperate with local law enforcement to investigate the Good and Pretti slayings by citing the fraud allegations. He also claimed, without evidence, that Minnesota had rigged the Presidential elections all three times he ran so he officially lost the state when he “really” should have won it. Trump said he would create a task force to investigate “waste, fraud, and abuse” in federally funded social service programs and put his vice-president, J. D. Vance, in charge of it. Like Ronald Reagan, he claimed there was so much “waste, fraud, and abuse” in these programs that ending it could balance the federal budget. (Hint: it didn’t work for Reagan.)
Trump also used the fraud allegations against the Somali community in Minnesota as an object lesson in why immigrants from certain parts of the world should never be let into the United States. “The Somali pirates who ransacked Minnesota remind us that there are large parts of the world where bribery, corruption, and lawlessness are the norm, not the exception,” Trump said. “Importing these cultures through unrestricted immigration and open borders brings us problems right here to the USA. And it is the American people who pay the price in higher medical bills, car insurance rates, rent, taxes, and perhaps most importantly, crime. We will take care of this problem. We're going to take care of this problem. We are not playing games.”
Trump’s Whack-a-Mole Game on Tariffs
Donald Trump delivered his State of the Union speech just four days after the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated his signature economic initiative: the willy-nilly imposition of tariffs on just about every country in the world under the so-called “economic emergency” provisions of a 1977 law, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). The day the justices announced their decision, which was 6-3 and included three Republican justices, two of them appointed by Trump in his first term, Trump was furious. He said the six majority justices were “just being fools and lapdogs for the RINO’s [‘Republicans in Name Only’] and the radical left Democrats.” About the two justices Trump appointed who joined the majority, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett, Trump said, “I think it’s an embarrassment to their families.”
Trump was only marginally less combative towards the Supreme Court in his State of the Union address than he’d been in his impromptu press conference four days before. “Many of the wars I’ve settled were because of the threat of tariffs,” Trump said on February 24, adding that his tariffs “will remain in place under fully approved and tested alternative legal statutes. And they have been tested for a long time. They're a little more complex, but they're actually probably better — leading to a solution that will be even stronger than before. Congressional action will not be necessary. It's already time-tested and approved. And as time goes by, I believe the tariffs, paid for by foreign countries, will, like in the past, substantially replace the modern-day system of income tax, taking a great financial burden off the people that I love.”
There you have Trump’s tariff policy in the proverbial nutshell. Instead of paying attention to the Court majority’s holding that he doesn’t have the power under the Constitution to impose tariffs unilaterally, he’s going to play a game of whack-a-mole. He’ll keep finding new statutes on the books (a number of which were already helpfully pointed out to him by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the only Trump appointee who dissented) he can use to impose tariffs willy-nilly without Congressional approval. “Congressional action will not be necessary,” he boasted, adding that he hopes that the income from tariffs will enable him and future Republican governments to abolish the income tax altogether and fund the federal government almost exclusively through tariff revenue, as was the case before 1913 when the U.S. enacted its first federal income tax.
The SAVE America Act: Trump’s Secret Weapon for Perpetual Power
Quite a lot of Trump’s critics are holding out hope that the American democratic experiment will fulfill its purpose once again and vote Trump and the Republicans in the MAGA (“Make America Great Again”) coalition out of power. All too many hosts on MS NOW (what used to be MS-NBC) recite current polls showing how unpopular Trump is with the American people overall, on the economy, and even on immigration, Trump’s signature issue. But the hopes that the American people can vote for a Democratic Congress to constrain Trump after 2026 and replace him with a Democrat in 2028 are being trashed by a truly diabolical piece of proposed legislation to which Trump, of course, gave a full-throated endorsement to in his State of the Union speech.
It's called the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, or “SAVE America” as its proponents label it. It would impose a nationwide voter identification law, but that’s only the tip of the iceberg. It would require every American voter to provide proof of citizenship status both when they register to vote in the first place and every time they cast a ballot. According to the U.S. State Department, valid documents for proving citizenship include a birth certificate, a U.S. passport, a consular report of birth abroad, a certificate of citizenship, or a naturalization certificate. Your standard photo ID, even if it’s a so-called “Real ID,” isn’t good enough.
Just about all these documents require fees, often substantial fees, to obtain. My husband Charles and I recently acquired U.S. passports, which cost us $165 each for the passports themselves plus an extra $20 for the identity photos. This has led some critics of the proposed law to claim it’s effectively a poll tax, in violation of the 24th Amendment to the Constitution, which reads, “The right of citizens of the United States to vote in any primary or other election for President or Vice President, for electors for President or Vice President, or for Senator or Representative in Congress, shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State by reason of failure to pay poll tax or other tax.”
It also has some other quirks, including the fact that not everybody’s name currently in use matches the one on their birth certificate. Women who take their husbands’ names after marriage, as the radical Right urges them to, would have to bring in their marriage license along with their birth certificate to verify their identity. So would people who have changed their names to conceal their identities from former partners who abused them during their relationships. It would come down particularly hard on Transgender people who have undergone gender transition – an especially fraught group of people under the Christian nationalist regime Trump and his minions want to impose on America. (See below for the truly weird case Trump cited to bolster his argument that children are being subjected to gender transition willy-nilly without their parents’ approval.)
The SAVE America Act would also restrict the use of mail ballots. While it wouldn’t abolish them altogether (though Trump did say in the State of the Union speech that he’d like there to be “no more crooked mail-in ballots except for illness, disability, military, or travel, none”), it would require that only mail-in ballots received before Election Day could be counted. Existing law in many states allows mail-in ballots to be counted if they arrive after Election Day as long as they were postmarked before then. This is a particularly sore point with Trump, who was leading in the 2020 Presidential election in same-day votes but lost several key states when mail-in ballots came in afterwards.
And perhaps the worst provision of all is it would require all states to send their entire voter rolls, including people’s actual registration forms, to the federal government. Trump has already been demanding this. His Justice Department seized all the ballots and registration forms for the 2020 election in Fulton County, Georgia, on a warrant signed by a judge in St. Louis, Missouri. And more recently Attorney General Pam Bondi told the state government of Minnesota that one of her conditions for ending the ICE and CBP occupation of Minneapolis was that they turn over all the state’s voter records to her department. Minnesota Governor Tim Walz rightfully refused, but the spectre of their personal information being forwarded to the feds could be enough to discourage a lot of potential voters from registering at all.
Indeed, the SAVE America act is a huge and far-reaching blueprint for massive voter suppression. Its real purpose is to use the spectre of non-citizen voting (which hardly ever happens; the total number of people convicted of illegal voting in 2024 because they weren’t American citizens is in two digits) to disqualify whole swaths of the electorate who wouldn’t be likely to vote Republican from being able to vote at all. Trump had already tried to rig the 2026 midterm election by having Republican-controlled states like Texas gerrymander their Congressional districts to elect more Republicans, but this failed because Democratic-controlled states like California fought back and redrew their maps to elect more Democrats. Now Trump and the Republicans are pushing this latest and far more extreme strategy of disenfranchisement.
Trump said that Democrats “don't want identification for the greatest privilege of them all: voting in America.” That sums up one of the biggest differences between the two major parties in the U.S. in 2026: Republicahs regard voting as a “privilege,” while Democrats call it a “right.”
The Curious Case of Sage Blair
One of the oddest passages in Trump’s State of the Union address was about Sage Blair, a 14-year-old from Virginia who allegedly reached puberty uncertain about their sexual and gender identity. Here’s how Trump told their story: “In 2021, Sage was 14 when school officials in Virginia sought to socially transition her to a new gender, treating her as a boy and hiding it from her parents. Hard to believe, isn't it? Before long, a confused Sage ran away from home. After she was found in a horrific situation in Maryland, a left-wing judge refused to return Sage to her parents because they did not immediately state that their daughter was their son. Sage was thrown into an all-boys state home and suffered terribly for a long time.”
A post by John Russell on the Queer-friendly Web site lgbtnation.com (https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2026/02/invited-an-ex-trans-christian-student-to-the-sotu-yesterday-who-is-she/) told a more complicated version of Sage’s story. First of all, the woman who attended Trump’s State of the Union speech with Sage is not her mother, but her grandmother Michele Blair, a radical-Right Christian activist who legally adopted Sage when Sage was two. “Michele Blair … sued the Appomattox County School Board, several district employees, and a Maryland public defender in August 2023,” Russell reported. “Blair’s lawsuit cites the ‘“distress” about her body’ Sage experienced ‘with the ‘onset of puberty in 2019,’ which allegedly included hallucinations, depression, eating disorders, and self-harm.
The lawsuit claims that Blair supported Sage’s gender-nonconforming “dress and interests” when they started high school at Appomattox County High School (ACHS) in August 2021. Around the same time, Sage was diagnosed with “‘severe gender dysphoria’ and related symptoms.” The same day, Sage indicated to ACHS counselor Dena Olsen, who is named as a defendant in the lawsuit, that they identified as a boy and was told they could use the school’s boys’ restroom. Sage also reportedly expressed a desire to use he/him pronouns and the name Draco, and allegedly told Olsen and another counselor, Avery Via (also named as a defendant), that their parents were not supportive of their gender identity.
From then on Sage’s story, as reported by Russell, became truly horrific. Sage said they were subjected to multiple instances of bullying and assault at high school when they were identifying as male and using the first name “Draco.” According to their lawsuit, Sage decided to run away out of fear of how Michele might react if she found out about their gender identity, which in turn led Sage to be victimized again, this time by a male human trafficker who kidnaped Sage, took them to Washington, D.C. and Maryland, and allowed them to be drugged and raped by multiple adult men. Sage’s attorney, Maryland public defender Aneesa Khan, had Sage placed in a Maryland Department of Juvenile Services facility for boys, where the abuse started all over again. Sage escaped and fell into the trap of yet another abuser who took Sage to Texas, where they were “raped, drugged, starved, and tortured” until rescued by state police.
“But today, all of that is behind them,” Trump said in his State of the Union speech. “Because Sage is a proud and wonderful young woman with a full ride scholarship to Liberty University. Sage and Rachelle, please stand up. And thank you for your great bravery.” The university she’s attending is a dead giveaway about how she’s being used by the radical Right to advance their anti-Trans agenda. Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia was co-founded by the late Rev. Jerry Falwell in 1971. Control passed to Falwell’s oldest son, Jerry Falwell, Jr. upon his father’s death in 2007, but allegations of sexual misconduct against Falwell, Jr. led the trustees to replace him with his brother Jonathan in 2023.
Sage Blair’s regrettable and tragic case has become a cause célèbre among anti-Trans activists in particular and the radical Right in general. One part of Michele’s lawsuit was thrown out of court in 2024, and the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that dismissal in 2025. Michele’s other lawsuit, alleging that Sage’s high school violated their rights under Title IX of the 1964 Civil Rights Act by acting with “deliberate indifference” to the threats Sage was being subjected to, is still pending. Beginning in 2023, Republicans in the Virginia legislature have regularly introduced bills called “Sage’s Law,” which would require that Virginia high schools immediately inform their parents or guardians whenever a student comes out as Trans.
Trump’s State of the Union address was a blueprint for the America he and his supporters want to see. It’s one in which the vote is restricted as much as possible to well-to-do white people while Blacks are sent to the back of the bus, Latinos live in constant fear of deportation without trial or any other legal process, women are sent back to what the Nazis called “Kinder, Küche, Kirche” (“children, kitchen, church”), and Queer and especially Trans people live in a continual state of terror every moment of their lives. It’s also one in which an unholy alliance of politicians and businesspeople run the economy with absolute control, and the environment is continually plundered for short-term profit until the earth finally rebels and becomes uninhabitable for humans.
Wednesday, February 18, 2026
"Washington Week" Profiles Donald Trump's Dark Eminence, Stephen Miller, Friday, February 13
On Friday, February 13 – an appropriate date – PBS’s long-running public-affairs program Washington Week did a show-length profile of Stephen Miller, the dark eminence behind Donald Trump’s jihad against immigrants in general and immigrants of color in particular. Here is a full transcript (done by me, not the network) of a show that dances around the obvious reality that, like his boss, Miller is a thoroughgoing racist and white supremacist who is trying to remake America as a white-dominated Christian nationalist state. As I was preparing this post, news broke that Stephen Miller sent out a memo calling for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to involve itself directly in the 2026 midterm elections, on the pretext that they are hunting down hundreds of thousands of naturalized U.S. citizens whom they accuse of voting before they became citizens. As part of this effort, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said DHS has to make sure “we have the right people voting, electing the right leaders to lead this country,” a thinly veiled threat to do whatever they can to ensure that Republicans keep control of both houses of Congress despite the growing unpopularity of Trump and the Republican agenda. -- M.G.C., 2/18/26
“Washington Week with The Atlantic” transcript, February 13, 2026
Few people in Washington have more power and influence than Stephen Miller. He’s the architect of the Trump administration’s hardline immigration policy, and he’s the president’s enforcer. Moderator Jeffrey Goldberg discusses the beliefs and the record of Stephen Miller with Leigh Ann Caldwell of Puck, Zolan Kanno-Youngs of The New York Times and McKay Coppins and Ashley Parker of The Atlantic.
TRANSCRIPT
Jeffrey Goldberg: Few people in Washington today have more power and influence than Stephen Miller. He’s the architect of the Trump administration’s hard-line immigration policy. And he’s the President’s enforcer, making sure that the MAGA elite and the Cabinet stay true to Trump’s vision. Tonight, a close look at the beliefs and the record of Stephen Miller, next.
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Announcer 1: Additional funding is provided by Koo and Patricia Yuen through The Yuen Foundation, committed to bridging cultural differences in our communities; Sandra and Carl DeLay-Magnuson; Rose Hirschel and Andy Shreeves; Robert and Susan Rosenbaum; Charles Hamowy, through the Charles Hamowy Fund; Steve and Marilyn Kerman; Leonard and Norma Klorfine; and by contributions to your PBS stations from viewers like you. Thank you. Once again, from the David M. Rubinstein studio at WETA in Washington, D.C., editor-in-chief of The Atlantic and moderator Jeffrey Goldberg.
Jeffrey Goldberg: Good evening, and welcome to Washington Week. We’re going to do something a little bit different tonight. We’re going to try to understand some of the most important and disruptive Trump policies through the prism of one aide: Stephen Miller. He’s no ordinary aide, as you all know. He’s been with Trump since his improbable run as the 21st century’s most important political leader, and no one seems to understand the President and his impulses better than Miller.
He's also a revolutionary. His ideas come from far outside what we used to think of as the Republican mainstream. And he’s a vociferous, uncompromising advocate for policies that only a few years ago would have been deemed unworkable or extreme.
Joining me tonight are four reporters who have covered Miller for years and know him well. Leigh Ann Caldwell is the chief Washington correspondent at Puck. McKay Coppins is a staff writer at The Atlantic. Zolan Kanno-Youngs is a White House correspondent at The New York Times. And Ashley Parker is a staff writer, also at The Atlantic.
Thank you all for joining me. All of you have covered Miller for years. You’ve written a lot about Miller. Ashley, very recently; Zolan, very recently. But I want to just start at the beginning. McKay, why don’t I just go to you because you wrote a sort of definitive early profile of Stephen Miller in 2018. So where did he come from? Where did his politics develop? Give us a little sense of the forces that created this Stephen Miller we know of today, before he entered the general political consciousness.
McKay Coppins, staff writer, The Atlantic: Yeah, I think the thing that most struck me talking to him years ago when I was profiling him was how much of his political world view was forged in opposition to his upbringing. Right? He grew up in Santa Monica, in a family of very well-off progressive Jewish parents, and was surrounded by what he would describe as “a bubble of progressive affluence,” right?
He went to a high school where they would have, you know, multi-racial retreats and multi-cultural festivals. And his first exposure to conservative politics was actually reading, on a lark, Guns and Ammo magazine, which then led him to people like Rush Limbaugh, Larry Elder, David Horowitz, the kind of prominent conservative talk-radio hosts and polemicists of the time. And you can see from the very beginning, as a teenager in a very liberal high school, him kind of mimicking the political style of those people.
Jeffrey Goldberg: Wait, wait. You mentioned the high school. Just watch with me for one moment a clip of – this is Stephen Miller running for student government. Watch this:
Stephen Miller (high-school clip): Am I the only one who is sick and tired of being told to pick up my trash, when we have plenty of janitors who are paid to do it for us?
Jeffrey Goldberg: So, first of all, the Che Guevara look. Really, he doesn’t do that anymore. He’s really into the silk suits now, or something. But you wrote – part of your profile was focused on the fact that he’s an expert troll. And so in your study of him, and your conversations with him back then, was he just trolling his liberal friends, or his liberal adversaries? Or was that something more serious?
McKay Coppins: This was actually the mystery of Stephen Miller to everybody who ever knew him in every stage of his life: in high school. Later at Duke, when he went to college. He was – everyone was trying to figure out whether this was performance art or whether he really believed it. And he would – that was a classic example of teenage Stephen Miller. But he would write columns for the Duke student newspaper picking culture-war fights on campus.
What I think – where I landed, because I asked him about this a number of times – is at first he’d say, “No, no, no, I believe in everything I say.” But then he at one point said, “I do believe in constructive controversy for the sake of enlightenment.” Those were his words. And I think that gets at something fundamental about him, which is he has always believed that there is a role for provocation and performance in politics.
Jeffrey Goldberg: Right. So, Ashley, let me ask you this: does he go further, rhetorically, than he actually believes? Or, when you’re listening to him, especially in this second Trump term, is what he saying what he actually believes? Is he just trying to provoke, and then he’ll try to bring it back a little bit?
Ashley Parker, staff writer, The Atlantic: Again, I think at this point both things are true. But we have sort of come full circle to where the caricature has become the character, and it’s hard to differentiate. You see in some of these early high-school videos of Stephen Miller, him sort of occasionally break the fourth wall to kind of do a kid-faced toothy grin, or kind of almost smirk at himself as if he can’t believe he said what he just said.
But in reporting my profile, one of the people I spoke with was Steve Bannon, who recounted, I mean, early on Stephen Miller would open for Donald Trump in 2015, in 2016, in that campaign at his rallies. And Stephen – Steve Bannon, who again loves all the incendiary stuff – recalled, saying to Stephen Miller, “Look, the main point of being an opening act is so the main guy doesn’t have to top you, right? You have to stop saying these things, because Trump can’t come out there and beat it.”
And so people have told me in the White House, one of the things they like about him, perhaps counterintuitively, is that he is incredibly dogmatic. That intensity – maybe not the trolling, but that intensity and the passion, is the same behind closed doors and in the Oval Office as you see in front of the TV cameras. And so whether you agree with him or not, you sort of always know where he stands, which is –
Jeffrey Goldberg: Right.
Ashley Parker: – on the far extreme when it comes to immigration.
Jeffrey Goldberg: Zolan, you’ve watched this for a while. How has his ideology shifted? And we’ll talk about the linchpins of the ideology in a minute, but has he shifted? Has he become more extreme? Because obviously the second Trump term is very much unlike the first Trump term.
Zolan Kanno-Youngs, White House correspondent, The New York Times: Sure, sure. I actually think from everyone I’ve talked to that Stephen’s ideology has actually been rather consistent. He’s been more visible and more powerful in the second term, you know. In the first term, he might have been limited in many ways to kind of being the architect, overseeing immigration policy in the Department of Homeland Security. And he was a speechwriter, of course, getting involved in comms as well.
Now you have somebody who is taking that ideology, that was formed through his upbringing, through working with Michele Bachmann, now to imposing that on domestic policy [and] foreign policy as well. His role has expanded. If I could also follow up on the previous subject, I think that the rhetoric and the provoking, Stephen also sees that as key to implementing his policy, right? I mean, in the first term –
Jeffrey Goldberg: Shelling the beach in advance of the actual policy roles?
Zolan Kanno-Youngs: And he believes that America – you often hear of America having a role as a sanctuary for immigrants, being a pro-immigrant country. He is trying to change the perception in the nation towards immigrants, to basically make it so that the pendulum of politics shifts, and there’s more of a tolerance towards the policies that he’s trying to implement.
Jeffrey Goldberg: Leigh Ann, talk about – well, we know he was an expert at provocation. He was a serious conservative, more conservative than Republicans at the time as he was growing up. He comes to Washington. Talk about his course through Congress until he meets Trump.
Leigh Ann Caldwell, chief Washington correspondent, Puck: Yes, as you said, he worked for Michele Bachmann, who is this –
Jeffrey Goldberg: Remind us.
Leigh Ann Caldwell: Michele Bachmann is somebody who actually ran for President in 2008. She was a fringe candidate, an outlier, and she was also very provocative. She crashed and burned very quickly. He –
Jeffrey Goldberg: She was a little bit ahead of her time, in terms of Lauren Boebert before, a Lauren Boebert kind of person.
Leigh Ann Caldwell: She was kind of pre-Trump, yeah, absolutely. But then he found a home with Jeff Sessions, Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, who was also very anti-immigrant. And ideologically, they were on the same page. Jeff Sessions was adamantly involved in [opposing] comprehensive immigration reform during the Bush and early Obama years – the Bush years, really – and trying to kill it. And Stephen Miller was instrumental in that.
He had a reputation on the Hill – he was a comms director at the time – of being way outside the mainstream. He would also, in internal comms meetings with his fellow Republican comms directors, would provocate in the same way he does publicly. People used to just roll their eyes and dismiss him.
Now, he is probably the most powerful non-elected official in this country, and you still see actually that tension on Capitol Hill with Stephen Miller. People remember Stephen Miller then, and there’s a lot of grumbling on Capitol Hill, even among Republicans, who think that Stephen Miller’s policies are going to far and will hurt them.
Jeffrey Goldberg: Right.
Ashley Parker: It’s hard just briefly to overstate – I covered the Gang of Eight immigration bill for The New York Times as a Congressional correspondent. And this was sort of the last time that immigration, bipartisan immigration [legislation], had any real momentum, right? You had four Republicans, including Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio; four Democrats.
You had the tentative, cautious, but you had the buy-in of the tech community, the business community, the labor community, the activist community, the Hispanic community. And the reason that bill essentially sank and did not come up for a vote in the House was single-handedly because of Jeff Sessions and Stephen Miller, working alongside Breitbart News, to kill it.
Leigh Ann Caldwell: And remember, just during the end of the Biden administration, when James Lankford was working on a bipartisan bill to close the borders, and then Trump came in as a potential candidate and killed it. Stephen Miller had a role in that, too.
Jeffrey Goldberg: Right. Well, let’s talk about Sessions and the jump from Sessions to Trump. Obviously Sessions – we don’t have to rehearse this one at length, but [he] was a Trump loyalist and Trump turned on him because Sessions appointed the special prosecutor, etc. How did Miller make the move to the Big Man? I mean, it’s a classic Washington story, also? It’s not that unusual. But did he discard Jeff Sessions when –
Leigh Ann Caldwell: So, so, not yet. What happened is in January 2016 Miller was one of the very first people to come and leave Jeff Sessions’s office and go to Trump’s campaign.
Jeffrey Goldberg: And this is still when Trump was very improbable.
Leigh Ann Caldwell: Yes, very improbable. Before the Iowa caucuses, a good month before then. But Jeff Sessions, a month later, was the very first person, first Senator, to endorse Donald Trump. And so they were still very close, working together to promote this enigma of Donald Trump.
Jeffrey Goldberg: Interesting.
Leigh Ann Caldwell: But, you know, fast-forward to Jeff Sessions being Attorney General; Jeff Sessions recusing himself into the Russia investigation; Jeff Sessions losing his job and being fired because of that; and the person left standing is Stephen Miller, who discarded Jeff Sessions at that moment.
Jeffrey Goldberg: Right. When you say “discarded,” what do you mean?
Leigh Ann Caldwell: There was no public statement of Stephen Miller supporting or saying anything nice about Jeff Sessions in that moment. And then a person close to Stephen Miller at that time said no one was more furious at Jeff Sessions than Stephen Miller.
Jeffrey Goldberg: I mean, this goes to another question about Stephen Miller and his view of a powerful executive. I want to get to that, but let’s stay on the immigration views. There’s a tweet – and he tweets a lot, as we know, and he tweets very frankly about his views. There’s a tweet:
Stephen Miller [via X, nèe Twitter, December 27, 2025]: Someone should write an alternate historical novel where Americans are the first to master the automobile, the first in flight, the first to harness the atom, the first to land on the moon – but just keep going and never open our borders to the entire Third World for 60 years. For those who don’t know, the U.S. had negative migration for the half-century between the first non-stop transatlantic flight and the moon landing.
Jeffrey Goldberg: Basically, what he’s saying is American innovation all happened because white men – I mean, that’s the interpretation here – did all these things, and then the country lost focus because it started letting in the quote-“Third World.” McKay, come back to California.
McKay Coppins: Because I think that’s crucial to understanding his fixation on immigration.
Jeffrey Goldberg: Yeah, because this is all – first, it’s ahistorical. Americans invented plenty of things at the same time as immigrants were coming into the country. In fact, many of the people who were immigrants invented those things, as new Americans. But let’s go back to the visceral feeling against immigrants.
McKay Coppins: Yeah, I mean, obviously none of us can read his mind. But to understand how these views formed, you have to understand the post-9/11 politics on the Right, in southern California in particular. Post-9/11, there was a general rise in xenophobia, fear of Muslims, outsiders, foreigners. We had been through this national trauma. It’s understandable, to a certain extent.
But Miller’s particular fixation on immigration was really born out of the Right-wing media ecosystem in California at the time, which was always rotating around immigration issues. You know, I think if he had been born in Cleveland or Montana or even, you know, Washington, D.C., I think it would have been a very different story.
But the people that he idolized, the local talk-radio people on the Right, the kind of group of conservatives that he fell in with, were always talking about immigration. And so –
Jeffrey Goldberg: Extremely negatively.
McKay Coppins: Of course.
Jeffrey Goldberg: The only reason I say that is because Ronald Reagan, the greatest Republican in the history of California, was not in that camp.
McKay Coppins: No, of course. Right. Something had shifted in the decades after Reagan. Some of it had to do with the Right-wing backlash against George W. Bush’s attempt to find a grand immigration compromise. But because he was always on the far Right of the Republican Party, and because he came from California, immigration was kind of a natural wedge issue that he latched onto.
Jeffrey Goldberg: So what was it? Growing up in southern California, he saw Hispanics, the Latino population, as just too big; trying to dominate white America?
Zolan Kanno-Youngs: There’s sort of two things. You’re talking about the sort of post-9/11 Republican backlash against real efforts to actually have some sort of comprehensive immigration reform. What you saw was sort of a xenophobic view where you generalize to many immigrants coming from the Middle East as national security threats. And you’ve seen that rhetoric replicated by this administration.
But then when it comes to also immigrants coming from Central and Latin America, you’ve had – and this still exists today – this real push by conservatives that these are, this is economic competition with people who are born in the United States. Now, of course, economic studies do undercut that. They show that immigrants broadly actually benefit the economy. But this is a prime example for the white grievance argument.
Jeffrey Goldberg: I want to stay on that for a second, because Stephen Miller is Jewish, and part of his family came over here 100 years ago as refugees from anti-Semitism in Europe. In your conversations with him, does that ever play into his understanding of the world, and his own background as a great-grandchild of immigrants?
McKay Coppins: I’m going to introduce one data point which may or may not be relevant, but he told me that one of the books that most shaped him was Wayne LaPierre’s book – head of the National Rifle Association (NRA). In that book, Wayne LaPierre makes the argument that the Holocaust and, I think he says Auschwitz, are prime examples of the need for Second Amendment rights.
You know, to make what you will of that argument, but if the Jewish people had been armed, they would have been able to stand up against this authoritarian genocidal regime. I think that he found a way early on to kind of meld his general Right-wing world view with his Jewish identity and background. I think it became a little more strained as he got deeper into Trump-era Right-wing politics and found himself swimming in waters that were, say, a little bit less friendly to Jews.
Jeffrey Goldberg: Yes, because there is an element of let’s call it the racialist far Right that doesn’t have fond feelings about Jews. Let me make just one brief editorial aside. I’m sorry, but this prompts this thought: I wish that the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto had had more guns back then, but I still think they would not have been able to defeat the German army. I mean it sounds like – it’s just a, like – put that aside from now. We’ll do a special episode about that. I’ll bring it up with Wayne LaPierre the next time he’s on the show.
Zolan Kanno-Youngs: But the thing I would just add to that, too, is when you look at Stephen Miller’s comments about immigration, he does have a very narrow sort of view of who – which immigrants are justified to be in the United States. And it’s not – it doesn’t always track with the law. If you go into a legal port of entry at the border, you have a legal process to come into the country.
He pushes back against that. He pushes back against the parole system the Biden administration started. They’ve revamped their refugee program to focus on English-speaking refugees coming into the U.S., and not from African and also Muslim-majority countries, too. So there’s a through-line there of who he thinks is deserving to be in the U.S.
Jeffrey Goldberg: So this is why South African Afrikaners are given privileges, the only people allowed into the country.
Zolan Kanno-Youngs: The only refugees that are automatically allowed in.
Jeffrey Goldberg: I want to talk a little bit about his power in the White House. I came into direct contact with this question last year during the Signal controversy. When I was in that chat, J. D. Vance, Marco Rubio, everyone else are in that chat room arguing back and forth about the utility of striking Yemen. And then Miller comes into the chat and writes:
“As I heard it, the President was clear: green light, but we soon make clear to Egypt and Europe what we expect in return. We also need to figure out how to enforce such a requirement. EG, if Europe doesn’t remunerate, then what? If the U.S. successfully restores freedom of navigation at great cost, there needs to be some further economic gain extracted in return.” (Pete Hegseth replied, “Agree.”)
And it shut down the debate. It shut down J. D. Vance. It kind of made me think, “Well, Stephen Miller is worth a half-hour on Washington Week,” if that’s the case that he’s so powerful. Talk about inside the White House, what kind of power Stephen Miller has.
Ashley Parker: It is kind of hard to overstate his power inside the Trump second term White House, in part because his purview is so much broader than just immigration, although it certainly includes immigration. It includes trade. It includes foreign policy. It includes national security. It includes education. The entire war on the quote-unquote “elite university system” Stephen Miller, in his free time, when he’s not dealing with immigration, is the architect of that,
Jeffrey Goldberg: Right.
Ashley Parker: And also it’s, you know, you were asking earlier about if his views have become more extreme. I think it’s instructive to understand him in some of the same ways we understand President Trump himself, which is that his views haven’t necessarily changed, but he used those – even more than Trump, in certain ways, Stephen Miller used those four years out of power to basically get better, stronger, faster, more ruthless.
And he understood the mistakes he made in the first term. Why the travel ban, you know, he wrote the first executive order, led to chaos at the airports, got struck down in the courts. This time he knows that if you care about being hard-line about immigration, it’s not just important to have your people at the Department of Homeland Security, although that is important.
But there’s certain positions at Health and Human Services where you want a strong ally with your point of view. There are certain jobs at the State Department, in the Western Hemisphere division. So he now knows all the levers of power.
Jeffrey Goldberg: But, Leigh Ann, let me ask you this. Minneapolis, Tom Homan comes in and says, “Well, we’re pulling out.” Obviously, this did not go well, certainly from a public-relations perspective, for the administration in Minneapolis, largely because of the two deaths caused by ICE [and CBP] agents, of protesters. Did he go – did Stephen Miller go too far this time?
Leigh Ann Caldwell: It seems that way. Yeah, I think that, a couple of things. On his standing in the White House, there was – he had a 40th birthday party that his wife, Katie Miller, hosted for him, back in the fall – or the summer, actually. Everybody who attended told me that they had never seen so many people in the administration in one place. It was every single Cabinet member/official, [Trump’s press secretary] Karoline Leavitt. Everyone was there.
Ashley Parker: You needed like a designated survivor to be put in place.
Leigh Ann Caldwell: Exactly, and it was a show of how important he is in this administration. It was also notable that there were no members of Congress there, except for the Speaker of the House. Which gets back to your question, “Did he go too far?” This is something that the President has got a lot of push-back on. Stephen Miller has been criticized very publicly by Democrats, and very privately by Republicans.
Jeffrey Goldberg: Although Senator Thom Tillis (R-North Carolina), a prominent Republican, does not like him at all, and has told the President that.
Leigh Ann Caldwell: Despises. Every single time he can publicly say how much he hates Stephen Miller, he does it. He can be talking about something totally different to a reporter, and he will bring up Stephen Miller.
Jeffrey Goldberg: He’s also retiring, which is interesting.
Leigh Ann Caldwell: He’s also retiring, but he does have a line to the President, and he’s told the President many times that Stephen Miller is doing him and the Republican Party no justice.
Zolan Kanno-Youngs: You did see something rare after the [Alex] Pretti shooting from Miller, which was him also sort of trying to clean it up and saying, “Well, look, I was getting information from CBP agents.” There was a period there where they tried to soften that language. That’s rare.
Jeffrey Goldberg: But, McKay, let me ask you this: what does he ultimately want? And, by the way, you have 30 seconds to answer that question.
McKay Coppins: Well, I think that he wants a lot. But I think that when it comes to immigration in particular, I think if you guys are right, he has made it very clear in my conversations that he wants to entirely reframe our understanding of our country as a nation of immigrants.
Jeffrey Goldberg: He’s basically in an argument with Emma Lazarus, in a way.
McKay Coppins: Right. I mean, there’s a key moment in the first term where he was asked about the placard at the base of the Statue of Liberty –
Jeffrey Goldberg: That’s Emma Lazarus. That’s the poem, right.
McKay Coppins: And he completely dismisses it, like disdainfully dismisses it. And I think like that just – that is his ideological project. He – if he leaves – if he can retire in a country that does not see immigrants as being welcome into this country, that does not see immigrants as part of the national story, he will be happy.
Jeffrey Goldberg: He’s a fascinating figure. Obviously, the most powerful non-elected official, I think we can all agree on that. More powerful than a Cabinet official. We’ll talk about him again and again, obviously, but that’s all the time we have for now. I want to thank our guests for joining me, and thank you at home for watching us. You can read Ashley’s profile on Stephen Miller by visiting theatlantic.com. I’m Jeffrey Goldberg. Good night from Washington.
“Washington Week with The Atlantic” transcript, February 13, 2026
Few people in Washington have more power and influence than Stephen Miller. He’s the architect of the Trump administration’s hardline immigration policy, and he’s the president’s enforcer. Moderator Jeffrey Goldberg discusses the beliefs and the record of Stephen Miller with Leigh Ann Caldwell of Puck, Zolan Kanno-Youngs of The New York Times and McKay Coppins and Ashley Parker of The Atlantic.
TRANSCRIPT
Jeffrey Goldberg: Few people in Washington today have more power and influence than Stephen Miller. He’s the architect of the Trump administration’s hard-line immigration policy. And he’s the President’s enforcer, making sure that the MAGA elite and the Cabinet stay true to Trump’s vision. Tonight, a close look at the beliefs and the record of Stephen Miller, next.
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Jeffrey Goldberg: Good evening, and welcome to Washington Week. We’re going to do something a little bit different tonight. We’re going to try to understand some of the most important and disruptive Trump policies through the prism of one aide: Stephen Miller. He’s no ordinary aide, as you all know. He’s been with Trump since his improbable run as the 21st century’s most important political leader, and no one seems to understand the President and his impulses better than Miller.
He's also a revolutionary. His ideas come from far outside what we used to think of as the Republican mainstream. And he’s a vociferous, uncompromising advocate for policies that only a few years ago would have been deemed unworkable or extreme.
Joining me tonight are four reporters who have covered Miller for years and know him well. Leigh Ann Caldwell is the chief Washington correspondent at Puck. McKay Coppins is a staff writer at The Atlantic. Zolan Kanno-Youngs is a White House correspondent at The New York Times. And Ashley Parker is a staff writer, also at The Atlantic.
Thank you all for joining me. All of you have covered Miller for years. You’ve written a lot about Miller. Ashley, very recently; Zolan, very recently. But I want to just start at the beginning. McKay, why don’t I just go to you because you wrote a sort of definitive early profile of Stephen Miller in 2018. So where did he come from? Where did his politics develop? Give us a little sense of the forces that created this Stephen Miller we know of today, before he entered the general political consciousness.
McKay Coppins, staff writer, The Atlantic: Yeah, I think the thing that most struck me talking to him years ago when I was profiling him was how much of his political world view was forged in opposition to his upbringing. Right? He grew up in Santa Monica, in a family of very well-off progressive Jewish parents, and was surrounded by what he would describe as “a bubble of progressive affluence,” right?
He went to a high school where they would have, you know, multi-racial retreats and multi-cultural festivals. And his first exposure to conservative politics was actually reading, on a lark, Guns and Ammo magazine, which then led him to people like Rush Limbaugh, Larry Elder, David Horowitz, the kind of prominent conservative talk-radio hosts and polemicists of the time. And you can see from the very beginning, as a teenager in a very liberal high school, him kind of mimicking the political style of those people.
Jeffrey Goldberg: Wait, wait. You mentioned the high school. Just watch with me for one moment a clip of – this is Stephen Miller running for student government. Watch this:
Stephen Miller (high-school clip): Am I the only one who is sick and tired of being told to pick up my trash, when we have plenty of janitors who are paid to do it for us?
Jeffrey Goldberg: So, first of all, the Che Guevara look. Really, he doesn’t do that anymore. He’s really into the silk suits now, or something. But you wrote – part of your profile was focused on the fact that he’s an expert troll. And so in your study of him, and your conversations with him back then, was he just trolling his liberal friends, or his liberal adversaries? Or was that something more serious?
McKay Coppins: This was actually the mystery of Stephen Miller to everybody who ever knew him in every stage of his life: in high school. Later at Duke, when he went to college. He was – everyone was trying to figure out whether this was performance art or whether he really believed it. And he would – that was a classic example of teenage Stephen Miller. But he would write columns for the Duke student newspaper picking culture-war fights on campus.
What I think – where I landed, because I asked him about this a number of times – is at first he’d say, “No, no, no, I believe in everything I say.” But then he at one point said, “I do believe in constructive controversy for the sake of enlightenment.” Those were his words. And I think that gets at something fundamental about him, which is he has always believed that there is a role for provocation and performance in politics.
Jeffrey Goldberg: Right. So, Ashley, let me ask you this: does he go further, rhetorically, than he actually believes? Or, when you’re listening to him, especially in this second Trump term, is what he saying what he actually believes? Is he just trying to provoke, and then he’ll try to bring it back a little bit?
Ashley Parker, staff writer, The Atlantic: Again, I think at this point both things are true. But we have sort of come full circle to where the caricature has become the character, and it’s hard to differentiate. You see in some of these early high-school videos of Stephen Miller, him sort of occasionally break the fourth wall to kind of do a kid-faced toothy grin, or kind of almost smirk at himself as if he can’t believe he said what he just said.
But in reporting my profile, one of the people I spoke with was Steve Bannon, who recounted, I mean, early on Stephen Miller would open for Donald Trump in 2015, in 2016, in that campaign at his rallies. And Stephen – Steve Bannon, who again loves all the incendiary stuff – recalled, saying to Stephen Miller, “Look, the main point of being an opening act is so the main guy doesn’t have to top you, right? You have to stop saying these things, because Trump can’t come out there and beat it.”
And so people have told me in the White House, one of the things they like about him, perhaps counterintuitively, is that he is incredibly dogmatic. That intensity – maybe not the trolling, but that intensity and the passion, is the same behind closed doors and in the Oval Office as you see in front of the TV cameras. And so whether you agree with him or not, you sort of always know where he stands, which is –
Jeffrey Goldberg: Right.
Ashley Parker: – on the far extreme when it comes to immigration.
Jeffrey Goldberg: Zolan, you’ve watched this for a while. How has his ideology shifted? And we’ll talk about the linchpins of the ideology in a minute, but has he shifted? Has he become more extreme? Because obviously the second Trump term is very much unlike the first Trump term.
Zolan Kanno-Youngs, White House correspondent, The New York Times: Sure, sure. I actually think from everyone I’ve talked to that Stephen’s ideology has actually been rather consistent. He’s been more visible and more powerful in the second term, you know. In the first term, he might have been limited in many ways to kind of being the architect, overseeing immigration policy in the Department of Homeland Security. And he was a speechwriter, of course, getting involved in comms as well.
Now you have somebody who is taking that ideology, that was formed through his upbringing, through working with Michele Bachmann, now to imposing that on domestic policy [and] foreign policy as well. His role has expanded. If I could also follow up on the previous subject, I think that the rhetoric and the provoking, Stephen also sees that as key to implementing his policy, right? I mean, in the first term –
Jeffrey Goldberg: Shelling the beach in advance of the actual policy roles?
Zolan Kanno-Youngs: And he believes that America – you often hear of America having a role as a sanctuary for immigrants, being a pro-immigrant country. He is trying to change the perception in the nation towards immigrants, to basically make it so that the pendulum of politics shifts, and there’s more of a tolerance towards the policies that he’s trying to implement.
Jeffrey Goldberg: Leigh Ann, talk about – well, we know he was an expert at provocation. He was a serious conservative, more conservative than Republicans at the time as he was growing up. He comes to Washington. Talk about his course through Congress until he meets Trump.
Leigh Ann Caldwell, chief Washington correspondent, Puck: Yes, as you said, he worked for Michele Bachmann, who is this –
Jeffrey Goldberg: Remind us.
Leigh Ann Caldwell: Michele Bachmann is somebody who actually ran for President in 2008. She was a fringe candidate, an outlier, and she was also very provocative. She crashed and burned very quickly. He –
Jeffrey Goldberg: She was a little bit ahead of her time, in terms of Lauren Boebert before, a Lauren Boebert kind of person.
Leigh Ann Caldwell: She was kind of pre-Trump, yeah, absolutely. But then he found a home with Jeff Sessions, Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, who was also very anti-immigrant. And ideologically, they were on the same page. Jeff Sessions was adamantly involved in [opposing] comprehensive immigration reform during the Bush and early Obama years – the Bush years, really – and trying to kill it. And Stephen Miller was instrumental in that.
He had a reputation on the Hill – he was a comms director at the time – of being way outside the mainstream. He would also, in internal comms meetings with his fellow Republican comms directors, would provocate in the same way he does publicly. People used to just roll their eyes and dismiss him.
Now, he is probably the most powerful non-elected official in this country, and you still see actually that tension on Capitol Hill with Stephen Miller. People remember Stephen Miller then, and there’s a lot of grumbling on Capitol Hill, even among Republicans, who think that Stephen Miller’s policies are going to far and will hurt them.
Jeffrey Goldberg: Right.
Ashley Parker: It’s hard just briefly to overstate – I covered the Gang of Eight immigration bill for The New York Times as a Congressional correspondent. And this was sort of the last time that immigration, bipartisan immigration [legislation], had any real momentum, right? You had four Republicans, including Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio; four Democrats.
You had the tentative, cautious, but you had the buy-in of the tech community, the business community, the labor community, the activist community, the Hispanic community. And the reason that bill essentially sank and did not come up for a vote in the House was single-handedly because of Jeff Sessions and Stephen Miller, working alongside Breitbart News, to kill it.
Leigh Ann Caldwell: And remember, just during the end of the Biden administration, when James Lankford was working on a bipartisan bill to close the borders, and then Trump came in as a potential candidate and killed it. Stephen Miller had a role in that, too.
Jeffrey Goldberg: Right. Well, let’s talk about Sessions and the jump from Sessions to Trump. Obviously Sessions – we don’t have to rehearse this one at length, but [he] was a Trump loyalist and Trump turned on him because Sessions appointed the special prosecutor, etc. How did Miller make the move to the Big Man? I mean, it’s a classic Washington story, also? It’s not that unusual. But did he discard Jeff Sessions when –
Leigh Ann Caldwell: So, so, not yet. What happened is in January 2016 Miller was one of the very first people to come and leave Jeff Sessions’s office and go to Trump’s campaign.
Jeffrey Goldberg: And this is still when Trump was very improbable.
Leigh Ann Caldwell: Yes, very improbable. Before the Iowa caucuses, a good month before then. But Jeff Sessions, a month later, was the very first person, first Senator, to endorse Donald Trump. And so they were still very close, working together to promote this enigma of Donald Trump.
Jeffrey Goldberg: Interesting.
Leigh Ann Caldwell: But, you know, fast-forward to Jeff Sessions being Attorney General; Jeff Sessions recusing himself into the Russia investigation; Jeff Sessions losing his job and being fired because of that; and the person left standing is Stephen Miller, who discarded Jeff Sessions at that moment.
Jeffrey Goldberg: Right. When you say “discarded,” what do you mean?
Leigh Ann Caldwell: There was no public statement of Stephen Miller supporting or saying anything nice about Jeff Sessions in that moment. And then a person close to Stephen Miller at that time said no one was more furious at Jeff Sessions than Stephen Miller.
Jeffrey Goldberg: I mean, this goes to another question about Stephen Miller and his view of a powerful executive. I want to get to that, but let’s stay on the immigration views. There’s a tweet – and he tweets a lot, as we know, and he tweets very frankly about his views. There’s a tweet:
Stephen Miller [via X, nèe Twitter, December 27, 2025]: Someone should write an alternate historical novel where Americans are the first to master the automobile, the first in flight, the first to harness the atom, the first to land on the moon – but just keep going and never open our borders to the entire Third World for 60 years. For those who don’t know, the U.S. had negative migration for the half-century between the first non-stop transatlantic flight and the moon landing.
Jeffrey Goldberg: Basically, what he’s saying is American innovation all happened because white men – I mean, that’s the interpretation here – did all these things, and then the country lost focus because it started letting in the quote-“Third World.” McKay, come back to California.
McKay Coppins: Because I think that’s crucial to understanding his fixation on immigration.
Jeffrey Goldberg: Yeah, because this is all – first, it’s ahistorical. Americans invented plenty of things at the same time as immigrants were coming into the country. In fact, many of the people who were immigrants invented those things, as new Americans. But let’s go back to the visceral feeling against immigrants.
McKay Coppins: Yeah, I mean, obviously none of us can read his mind. But to understand how these views formed, you have to understand the post-9/11 politics on the Right, in southern California in particular. Post-9/11, there was a general rise in xenophobia, fear of Muslims, outsiders, foreigners. We had been through this national trauma. It’s understandable, to a certain extent.
But Miller’s particular fixation on immigration was really born out of the Right-wing media ecosystem in California at the time, which was always rotating around immigration issues. You know, I think if he had been born in Cleveland or Montana or even, you know, Washington, D.C., I think it would have been a very different story.
But the people that he idolized, the local talk-radio people on the Right, the kind of group of conservatives that he fell in with, were always talking about immigration. And so –
Jeffrey Goldberg: Extremely negatively.
McKay Coppins: Of course.
Jeffrey Goldberg: The only reason I say that is because Ronald Reagan, the greatest Republican in the history of California, was not in that camp.
McKay Coppins: No, of course. Right. Something had shifted in the decades after Reagan. Some of it had to do with the Right-wing backlash against George W. Bush’s attempt to find a grand immigration compromise. But because he was always on the far Right of the Republican Party, and because he came from California, immigration was kind of a natural wedge issue that he latched onto.
Jeffrey Goldberg: So what was it? Growing up in southern California, he saw Hispanics, the Latino population, as just too big; trying to dominate white America?
Zolan Kanno-Youngs: There’s sort of two things. You’re talking about the sort of post-9/11 Republican backlash against real efforts to actually have some sort of comprehensive immigration reform. What you saw was sort of a xenophobic view where you generalize to many immigrants coming from the Middle East as national security threats. And you’ve seen that rhetoric replicated by this administration.
But then when it comes to also immigrants coming from Central and Latin America, you’ve had – and this still exists today – this real push by conservatives that these are, this is economic competition with people who are born in the United States. Now, of course, economic studies do undercut that. They show that immigrants broadly actually benefit the economy. But this is a prime example for the white grievance argument.
Jeffrey Goldberg: I want to stay on that for a second, because Stephen Miller is Jewish, and part of his family came over here 100 years ago as refugees from anti-Semitism in Europe. In your conversations with him, does that ever play into his understanding of the world, and his own background as a great-grandchild of immigrants?
McKay Coppins: I’m going to introduce one data point which may or may not be relevant, but he told me that one of the books that most shaped him was Wayne LaPierre’s book – head of the National Rifle Association (NRA). In that book, Wayne LaPierre makes the argument that the Holocaust and, I think he says Auschwitz, are prime examples of the need for Second Amendment rights.
You know, to make what you will of that argument, but if the Jewish people had been armed, they would have been able to stand up against this authoritarian genocidal regime. I think that he found a way early on to kind of meld his general Right-wing world view with his Jewish identity and background. I think it became a little more strained as he got deeper into Trump-era Right-wing politics and found himself swimming in waters that were, say, a little bit less friendly to Jews.
Jeffrey Goldberg: Yes, because there is an element of let’s call it the racialist far Right that doesn’t have fond feelings about Jews. Let me make just one brief editorial aside. I’m sorry, but this prompts this thought: I wish that the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto had had more guns back then, but I still think they would not have been able to defeat the German army. I mean it sounds like – it’s just a, like – put that aside from now. We’ll do a special episode about that. I’ll bring it up with Wayne LaPierre the next time he’s on the show.
Zolan Kanno-Youngs: But the thing I would just add to that, too, is when you look at Stephen Miller’s comments about immigration, he does have a very narrow sort of view of who – which immigrants are justified to be in the United States. And it’s not – it doesn’t always track with the law. If you go into a legal port of entry at the border, you have a legal process to come into the country.
He pushes back against that. He pushes back against the parole system the Biden administration started. They’ve revamped their refugee program to focus on English-speaking refugees coming into the U.S., and not from African and also Muslim-majority countries, too. So there’s a through-line there of who he thinks is deserving to be in the U.S.
Jeffrey Goldberg: So this is why South African Afrikaners are given privileges, the only people allowed into the country.
Zolan Kanno-Youngs: The only refugees that are automatically allowed in.
Jeffrey Goldberg: I want to talk a little bit about his power in the White House. I came into direct contact with this question last year during the Signal controversy. When I was in that chat, J. D. Vance, Marco Rubio, everyone else are in that chat room arguing back and forth about the utility of striking Yemen. And then Miller comes into the chat and writes:
“As I heard it, the President was clear: green light, but we soon make clear to Egypt and Europe what we expect in return. We also need to figure out how to enforce such a requirement. EG, if Europe doesn’t remunerate, then what? If the U.S. successfully restores freedom of navigation at great cost, there needs to be some further economic gain extracted in return.” (Pete Hegseth replied, “Agree.”)
And it shut down the debate. It shut down J. D. Vance. It kind of made me think, “Well, Stephen Miller is worth a half-hour on Washington Week,” if that’s the case that he’s so powerful. Talk about inside the White House, what kind of power Stephen Miller has.
Ashley Parker: It is kind of hard to overstate his power inside the Trump second term White House, in part because his purview is so much broader than just immigration, although it certainly includes immigration. It includes trade. It includes foreign policy. It includes national security. It includes education. The entire war on the quote-unquote “elite university system” Stephen Miller, in his free time, when he’s not dealing with immigration, is the architect of that,
Jeffrey Goldberg: Right.
Ashley Parker: And also it’s, you know, you were asking earlier about if his views have become more extreme. I think it’s instructive to understand him in some of the same ways we understand President Trump himself, which is that his views haven’t necessarily changed, but he used those – even more than Trump, in certain ways, Stephen Miller used those four years out of power to basically get better, stronger, faster, more ruthless.
And he understood the mistakes he made in the first term. Why the travel ban, you know, he wrote the first executive order, led to chaos at the airports, got struck down in the courts. This time he knows that if you care about being hard-line about immigration, it’s not just important to have your people at the Department of Homeland Security, although that is important.
But there’s certain positions at Health and Human Services where you want a strong ally with your point of view. There are certain jobs at the State Department, in the Western Hemisphere division. So he now knows all the levers of power.
Jeffrey Goldberg: But, Leigh Ann, let me ask you this. Minneapolis, Tom Homan comes in and says, “Well, we’re pulling out.” Obviously, this did not go well, certainly from a public-relations perspective, for the administration in Minneapolis, largely because of the two deaths caused by ICE [and CBP] agents, of protesters. Did he go – did Stephen Miller go too far this time?
Leigh Ann Caldwell: It seems that way. Yeah, I think that, a couple of things. On his standing in the White House, there was – he had a 40th birthday party that his wife, Katie Miller, hosted for him, back in the fall – or the summer, actually. Everybody who attended told me that they had never seen so many people in the administration in one place. It was every single Cabinet member/official, [Trump’s press secretary] Karoline Leavitt. Everyone was there.
Ashley Parker: You needed like a designated survivor to be put in place.
Leigh Ann Caldwell: Exactly, and it was a show of how important he is in this administration. It was also notable that there were no members of Congress there, except for the Speaker of the House. Which gets back to your question, “Did he go too far?” This is something that the President has got a lot of push-back on. Stephen Miller has been criticized very publicly by Democrats, and very privately by Republicans.
Jeffrey Goldberg: Although Senator Thom Tillis (R-North Carolina), a prominent Republican, does not like him at all, and has told the President that.
Leigh Ann Caldwell: Despises. Every single time he can publicly say how much he hates Stephen Miller, he does it. He can be talking about something totally different to a reporter, and he will bring up Stephen Miller.
Jeffrey Goldberg: He’s also retiring, which is interesting.
Leigh Ann Caldwell: He’s also retiring, but he does have a line to the President, and he’s told the President many times that Stephen Miller is doing him and the Republican Party no justice.
Zolan Kanno-Youngs: You did see something rare after the [Alex] Pretti shooting from Miller, which was him also sort of trying to clean it up and saying, “Well, look, I was getting information from CBP agents.” There was a period there where they tried to soften that language. That’s rare.
Jeffrey Goldberg: But, McKay, let me ask you this: what does he ultimately want? And, by the way, you have 30 seconds to answer that question.
McKay Coppins: Well, I think that he wants a lot. But I think that when it comes to immigration in particular, I think if you guys are right, he has made it very clear in my conversations that he wants to entirely reframe our understanding of our country as a nation of immigrants.
Jeffrey Goldberg: He’s basically in an argument with Emma Lazarus, in a way.
McKay Coppins: Right. I mean, there’s a key moment in the first term where he was asked about the placard at the base of the Statue of Liberty –
Jeffrey Goldberg: That’s Emma Lazarus. That’s the poem, right.
McKay Coppins: And he completely dismisses it, like disdainfully dismisses it. And I think like that just – that is his ideological project. He – if he leaves – if he can retire in a country that does not see immigrants as being welcome into this country, that does not see immigrants as part of the national story, he will be happy.
Jeffrey Goldberg: He’s a fascinating figure. Obviously, the most powerful non-elected official, I think we can all agree on that. More powerful than a Cabinet official. We’ll talk about him again and again, obviously, but that’s all the time we have for now. I want to thank our guests for joining me, and thank you at home for watching us. You can read Ashley’s profile on Stephen Miller by visiting theatlantic.com. I’m Jeffrey Goldberg. Good night from Washington.
Wednesday, February 11, 2026
“The Librarians”: PBS Airs a Powerful Documentary about Librarians on the Front Lines of the Culture Wars
by MARK GABRISH CONLAN • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
On Monday, February 9 PBS aired a powerful and unflinching 2025 documentary called The Librarians, about how librarians are being dragged into the culture wars being waged by an ascendant radical Right (it’s really a perversion of language to call these people “conservative” when their political, cultural, social, and moral ambitions are anything but “conservative”). Their ultimate goal is to turn the U.S. into a Christian theocracy, and one of their immediate goals is to eliminate any opinions they disagree with from public discourse, including critiques of racism, sexism, and homophobia.
The Librarians, directed by Kim A. Snyder in collaboration with Janique L. Robillard, Maria Cuomo Cole, and Jana Edelbaum, tells the story of how librarians across the country, especially (though not exclusively) in Southern states, have essentially been drafted into the culture war. They’ve been torn between the ethics of their profession, which among other things call them to oppose censoring the content of their libraries simply because other people don’t like certain books; and the increasingly vociferous demands of organizations like the well-funded, powerful nationwide group “Moms for Liberty” which demanded that school libraries in particular censor books with anti-racist or Queer themes.
Moms for Liberty was founded on New Year’s Day 2021 by three Right-wing activists in Florida. They were originally opposed to mask requirements instituted in 2020 to slow the spread of the virus that causes COVID-19, but their agenda soon broadened to include running candidates for local school boards who were pledged to support their racist, anti-Queer agenda. In 2022 their campaigns were successful in 11 Texas school districts, including one in a town called Granbury that became a major focus of the film.
The campaign was started by a Texas state legislator called Matt Krause, who in October 2021 released a list of 850 books he wanted banned from Texas public school libraries. Krause also said his list was not all-inclusive and he reserved the right to add future titles. Krause explained that the books he wanted removed from state school libraries were ones which “might make students feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress because of their race or sex.” That seemingly unexceptional statement is actually radical-Right code-speak for anything which “might make white people uncomfortable by pointing out that the U.S. built its prosperity on the backs of enslaved Africans.” (For more information see https://www.npr.org/2021/10/28/1050013664/texas-lawmaker-matt-krause-launches-inquiry-into-850-books.)
Krause included with his blacklist a demand that the Texas Education Agency and school districts throughout the state asking each individual he sent it to whether their schools had any of the books on his list. He also asked for a detailed accounting of where the books were and how much money had been spent on them. Among the books cited by Krause and other would-be Texas censors were Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Nikole Hannah-Jones’s The 1619 Project, Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Anti-Racist, Peggy J. Parks’s How Prevalent Is Racism in Our Society?, a picture book put out by Amnesty International illustrating the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, and novels like Tim Federle’s The Great American Whatever, Jonathan Evison’s Lawn Boy, and “Pink Is a Girl’s Color” … and other silly things people say, a children’s picture book by Stacy and Erik Drageset.
One of the key people involved in the radical-Right takeover was successful school board candidate Courtney Gore. She was a prominent activist in the area with solid Right-wing credentials. After the school district removed 130 books from school libraries on grounds they were “pornographic,” Gore did something unusual for someone with her background. Instead of meekly going along with the pressure from her colleagues and funders to ban whole lists of books as “pornographic,” she actually read them and realized they weren’t pornographic at all. Though Gore maintains that she still considers herself a “conservative,” she posted on Facebook in May 2022 that “I’m over the political agenda, hypocrisy B.S. I took part in it myself. I refuse to participate in it any longer, it’s not serving our party. We have to do better.”
Another quirky story told in the documentary concerns Granbury parent Monica Brown, one of the leaders of the book-banning movement. What made her story unusual is that the oldest of her nine children, son Weston Brown, is Gay. When he came out to her at age 23, she immediately and irrevocably banned him from any Thanksgiving dinners and other family functions. Weston ultimately moved to San Diego, found a partner named Andrew, and agreed not to have anything to do with the birth family that had raised him, homeschooled him, and kept him as insulated as they could from any intimation either that Queer people existed or he might be one.
Then he saw Monica Brown testifying before the Granbury school board on a social-media video that had gone viral. “It was one thing when my parents’ beliefs were causing this rift between us and it was just a family matter,” Brown told NBC News. “But seeing now that she’s applying those same views to public activism, at a time when so many basic rights are being challenged, I couldn’t stay quiet about that.” The Librarians includes a scene in which Weston Brown spoke to the Granbury school board and pleaded with them not to ban Queer-affirming books like the one he says turned him around, George M. Johnson’s All Boys Aren’t Blue.
"It’s been nearly five years since I came out to my family,” Weston Brown told the Granbury school board. “I'm not allowed to join in family celebrations or holidays, or be part of my eight siblings' lives, all because I’m not straight. I’m here to implore you to listen to librarians, educators and students, not those speaking from a religious perspective or at the bidding of a political group. If you choose to marginalize differences and remove representation, you will only cause harm.” Monica Brown immediately followed her disowned son to the podium and spewed the usual radical-Right nonsense. She ignored everything her son had said and didn’t have anything to do with him – until the meeting ended. Then, as Weston was being interviewed by a reporter in the parking lot, she walked up to him and started filming the interview herself with her cell phone.
As I’ve noted in previous posts about the American radical Right and its position on Queer issues, one thing most pro-Queer people don’t understand about the radical Right is that it doesn’t believe in the existence of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, or Transgender people. They believe we are all naturally heterosexual and cisgender, and any people who express themselves as homosexual or Transgender are either deliberately rebelling against God or suffering from “trauma-induced sexual sin.” Weston Brown recalls that when he came out to his parents as Gay, “They thought that I was mentally ill or demonically possessed.” This is the ideology behind so-called “reparative therapy,” the various attempts to “cure” Queer or Trans people from their “trauma-induced sexual sin” and turn them into cisgender heterosexuals.
One thing we’ve learned about the radical Right since its political ascendancy, which predated the Presidencies of Donald Trump but was kicked into high gear by the Trump phenomenon, is the thug-like way they go after their enemies, especially ones like Courtney Gore who were formerly on their side. Gore reported receiving death threats. So did Amanda Jones, a 20-year veteran librarian in Louisiana who in 2021 won the School Librarian of the Year award from School Library Journal. The award was in recognition of an innovative program she devised during the COVID-19 lockdown. She reasoned that as long as students couldn’t go to the outside world, she would use computer technology to bring the world to them by presenting virtual tours of other countries.
Then in 2022 Jones ran afoul of the would-be book banners. In July 2022 she spoke publicly against censorship at a meeting of the Livingston Parish Public Library Board. (In Louisiana, counties are called “parishes.”) As a result, she got viciously attacked by various organizations, including Citizens for a New Louisiana and Bayou State of Mind. Bayou State of Mind accused Jones of "advocating teaching anal sex to 11-year-olds.” Citizens for a New Louisiana put out a leaflet showing a photo of Jones inside a red circle with a white border, and captioned it, “Why is she fighting so hard to keep sexually erotic and pornographic materials in the kids’ section?” She was, of course, doing no such thing, as any member of these organizations who’d actually read the books in question the way Courtney Gore did in Granbury, Texas would have found out.
Since then Jones, who is still a librarian at the same school in Louisiana she attended as a child, has published a memoir called That Librarian detailing her struggle against book-banning and the attempts of the radical Right to turn librarians into censors. She still gets awards, but now they have names like the Association of School Librarians’ Intellectual Freedom Award and the Louisiana Library Association’s Alex Allain Intellectual Freedom Award. When Jones was honored at the National Book Awards in 2023, Oprah Winfrey said, “Amanda Jones started getting death threats, all for standing up for our right to read ... but she's not stopped fighting against book bans, or stopped advocating for access to diverse stories.”
Librarians, especially in schools, have become one of our principal lines of defense against the Radical Right’s depressingly successful campaign to end America’s experiment in self-governance and make the U.S. a neofascist dictatorship. They already control the Presidency, both houses of Congress, and the U.S. Supreme Court. They also have organized at the state and local levels in ways progressives can barely dream about. They want a world in which Blacks are once again in the back of the bus, women are once again stuck in the kitchen, Queers are still in the closet, Fundamentalist Christianity becomes a state religion, and giant corporations are able to extract maximum surplus value from their workers without any nonsense about health, safety, or decent pay.
The Librarians is a chilling account of how a handful of individuals are courageously fighting an often lonely battle to maintain and expand America’s and Americans’ freedoms in the face of a well-organized, well-funded campaign to destroy them. It deserves to be seen by every American who wants this country to remain a democratic, secular republic.
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