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 electios, 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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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.
