Note from our Editor-in-Chief:
This week, we are launching our series on the ‘Four Horsemen of the Trump-ocalypse.’ With several weeks left in the 2026 midterm elections, we believe this is the moment to capture the damage the Trump administration has inflicted throughout the U.S. and the world – and profile some of the people most responsible. The only way we can report original, long-form stories like these is with your support. This is why we all need to support independent media, in this new age of American authoritarianism. – Mehdi
The United States is now run by someone whose critics and victims routinely dub an American “psycho,” a man who revels in the pain and suffering of his enemies and his prey. Indeed, many of his allies, and his past and present colleagues, would describe him using precisely the same word.
We are, of course, talking about Stephen Miller, not his boss, Donald Trump.
Miller, who serves as Trump’s top policy architect and one of the president’s most committed loyalists, doesn’t care about human life the way you or I do, former and current Trump administration officials who’ve worked with him tell Zeteo. Several of these sources actually quite like Miller. Still, the degree to which Miller does not care about – or at least tolerates – the loss of human lives in the pursuit of his and President Trump’s policy vision has unnerved, or disturbed, some of his Republican colleagues, multiple Trump advisers and U.S. government officials recount.
Some of his associates in and close to the administration even accuse him of intentionally trying to push major U.S. cities to riot, to create a pretext for Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act, an early 19th-century law, so that he could send thousands of active-duty and National Guard troops to fully occupy those urban areas. One source directly familiar with Miller’s private deliberations tells Zeteo: “Stephen wanted to provoke a very strong response, so that the president would deploy troops.”
It has been just under two years since Trump won the presidency for the second time, and the scale of democratic backsliding, rampant corruption, and sheer violence unleashed on this continent and others is remarkably difficult to tabulate. The administration has normalized putting troops in the streets; deploying masked, violent immigration agents to kidnap and intimidate and kill people; punishing immigrants, including many with a legal right to be here, by shipping them to dangerous countries, including places where they have no ties, simply to be cruel; murdering supposed drug smugglers with regularity in international waters; tearing apart the core constitutional right to due process at every opportunity, so that people can’t challenge the government’s claims against them before they are removed or killed; politicizing every lever of the government so that it targets their enemies, and only their enemies, as part of a swarming attack on Democrats and the left and liberal nonprofit and political infrastructure; actively ignoring the First Amendment; spewing the most blatant kinds of racism from the White House, including at Somali Americans and Haitians; plotting in broad daylight to rig elections and subvert the American democratic order; and so, so much more.
On Trump’s behalf, Miller has overseen, or orchestrated, all of it. He has led Trump’s deportation operations and the president’s efforts to target and selectively prosecute his enemies at an intensely granular level. That includes overseeing what a Trump adviser described to Zeteo as the administration’s “Must Deport list.” When Miller has discussed behind closed doors the administration’s deportations to third-countries (where the immigrants have no ties), he has explicitly said that it is better to strike those agreements with nations with lousy human rights records – in part because those regimes often do what they’re told by the United States, sources who’ve been in the room with him say.
It is impossible to come to any other conclusion: At almost every single meaningful turn of the second Trump era, the president’s lead policy author has sought to make the government’s crackdowns more painful, and less humane, for its countless dragnet victims and their families.
Let that be his, and his boss’s, legacy – and perhaps their undoing.