Via Rick Wilson’s newsletter:
The perverse physics of the Trump singularity is pretty explicable at this point: the closer you orbit the orange supernova, the more your conscience vaporizes and your spine bends toward servility.
The roll call of “smart‑enough‑to‑know‑better” flunkies is long, but the pattern is the same: one little moral compromise becomes another and another and then it’s, “Sure, we’re arresting American citizens without a warrant or probable cause. What about it, cuck?”
Marco Rubio, once the GOP’s boy‑band hope for a better future, now tweets Kremlin talking points like a Dollar Store bot and is doing every job short of landscaping the White House lawn. I can envision Susie Wiles, the grand dame of White House normies, mainlining late‑night Scotch‑and‑Ambien cocktails, praying for oblivion before dawn’s MAGA staff meeting. Remember when Scott Bessent was the normal Wall Street bro a week or two ago? Good times.
They wake up every morning, bleary, hollow‑eyed, souls on layaway, and mumble assent to whatever fresh constitutional, legal, or moral atrocity Dear Leader scribbled on the back of last night’s Filet-O-Fish wrapper.
Below them, there’s an army of under‑read, over‑online troll‑bros—keyboard chads who think fascism is a dank meme. They live to “own the libs,” but what they’re really doing is mortgaging their future to finance a tin‑pot dictatorship. Hovering alongside them are the Profiles in Chickenshit: Republican lifers so terrified of a primary challenge that they’d hand over grandma’s Medicare card—and grandma—to keep their sinecure.
And then, at the cold heart of it all, stands Stephen Miller.
Say what you will about his seething hatreds, embrace of evil, overt sadism, monstrous desire for innocent suffering and blood, at least it’s an ethos. The rest if gravy. Racial animus weaponized with bureaucratic precision, autocratic mania manipulating the whims of Donald Trump. Miller is increasingly the most powerful person in Trump’s orbit.
Forget the “big ideas” Project 2025 crowd—he’s a narrower kind of ideologue. He’s like an Eli Roth character who engineers cruelty like I tinker with old airplanes; if you can’t find the part, make it. Whenever the system seems to cough up a fresh obscenity (child‑separation, deporting kids with cancer, arresting students for tweeting, asylum bans, exile to jungle gulags, and on and on) follow the trail of bile and you’ll find Miller hunched over a memo, sharpening the knife.
Washington insiders often miscast him as an Adolf Eichmann figure, but that’s grading on a curve.
Eichmann, while despicable, was middle management—a ghoul hitting his KPIs.
Miller is much closer to Reinhard Heydrich, the SS Renaissance man who fused intelligence, policing, and party power into the Reich Security Main Office and greased the rails to Auschwitz. Heydrich didn’t merely obey; he innovated.
He saw Hitler’s rants not as mad ravings but as engineering specs. “Need a Final Solution?” he asked. “Give me six months and a rail network.” Miller, like Heydrich, is the systems guy, the dark technocrat who turns a demagogue’s fever dream into policy code, chapter and verse.
Look at the current tableau. Department of Homeland Security? A Miller satrapy. Justice Department? Same. ICE? It increasingly feels less like an American law enforcement agency and more um, Einsatzgruppen.
Even the White House staff process—supposedly under Susie Wiles’s baton—doesn’t breathe without Miller’s nod. The leaked “Houthi Small Group” Signal chat shows him as the black‑robed moderator, senior even to JD Vance and Rubio, shaping talking points and operational directives. Greg Sargent nailed it: the illegal abduction and rendition of Kilmar Abrego Garcia to a Salvadoran gulag has Miller’s fingerprints on every missing chain‑of‑custody form and on every denied court order.
Here’s the historical rhyme: Hitler thundered about the Jewish menace, but it took Heydrich’s slide rules to transform rant into railroad timetables. He weaponized Schutzhaft a “protective custody order” that meant warrantless arrest, indefinite detention, and a one‑way ticket to places like Dachau.
Miller echoes that rhythm: he scours statute books for dusty executive powers, then stretches them until due process screams. Title 42, “Remain in Mexico,” the dream of shipping asylum seekers to third‑country hellholes—each a Heydrich‑style hack on the operating system of democracy.
Unlike Trump’s carnival‑barker surrogates—Kristi Noem posing with a gun, Tom Homan flexing for Newsmax, Dan Bongino barking on cue—Miller largely prefers the gloom of the back office and a coffin filled with the soil of his native land.
He’s the stagehand who controls the winches and trapdoors, making sure the spectacle never stops. His power lies not in public persuasion but in procedural choke points: the memo that decides whether a family sleeps in a motel or a cage, the budgetary footnote that redirects funds from hurricane relief to border walls, the promises to pardon ICE agents who go too far.
And here’s the grim punchline: Miller’s grasp of bureaucracy means each outrage is a feature, not a bug. He knows the rule‑making process, the litigation delays, the inspector‑general reports that may, someday, materialize long after the damage is done. By the time a court smacks down his handiwork, new victims are already on the conveyor belt. Like Heydrich, he builds systems that keep doing their evil even after the architect is gone.
Heydrich was the rising star of all rising stars in the Nazi Party. He worked for Himmler, but Himmler was never in line to succeed the Führer. Heydrich was the next generation, the man who embraced the Nazi system from its start, built its tools of power and control, and was the golden boy in waiting. Heydrich was assassinated in 1942 by Czech partisans trained by the British Special Operations Executive, slamming the brakes on one of the darker historical counterfactuals.
Thankfully, Miller will never hold office beyond appointments. His charisma is in inverse proportion to his bureaucratic power.
Rubio and Wiles may someday sober up, wonder where their consciences went, and draft limp mea culpas for The New York Times.
But Miller? He’ll never feel the need. In his mirror, he sees the inevitable man who finally slapped wheels on the cruelty that Trump could only shout about. That’s the true horror: when democracy dies, it won’t be in a blaze of jackboots and torchlight. It’ll be in a conference room at 11:47 p.m., under fluorescent lights, while Stephen Miller quietly inserts one more sub‑paragraph, ensuring the train keeps rolling toward the abyss.
