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Washington Week with The Atlantic full episode, Feb. 13, 2026
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00:00Few people in Washington today have more power and influence than Stephen Miller.
00:05He's the architect of the Trump administration's hard-line immigration policy, and he's the
00:09president's enforcer, making sure that the MAGA elite and the cabinet stay true to Trump's
00:15vision.
00:15Tonight, a close look at the beliefs and the record of Stephen Miller, next.
00:24This is Washington Week with The Atlantic.
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01:21Once again, from the David M. Rubenstein studio at WETA in Washington, editor-in-chief of The
01:28Atlantic and moderator, Jeffrey Goldberg.
01:31Good evening, and welcome to Washington Week.
01:34We're going to do something a little bit different tonight.
01:37We're going to try to understand some of the most important and disruptive Trump policies
01:42through the prism of one aide, Stephen Miller.
01:45He's no ordinary aide, as you all know.
01:47He's been with Trump since the beginning of his improbable run as the 21st century's most
01:52important political leader.
01:53And no one seems to understand the president and his impulses better than Miller.
01:58He's also a revolutionary.
01:59His ideas come from far outside what we used to think of as the Republican mainstream.
02:04And he's a vociferous, uncompromising advocate for policies that only a few years ago would
02:09have been deemed unworkable and extreme.
02:12Joining me tonight are four reporters who have covered Miller for years and know him well.
02:17Leanne Caldwell is the chief Washington correspondent at Puck.
02:20McKay Coppins is a staff writer at The Atlantic.
02:23Zolan Kano-Young is a White House correspondent at The New York Times.
02:27And Ashley Parker is a staff writer, also at The Atlantic.
02:31Thank you all for joining me.
02:34All of you have covered Miller for years.
02:36You've written a lot about Miller.
02:38Ashley, you very recently.
02:39Leanne, very recently.
02:40But I want to just start at the beginning.
02:43McKay, why don't I go to you?
02:44Because you wrote a sort of definitive early profile of Stephen Miller in 2018.
02:51So, where does he come from?
02:53Like, where did his politics develop?
02:56Give us a little sense of the forces that created the Stephen Miller we know of today.
03:02Before he entered the general political consciousness.
03:06Yeah, I think the thing that most struck me in talking to him years ago when I was profiling him
03:10was how much of his political worldview was forged in opposition to his upbringing, right?
03:16He grew up in Santa Monica, a family of very well-off progressive Jewish parents,
03:24and was surrounded by, you know, what he would describe as kind of a bubble of progressive affluence, right?
03:31He went to a high school where they would have, you know, multiracial retreats and, you know, multiculturalism festivals.
03:39And his first exposure to conservative politics was actually reading on a lark guns and ammo magazine,
03:46which then led him to people like Rush Limbaugh, Larry Elder, David Horowitz,
03:50the kind of prominent conservative talk radio hosts and polemicists of the time.
03:55And you can see from the very beginning, as a teenager in a very liberal high school,
04:00him kind of mimicking the political style of those people.
04:03Wait, wait, you mentioned the high school.
04:05Just watch with me for one moment a quick clip of this is Stephen Miller running for student government.
04:12Student government.
04:13Watch this.
04:15Am I the only one who is sick and tired of being told to pick up my trash?
04:22And we have plenty of janitors who are paid to do it tomorrow.
04:27So first of all, the Che Guevara look really is, he doesn't do that anymore.
04:32He's really into the silk suits now or something.
04:36But you wrote, part of your profile was focused on the fact that he's an expert troll.
04:40And so in your study of him and your conversations with him back then, was he just trolling his liberal
04:47friends or liberal adversaries?
04:49Or was that something more serious?
04:52Well, this was actually kind of the mystery of Stephen Miller to everybody who knew him at every stage of
04:57his life,
04:57in high school, later at Duke when he went to college.
05:00He was, everyone was trying to figure out if this was performance art or if he really believed it.
05:05And, you know, he would, that was a classic example of teenage Stephen Miller.
05:10But he would write, you know, columns for the Duke campus newspaper, picking culture war fights on campus.
05:17What I think, you know, where I landed, because I asked him about this a bunch of times,
05:22and he at first would say, no, no, no, I believe everything that I say.
05:25But then he at one point said, I do believe in constructive controversy for the sake of enlightenment.
05:31Those were his words. And I think that that gets at something fundamental about him,
05:36which is he has always believed that there is a role for provocation and performance in politics.
05:42So actually, let me ask you this.
05:46Does he go further rhetorically than he actually believes?
05:53Or when you're listening to him, especially in this second Trump term, is what he's saying what he actually believes?
06:00Is he trying to just provoke and kind of then he'll bring it back a little bit?
06:04I mean, again, I think with him at this point, both things are true.
06:08But we have sort of come full circle to where the caricature has become the character.
06:14And it's really hard to differentiate.
06:16You see in some of those early high school videos of Stephen Miller, him sort of occasionally breaking the fourth
06:21wall to kind of do a full face toothy grin or kind of almost smirk it himself as if he
06:27can't believe he said what he's just said.
06:30But in reporting my profile, one of the people I spoke with was Steve Bannon, who recounted, I mean, early
06:36on, Stephen Miller would open for Donald Trump in 2015, in 2016, that campaign, his rallies.
06:43And Stephen, Steve Bannon, again, who loves all the incendiary stuff, recalled saying to Stephen Miller, look, the point of
06:50an opening act is so the main guy doesn't have to top you.
06:54Right. You have to stop saying these things because Trump can't come out there and beat it.
06:59And so people have told me in the White House one of the things they like about him, perhaps counterintuitively,
07:04is that he is incredibly dogmatic.
07:06That intensity, maybe not the trolling, but that intensity and that passion is the same behind closed doors and in
07:14the Oval Office, as you see in front of the TV cameras.
07:17And so whether you agree with him or not, you sort of always know where he stands, which is on
07:21the far extreme when it comes to immigration.
07:23Zolan, you've watched this for a while as well. Has his ideology shifted?
07:28We'll talk about the linchpins of the ideology in a minute, but has he shifted? Has he become more extreme?
07:35Because obviously the second Trump term is very much unlike the first Trump term.
07:40Sure, sure. I actually think from everyone I've talked to that Stephen's ideology has been rather consistent.
07:45It's that he's more visible and more powerful in the second term.
07:49You know, in the first term he might have been limited in many ways to being kind of the architect
07:54and overseeing immigration policy in the Department of Homeland Security.
07:58And he was a speechwriter, of course, you know, getting involved in comms as well.
08:01And now you have somebody who, you know, is taking that ideology that was formed through his upbringing, through working
08:09with Michelle Bachmann, now to imposing that on domestic policy, foreign policy as well.
08:16His role has expanded. If I could also follow up on the previous subject.
08:21I think that the rhetoric and the provoking Stephen also sees that as key to implementing his policy.
08:28Right. I mean, in the first term.
08:30Shelling the beach in advance of the actual policy.
08:33And he believes that America, as you often hear of America having a role as a sanctuary for immigrants, being
08:40a pro-immigrant country.
08:41He is trying to change the perception in the nation towards immigrants.
08:47Wow.
08:47To basically make it so that the pendulum of politics shifts and there's more of a tolerance for the policies
08:53he's trying to implement.
08:54Leanne, talk about so we know he was a he was a expert at provocation.
09:00He was a he was a serious conservative, more conservative than Republicans at the time as he was growing up.
09:05He comes to Washington. Talk about his his course through Congress until he until he meets Trump.
09:12Yeah. Well, yes. As you said, he worked for Michelle Bachmann, who is remind us.
09:17Michelle Bachmann is someone who actually ran for president in 2008.
09:21She was she was a fringe candidate, an outlier.
09:24And she was also very provocative.
09:26She crashed and burned very quickly.
09:28He she was a little bit ahead of her time in terms of she was kind of preaching.
09:32Lauren Boebert before Lauren. Yeah.
09:34Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.
09:36But then he found a home in Jeff Sessions, Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, who was also very anti-immigrant.
09:44And the ideologically they were on the same page.
09:48Jeff Sessions was adamantly involved in comprehensive immigration reform during, you know, the Bush and early Obama years.
09:58Bush years, really. And and trying to kill it.
10:01And Jeff and Stephen Miller was instrumental in that he had a reputation on the Hill.
10:09He was a comms director at the time of being way outside the mainstream.
10:14He would also in internal comms meetings with his fellow Republican comms directors would would provocate in the same way
10:22that he does publicly.
10:23People used to just roll their eyes and dismiss him.
10:26Now he is one probably the most powerful non-elected official in this country.
10:32And you still see actually that tension on Capitol Hill with Stephen Miller.
10:38People remember Stephen Miller then.
10:41And and there is a lot of, you know, grumbling on Capitol Hill, even among Republicans who think that Stephen
10:49Miller's policies are going too far and will hurt.
10:52Right. It's hard just briefly to overstate. I covered the Gang of Eight immigration bill for The New York Times
10:59as a congressional correspondent.
11:00And this was sort of the last time immigration, bipartisan immigration had any real momentum. Right.
11:06You had four Republicans, including Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio, four Democrats.
11:13You had the tentative cautious, but you had the buy in of the tech community, of the business community, of
11:17the labor community, of the activist community, of the Hispanic community.
11:21And the reason that bill essentially sank and did not come up for a vote in the House was single
11:28handedly because of Jeff Sessions and Stephen Miller working alongside Breitbart News to kill it.
11:35And remember, just during the end of the Biden administration, when James Lankford was working on a bipartisan bill to
11:43close the borders and then Trump came in as a potential candidate and killed it, Stephen Miller had a role
11:51in that.
11:52Right. Well, let's talk about Sessions and the jump from Sessions to Trump.
11:57Obviously, Sessions, we don't have to rehearse this one at length, but was a Trump loyalist and Trump turned on
12:03him because Jeff Sessions appointed the special prosecutor, et cetera.
12:08How did Miller make the move to the big man?
12:12So, so.
12:14I mean, it's a classic Washington story also. It's not that unusual.
12:17But did he discard Jeff Sessions when.
12:20Not yet.
12:20So what happened is in January of 2016, Miller was one of the very first people to come and just
12:29and leave Jeff Sessions office and go to to his campaign.
12:32And this is when Trump was still improbable.
12:34Yes. Very improbable before the Iowa caucuses, a good month before then.
12:39But Jeff Sessions, a month later, was the very first person, first senator to endorse Donald Trump.
12:45And so they were still very close working together to promote this this enigma of Donald Trump.
12:52Interesting.
12:52But then, you know, fast forward to Jeff Sessions being attorney general, Jeff Sessions recusing himself into the Russia investigation.
13:03Jeff Sessions losing his job, being fired because of that.
13:06And the person left standing is Stephen Miller, who who discarded Jeff Sessions at that moment.
13:13When you say discarded, what do you mean?
13:15There was there was no public statement of Stephen Miller supporting or saying anything nice about Jeff Sessions in that
13:22moment.
13:23And then a person close to Stephen Miller said that no one at that time was more furious at Jeff
13:30Sessions than Stephen Miller.
13:32I mean, this goes to another question about Stephen Miller and his view of a powerful executive.
13:37I want to get to that. But let's stay on the immigration views.
13:41There's a tweet and he tweets a lot, as we we know, and he tweets very frankly about his views.
13:51There's a tweet. Someone should write an alternate historical novel where Americans are the first to master the automobile, the
13:58first in flight, the first to harness the atom, the first to land on the moon.
14:01But just keep going and never open our borders to the entire third world for 60 years.
14:06Basically, what he's saying is American innovation all happened because white men.
14:15I mean, that's the interpretation here.
14:17Did all of these things.
14:18And then the country lost focus because it started letting in the, quote, third world.
14:24We can come back to California.
14:25Yeah.
14:26I mean, because I do think that's crucial to understanding his position on immigration.
14:30Yeah.
14:31These are this is an first of all, it's it's a historical.
14:35I mean, Americans invented plenty of things at the same time that immigrants were coming into country.
14:40In fact, many of the people who were immigrants invented those things as as new Americans.
14:45But go to this.
14:47The visceral feeling against immigrants.
14:50Yeah, I mean, look, obviously, none of us can read his mind.
14:53But I think that to understand how these views formed, you have to understand the post 9-11 politics on
14:59the right in Southern California in particular.
15:01Right.
15:02Post 9-11, there was a general kind of rise in xenophobia, fear of, you know, Muslims, outsiders, foreigners.
15:10We have been through this national trauma.
15:12It's understandable to a certain extent.
15:13But Miller's particular fixation on immigration was really born of the right wing media ecosystem in California at the time,
15:22which was always rotating around immigration issues.
15:26That, you know, I think that if he had been, you know, born in Cleveland or Montana or, you know,
15:32even, you know, Washington, D.C., I think it would have been a very different story.
15:35But the people that he idolized, the local talk radio people on the right, the kind of group of conservatives
15:43he fell in with, were always talking about immigration.
15:46And so—
15:47Extremely negatively.
15:48Of course.
15:49The only reason I say that is because Ronald Reagan, the greatest Republican in the history of California, was not
15:57in that camp.
15:58Right.
15:59Something had shifted in the decades after Reagan.
16:03Some of it had to do with the right wing backlash to George W. Bush's attempt to find a grand
16:11immigration compromise.
16:12But because he was always on the far right of the Republican Party, and because he came from California, immigration
16:18was kind of a natural wedge issue that he latched on.
16:22So what was it?
16:23Growing up in Southern California, he saw Hispanics, he saw the Latino population as just too big, trying to dominate
16:30white America?
16:32Well, there's sort of two things.
16:34You're talking about the post-9-11 or Republican sort of backlash, you know, against real efforts to actually have
16:41some sort of comprehensive immigration reform.
16:43What you saw was sort of a xenophobic view where you generalized many immigrants coming from the Middle East as
16:50national security threats.
16:51And you've seen that rhetoric replicated by this administration.
16:54But then when it comes to also immigrants coming from Central and Latin America, you've had, and this still exists
17:00today, this real push by conservatives of these are, this is economic competition with people that are born in the
17:08States.
17:08Now, of course, economic studies do undercut that and show that immigrants broadly actually benefit the economy.
17:14But this is a prime example for the white grievance argument, right?
17:19I want to stay on that for a second because Stephen Miller is Jewish and part of his family came
17:27over here 100 years ago as refugees from anti-Semitism in Europe.
17:33In your conversations with him, does that ever play into his understanding of the world and his own background as
17:41the grandchild, great-grandchild of immigrants?
17:46I'm going to introduce one data point, which, you know, may or may not be relevant.
17:50But he told me one of the books that most shaped him was Wayne LaPierre's book, The Head of the
17:55NRA.
17:55In that book, Wayne LaPierre makes an argument that the Holocaust, and I think he says something like Auschwitz, are
18:02prime examples of the need for Second Amendment rights.
18:04That the, you know, to make what you will of that argument, but that if the Jewish people had been
18:11armed, they would have been able to stand up to this, you know, authoritarian, genocidal regime.
18:16I think that he found a way early on to kind of meld his general right-wing worldview with his
18:26Jewish identity and background.
18:28I think it became a little more strained as he got deeper into Trump-era right-wing politics and found
18:35himself kind of swimming in waters that were, let's say, a little bit less friendly to Jewish.
18:41Yeah, I mean, because there is an element of, let's call it the racialist far right, that doesn't have fond
18:48feelings about Jews.
18:50Can I make just one brief editorial aside?
18:52I'm sorry, this prompts this thought.
18:55I wish that the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto had more guns back then, but I don't think that they
19:01still would not have been able to defeat the German army.
19:03I mean, it sounds like a, it's just a kind of a, anyway, put that aside for now.
19:07We'll do a special episode.
19:09Yeah, I'll bring it up with Wayne LaPierre the next time he's on the show.
19:11The thing I would just add to that, too, is when you look at Stephen's comments about immigration, he does
19:16have a very narrow sort of view of who, which immigrants are justified to be in the United States.
19:23And it's not, it doesn't always track with the law.
19:26Like, if you go into a legal port of entry at the border, you have a legal process to come
19:30in the country.
19:31He pushes back against that, right?
19:33He pushes back against the parole system the Biden administration started.
19:37They've revamped their refugee program to focus on English-speaking refugees coming into the U.S., and not from predominantly
19:45African and also Muslim-majority countries, too.
19:48So there's a through line there of who he thinks is deserving to be in the U.S.
19:51Well, this is why South African Afrikaners are given privileges.
19:55The only refugees pretty much allowed in that system.
19:58You know, I want to talk a little bit about his power in the White House.
20:01And I came into direct contact with this question last year during the Signal controversy when I was in that
20:07chat.
20:08J.D. Vance, everyone else, Marco Rubio are in that chat and arguing back and forth about the utility of
20:14striking Yemen.
20:16And then Miller comes into the chat and writes, as I heard at the present, it was clear, green light,
20:23but we soon make clear to Egypt and Europe what we expect in return.
20:26And that shut down the debate.
20:28It shut down J.D. Vance.
20:30Kind of made me think, well, Stephen Miller is worth a half hour on Washington Week if that's the case,
20:38that he's so powerful.
20:39Talk about inside the White House what kind of power you saw.
20:42It's hard to overstate his power inside the Trump second term White House, in part because his purview is so
20:51much broader than just immigration,
20:53although it certainly includes immigration, but it includes trade.
20:56It includes foreign policy.
20:59It includes national security.
21:01It includes education.
21:02The entire war on the quote-unquote elite university system, Stephen Miller in his free time when he's not dealing
21:08with immigration is the architect of that.
21:11And also, you were asking earlier if his views had become more extreme.
21:16I think it is instructive to understand him in some of the same ways we understand President Trump himself, which
21:22is that his views haven't necessarily changed.
21:24But he used those even more than Trump in certain ways.
21:27Stephen Miller used those four years out of power to basically get better, stronger, faster, more ruthless.
21:34And he understood the mistakes he made in the first term, why the travel ban, EO, he wrote the first
21:40time, led to chaos at the airports and got struck down in the courts.
21:45This time he knows that if you care about being hardline on immigration, it's not just important to have your
21:50people at the Department of Homeland Security, although that is important.
21:53But there are certain positions at Health and Human Services where you want a strong ally with your point of
21:58view.
21:59There are certain jobs in the State Department, in the Western Hemisphere Division.
22:02So he knows now all the levers of power.
22:05Right.
22:05But, Leanne, let me ask you this.
22:07Minneapolis, Tom Homan comes in and says, well, we're pulling out.
22:12Obviously, it did not go well.
22:14No.
22:15Certainly from a public relations perspective for the administration in Minneapolis, largely because of the two deaths caused by ICE
22:22agents.
22:24Of protestors.
22:26Did he go, did Stephen Miller go too far this time?
22:29It seems that way.
22:31Yeah.
22:32I think that a couple things.
22:34On his standing in the White House, there was, he had a 40th birthday party that his wife, Katie Miller,
22:40hosted for him back in the fall, or the summer, actually.
22:46Every, people who attended told me that they have never seen so many people in the administration in one place.
22:54It was every single cabinet member, official, Caroline Levitt.
22:59Just everyone was there.
23:00You needed like a designated survivor.
23:02Yeah, exactly.
23:03And it was, and it was show, it was a show of how important he is.
23:09Right.
23:10In this administration, it was also notable that there was no members of Congress there, except for the Speaker, the
23:16Speaker of the House.
23:17Which gets back to your question, did he go too far?
23:21This is something that the president has gotten a lot of pushback on.
23:25Stephen Miller has been criticized very publicly by Democrats and very privately by Republicans.
23:30Although Senator Tillis, a prominent Republican, does not like him at all and has told the president that.
23:35Every single time he can publicly say how much he hates Stephen Miller, he does it.
23:42He will be talking about something totally different to a reporter, and he will bring up Stephen Miller.
23:46He's also retiring.
23:48He is also retiring.
23:49Which is interesting.
23:50But he does have a line to the president, and he has told the president many times that Stephen Miller
23:56is doing him and the Republican Party no justice.
24:00We did see something rare after the Prede shooting, too, on Miller, which was him also sort of trying to
24:05clean it up and say, well, look, I was getting information from CBP agents.
24:09There was a period there where they tried to soften that language.
24:12That's rare.
24:13McKay, let me ask you this.
24:15What does he ultimately want?
24:18And by the way, you have like 30 seconds to answer that question.
24:22Well, I think that he wants a lot.
24:24But I think when it comes to immigration in particular, I think that you guys are right.
24:30He has made it very clear, and even in my conversations, that he wants to entirely reframe our national understanding
24:37of our country as a nation.
24:39He's basically in an argument with Emma Lazarus in a kind of way.
24:43Right.
24:43I mean, there's a key moment in the first term where he was asked about the placard at the base
24:50of the Statue of Liberty.
24:51That's the poem.
24:53And he completely dismisses it, like disdainfully dismisses it.
24:59And I think that that just – that is his ideological project.
25:02If he leaves – if he can retire in a country that does not see immigrants as being welcome into
25:10this country, that does not see immigrants as part of the national story, he will be happy.
25:15He's a fascinating figure, obviously the most powerful non-elected official.
25:20I think we can all agree on that, more powerful than cabinet officials.
25:24We'll talk about him again and again, obviously, but that's all the time we have for now.
25:29I want to thank our guests for joining me, and I thank you at home for watching us.
25:33You can read Asher's profile of Stephen Miller by visiting TheAtlantic.com.
25:37I'm Jeffrey Goldberg.
25:38Good night from Washington.
26:08We'll see you next time.
26:39We'll see you next time.
26:41You're watching PBS.
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