Let’s talk about Miller. Miller often — he’s been described to me, and I sometimes describe him as seeming like the prime minister of the administration. He seems like the person running policy. You did a great profile of him not long ago. What is his role? So I mean, formally, he’s the deputy chief of staff; informally, I think the president’s described him as being at the top of the totem pole. And when he says that he’s talking about policy and that means he’s involved in all the foreign policy discussions or almost all of them, he’s involved in basically leading the immigration policy discussion. He was deeply involved in many of the disruptive executive orders from the first few months — the crackdown on universities. You just list off a lot of the stuff that happened in those first 100 days that caught everybody off guard, he was driving a lot of it, he was writing a lot of those executive orders. And then I think the other role he plays is he is the voice, he’s the accelerant in the White House, the voice that’s always like adding more fuel to whatever fire is happening and saying: We have to go harder. We have to go tougher. We have to do more of this. We can’t give up. We can’t surrender. We have to push through this stuff. And so in that way, he influences a lot of things. I mean any discussion that’s going on, he’s going to add more fuel to that fire, more kindling. He’s going to go and say something like ICE agents have total immunity. And so suddenly, C.B.P. officers or ICE agents up in Minneapolis feel somehow freer to push the bounds of what is legal in their behavior. And he’s accelerated that tension. I mean, I think the most jarring thing he’s done was after the Charlie Kirk murder, give a speech that everybody should watch at his funeral, in which he basically described this clash of civilizations, this full-on war for the future of humanity between the left and his side. “They cannot imagine what they have awakened. They cannot conceive of the army that they have arisen in all of us, because we stand for what is good, what is virtuous, what is noble. And to those trying to incite violence against us, those trying to foment hatred against us: What do you have? You have nothing. You thought you could kill Charlie Kirk. You have made him immortal.” It was like it was like a call to war speech. And I think he brings that attitude to the whole conversation inside the government. In our profile, we described him as the pulsing id of a president who is already almost pure id and I think that’s just another way of seeing him as that accelerant. And one of the first ways we, the nation, kind of collectively glimpsed it was during Signalgate, where our boss, the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, is inadvertently added to a private Signal chain of Trump’s top, top, top people discussing a bombing campaign in Yemen. And this is fascinating for a number of reasons for what it reveals, including just the sheer sloppiness to add a journalist to a private Signal chain with essentially classified information. But to me, even then, even before I started reporting on Stephen Miller and came to understand the true scope of his power and influence, was that in that debate, you have the vice president and Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, and all these top people going back and forth. Stephen Miller is in that chain, technically the lowest on the totem pole. He’s not elected. He’s not Senate-confirmed. He’s not a cabinet official. And at one point, Stephen Miller weighs in. And I’m paraphrasing a bit here, but he essentially says, look, as I understand it, the president gave the green light to go bomb Yemen. And then everyone’s just like, oh, OK, let’s do it. And they do it. And when we were talking to people in the White House, it became clear that a directive from Stephen Miller is viewed as a directive from Donald Trump himself.
