Al Haig’s fantasy come to life

The worst person in the Trump administration, it is increasingly clear, is the de facto president:

Moments after federal officers fatally shot Alex Pretti, his body still lying facedown on an icy Minneapolis street, Customs and Border Protection officials texted Stephen Miller, the White House aide and presidential confidant who framed the government’s response.

While White House communication and policy aides tried to sort out what they knew, what they should say and who would brief President Trump, Miller jumped ahead. Three hours after the shooting, Miller told the world via X that the slain VA nurse was a “domestic terrorist” who had “tried to assassinate federal law enforcement,” a description that set off one of the Trump administration’s biggest political crises of the president’s second term. 

None of the language Miller used had been approved or reviewed, said administration officials familiar with the matter. Miller, who shared a photo of the handgun found on Pretti’s hip with White House officials, told colleagues his comments were based on early information. 

Not long after Miller’s tweet, Trump posted the photo of the gun on his own social-media post, saying the weapon was loaded and ready to go. “What is that all about?” Trump wrote.

Video footage soon contradicted Miller’s portrayal of Pretti and marked a rare setback for the singularly powerful White House adviser who has shaped many of the president’s most incendiary impulses. Miller has been an architect in almost every boundary-pushing effort in Trump’s second term, according to White House officials familiar with the matter, including immigration sweeps in U.S. cities and the deadly boat strikes in the Caribbean.

When protests spread in Minneapolis, Miller raised the idea of the president invoking the Insurrection Act to send in military troops, a possibility that Trump later voiced publicly, according to White House officials familiar with the matter. 

After immigration agents fatally shot Renee Good in early January, senior officials from the White House and Department of Homeland Security discussed whether to continue the operation in Minneapolis, according to officials familiar with the discussions. Miller said even more officers should be deployed, a White House official said, both to continue raids and protect agents conducting them. Miller reminded the president of their original goal in the city: an immigration crackdown related to welfare fraud by Somali migrants. 

Miller, a 40-year-old from historically progressive Santa Monica, Calif., has been by Trump’s side through thick and thin since 2016, earning the president’s trust in part by proving that an aggressive approach to curbing illegal immigration would be a political winner. After Trump’s 2020 election defeat, Miller helped plot Trump’s return to the Oval Office. 

Miller has repeatedly said that bad people have been pouring into the U.S. and that the administration should respond with aggressive law enforcement. He confronts aides who bring up legal checks that might hinder his pursuit and dismisses concerns over public reaction to the administration’s most far-reaching measures, White House officials said. 

Imagine how much worse things could get if the president was a doddering old man with increasingly low energy and interest in anything but narcissistic and illegal real estate projects.