Democrats did so well in last Tuesday’s midterm elections that for a few days afterwards it was possible to imagine we’d just lived through the end of the Trump era.

On social media and podcasts, pundits took note of the fact that the president appeared to accept the outcome without a fight. Could this mean he would be open to bipartisanship with the new and sizable Democratic majorities in Congress? Or perhaps that he would recede from governing altogether, allowing aides to run the show while he all but retired to the White House? Or might it even be possible he would resign the presidency, allowing Vice President JD Vance to take over and the country as a whole to move on from the anxiety and dramas of the past decade?

Such musings were nice while they lasted—but they didn’t last long. The fantasies came to an abrupt end on Friday, when the president announced on Truth Social that White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles would be stepping down to be replaced by Stephen Miller.

Miller served as a senior advisor to the president in the first Trump administration, with special focus on immigration policy. Since the start of the second administration, he has been Homeland Security Advisor and White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy. But this rundown of Miller’s resume fails to capture what is most distinctive about him. Miller is a true-believing MAGA ideologue, a fiercely committed Trump loyalist, someone convinced Judeo-Christian white civilization is fatally threatened with a “great replacement” by people from other races and religions, and a man who longs to see the president assert and wield unconstrained power.

Far from signaling the conclusion of the Trump era, the midterm elections of 2026 now look likely to be viewed as the moment when the country began to confront an even more intense challenge to liberal democratic principles from the hardline xenophobic right than the one we’ve already been enduring for much of the past 10 years.

When Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama saw their parties’ congressional majorities swept away by midterm discontent, they were chastened. Their embrace of greater moderation after electoral rebukes flowed partly from an acceptance of political reality: With Congress lost, governing required the trimming of sails and a willingness to compromise with ideological opponents.

But there was more to it than this. Politicians in a democracy typically defer to and respect public opinion, even when they disagree with it. Just as a solid electoral victory bestows a sense of democratic legitimacy on a governing agenda, a drubbing does the reverse. It conveys vital information about how the American people are responding to that agenda. When the response is sufficiently negative, the former sense of legitimacy diminishes or vanishes altogether, leaving a president and his party weakened.

Though only if the president is open to receiving the message.

Trump’s decision to promote Miller to the position of White House Chief of Staff is an undeniable sign that the president has no intention whatsoever of deferring to the message of displeasure the midterm elections conveyed. On the contrary, the president appears eager to defy that message. Rather than feeling chastened, Trump seems committed to moving further away from anything resembling moderation and compromise. Whereas the election showed that many more Americans disapprove of how Trump is governing the country than support it, the president thinks the right response is to double down on a maximally MAGA agenda.

Miller is passionately devoted to the cause of doing exactly that. In addition to strongly supporting Trump’s protectionist tariff agenda and the vaccine skepticismof Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., he is an unapologetic anti-immigration zealot. Miller wants ICE and the Border Patrol to deport as many people as possible as quickly as possible, without regard for the effect this will have on immigrant communities, families, and children, or for whether the immigrants have committed any crime since arriving in the country. (Miller was the primary advocate behind the highly unpopular policy of family separation that generated considerable controversy and was eventually abandoned during the first Trump administration.)

This makes Miller an extremist on the issue. But it’s not merely his goals that are radical. It’s also the means he believes should be employed to achieve his preferred ends. When an ICE agent killed anti-ICE protester Renee Good in Minneapolis last winter, Miller immediately labeled her, without evidence, a “domestic terrorist,” just as he described protester Alex Pretti, a nurse shot to death in the same city 17 days later by two federal immigration agents, as a “would-be assassin.”

These hyperbolic lies were not exceptions for Miller. They were expressions of a worldview rooted in panic and alarm about the existential threat immigration and its defenders pose to the American way of life. The threat is so acute that Miller has long advocated suspending habeas corpus (the requirement that government officials must legally justify detaining a person) for noncitizens, despite its presence in Article I of the Constitution. The rule has been suspended four times in American history, each time in conformity with the constitutional stipulation that a suspension can only be put into effect in times of rebellion or invasion.

That’s why Miller consistently calls, and urges the president to call, immigration a form of “invasion” that is leading the country to being “conquered”—that is, in order to lay the legal groundwork for such a move. (Miller has also called birthright citizenship “a deep knife wound in the heart of the American republic” that will produce the “suicide” of our “civilization,” and has denied the Democrats are even a party, preferring to call them “a domestic extremist organization.”) As Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan of The New York Times reported, others in the administration have actively opposed Miller’s efforts in this area, though with Miller set to run the White House, such opposition will now likely be neutered.

Miller (along with Vance) has likewise been a leading advocate of Trump invoking the Insurrection Act against those protesting deportation sweeps. Doing so would give the president exceptionally broad powers to deploy military forces on American soil. As with the suspension of habeas corpus, Miller favors Trump asserting these powers in order to test the limits of what the system will permit the president to do in emergency situations.

The emphasis on emergency is key. Political philosophers as different from one another as Aristotle, John Locke, and Carl Schmitt have recognized that legal norms, and even the rule of law itself, can be justly set aside in emergency situations in which the very survival of the polity is at stake. The question then becomes: What constitutes a genuine emergency or situation of existential threat? The answer can ultimately be determined only by elected officials, judges, and citizens exercising independent judgment.

That points to an exceedingly dangerous possibility. What if someone in power continually describes the status quo as a situation involving a dire threat—or even behaves in such a way as to provoke the very chaotic conditions that would justify their own seizure of post-constitutional rule? The first option (threat inflation) is something Miller, along with the president and countless right-wing “influencers,” regularly engages in. Meanwhile, the second (acting to cause the very crisis that justifies an extralegal seizure of power) is what Miller seems to have been hoping for last winter in Minnesota.

In the end, cooler heads in the White House prevailed, leading ICE to back off its highly aggressive actions in the state.

Who were those cooler heads? We have reason to suspect that one of them may have been outgoing Chief of Staff Susie Wiles. According to the reporting by Haberman and Swan, the push to suspend habeas corpus for noncitizens was abandoned after an “archconservative” White House lawyer named Will Scharf wrote a confidential memo to Wiles making the case against any such move. Did Scharf write the memo unbidden? Or, more likely, did Wiles ask him to put his misgivings down on paper in order to provide herself with legal justification for quashing the power grab?

Regardless of what happened behind the scenes, it’s clear where Miller was eager to go—and equally clear that he has now been elevated to a position within the administration that will enable him to make the crucial judgment calls about what the nation’s ongoing immigration “emergency” requires with regard to habeas corpus and the Insurrection Act. He will be making these calls with no oversight at all, besides the minimal and mercurial one provided by the man who just promoted him.

We should be very grateful that the president and his fanatical enabler will be facing broad Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress come January 3, 2027. But we shouldn’t downplay the threat that they nonetheless pose to the competent and lawful functioning of democracy in the United States over the next two years. Those in charge of the executive branch may well actively seek to precipitate a constitutional crisis in the hope of testing the outer limits of presidential power.

That’s a situation no American should hope for—though it is one all of us need to be prepared for.

Damon Linker, a contributing writer at Persuasion, writes the Substack newsletter “Notes from the Middleground.” He is a senior lecturer in the Department of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania and a senior fellow in the Open Society Project at the Niskanen Center.

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