Michael Scherer

And I think he brings that attitude to the whole conversation inside the government.

I think it's more developed than the president's.

I don't think the president is a very ideological person.

I don't think he reads, you know, Claremont Institute papers or has a very sophisticated view of, you know, the drift of the Constitution over the last 30 years and what needs to be fixed.

He knows what he wants to do.

And I think Miller's role then is to fill in a lot of those blanks, and he has operationalized a lot of what the sort of emerging institutional MAGA...

has started to argue in the last five years, which is basically an argument that says the way the government has been behaving over the last 20, 30 years is way outside of what the Constitution was intended to do.

And we have to correct for that by doing things that, for most observers in Washington, I think, for definitely Democrats, looks extra constitutional.

What a gentle word.

Yeah.

But to do things that, you know, dramatically expands the power of the executive branch, involves the executive branch and the federal government and things that conservatives for decades never wanted the federal government to be involved in, you know, universities, speech codes and...

private businesses.

One thing I just want to add here is that the president, I think, kind of adores Miller, sees him as very useful, has definitely hugged him and empowered him.

It's also true that the president has held Miller at a kind of ironic distance at times.

And you've seen this in the Oval Office.

He'll say, you know, he'll joke about how we don't really want Stephen to say everything he believes.

Or, you know, we reported in this story an anecdote from the debate prep in 2024 in which they're talking about immigration.

And, you know, Miller was speaking about what the answer on immigration should be.

And the president, I'll paraphrase, said something like, well, if you had your way, Stephen, everybody in this country would look like you.

And Miller answered, that's correct.