Mother Jones reports:

President Donald Trump is ending a bruising week of electoral humiliation with a clear message: He has no intention of changing tack. In fact, the president appears ready to double down on his worst instincts.

“I am pleased to announce that Mr. Stephen Miller, the current Deputy Chief of Staff of the Trump Administration, and one of my most trusted advisors, will become the Chief of Staff starting Monday, November 9, 2026,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

That’s the singular message of Friday’s announcement that Trump is tapping Stephen Miller to replace Susie Wiles as his chief of staff, marking the alarming further rise of one of the administration’s most publicly reviled figures. The shake-up follows Tuesday’s Democratic sweep across the country, a rout widely viewed as a rejection of Trump and MAGA politics amid a deeply unpopular war and rising costs.

But perhaps most ominously, Miller’s ascension signals that Trump’s immigration crackdown will not slow down over the next two years unless Democrats find a way to break it with their new control of Congress. In selecting Miller, who is known for his aggressive, xenophobic rhetoric, Trump also replaces yet another prominent woman in his administration, following the firings of Kristi Noem, Pam Bondi, and Kimberly Guilfoyle. [Continue reading…]

Official statement from incoming Oversight Chairman @robertgarcia.house.gov on Stephen Miller being announced as White House Chief of Staff:

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— Oversight Dems (@oversightdemocrats.bsky.social) 2:31 PM · Nov 6, 2026

Andrew Feinberg writes:

An hour before President Donald Trump announced the ouster of his longest-serving White House Chief of Staff, Susie Wiles, in favor of longtime loyalist Stephen Miller, he posted to Truth Social an endorsement of Republican National Committee Chair Joe Gruters in the upcoming race to remain as the head of the RNC for the next two years.

He said Gruters, the former Florida Republican Party boss who presided over what Governor Ron DeSantis called an “extension level event” as Democrats took both the House and Senate plus countless governors’ mansions and state legislatures, “should return as Chairman of the RNC to continue to build our Party, and be a trusted partner as we MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN.”

The president’s understated endorsement of the man who, along with him, had overseen an electoral wipeout of historic proportion was overshadowed roughly 60 minutes later by his decision to promote Miller, a former Senate communications staffer whose career has been almost single-mindedly focused on reducing non-white immigration to America, to the role once held by legendary operators like James Baker, Leon Panetta, Dick Cheney and Ron Klain.

It was a move seemingly designed to telegraph his intention to learn absolutely nothing from the epic ballot-box blowout he and his party had just suffered and to telegraph nothing except defiance in the face of an incoming Democratic Congress determined to reassert the legislative branch’s status as primus inter pares among the three branches of American government.

But Republicans on the inside aren’t so sure that Trump’s choice of Miller is the stuff of three-dimensional chess or some sort of grand strategy.

Instead, multiple GOP sources told The Independent that the move is a sign of the president’s weakness in the face of his administration being humiliatingly rejected by the American electorate — and a desperation play to keep control of the remainder of his now-shattered political coalition.

That’s because Trump must now confront a problem that has beguiled every second-term chief executive since Dwight Eisenhower entered office with the 22nd Amendment’s two-term limit imposed on him.

America’s two-year election cycles mean a president in his last term will start to lose relevance as soon as the midterm elections are done because jockeying will inevitably begin for the next presidential primary cycle and the start of the race to succeed him.

That’s not something Trump can handle, and insiders suggest his recent moves are meant to keep himself at the center of the GOP universe even at a time when a healthy political party would be making preparations to hand off their standard to the next man.
[Continue reading…]