MAGA Monsters
Stephen Miller Is The New Republic’s 2025 Scoundrel of the Year
He was counting on a nation of haters. He was wrong.

Greg Sargent
December 31, 2025

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Finally, a glance at this administration’s messaging—the Department of Homeland Security’s X feed has become a white nationalist sewer pit—makes it clear that Miller is trying to pull off a hegemonic shift. Miller hoped the combination of brutal police-state tactics plus relentless state propaganda would shock the American people into embracing—or accepting—a semi-conscious ethnonationalism. Miller wants Americans to see immigrants from the “Third World” as a threat to American wellbeing at an existential, civilizational level.

But that hasn’t happened, either. His tactics have triggered a sustained cultural backlash in defense of the specific migrants in Trump-Miller’s crosshairs and of immigration more broadly as a positive good for the country. Miller has helped drive Trump’s approval on immigration—once a “good” issue for him—into the toilet. The public is rejecting their vision.

Miller is already causing immense human suffering, of course. He has snuffed out many pathways to entry for people fleeing global horrors and has revamped the refugee system to prioritize white people. His project may get a lot farther than many of us can bear.

But it remains possible to envision a different ultimate outcome. In it, Miller’s mass deportations mostly fall short, the government mostly follows court rulings, civil society’s resistance holds, and the public backlash to Miller’s masked storm troopers only grows. A future administration can then channel that popular energy into real reform oriented around immigration as a positive good, realigning our legal, humanitarian and enforcement apparatus with what’s genuinely in the national interest.

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