Trump to appoint immigration hardliner Stephen Miller to top White House job – report
Stephen Miller, an architect of Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, is expected to return to the White House as his deputy chief of staff for policy, CNN reports, citing two sources familiar with the plan.
Here’s more, from CNN:
Miller, who served as a senior adviser to Trump during his first administration and has been a leading advocate for more restrictive immigration policy, is expected to take on an expanded role in the president-elect’s second term.
Miller is also a lead architect of Trump’s plans for mass deportation of undocumented immigrants. He has said that a second Trump administration would seek a tenfold increase in the number of deportations to more than one million per year.
“President-elect Trump will begin making decisions on who will serve in his second administration soon. Those decisions will be announced when they are made,” Trump spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt told CNN.
Key events
The US climate envoy, John Podesta, has said the fight “for a cleaner, safer” planet will not stop under a re-elected Donald Trump even if some progress is reversed.
“Although under Donald Trump’s leadership the US federal government placed climate-related actions on the back burner, efforts to prevent climate change remain a commitment in the US and will confidently continue,” Podesta, who is leading the Biden administration’s delegation at the annual talks, said at the Cop29 UN climate talks on Monday as they opened in Baku, Azerbaijan.
Trump has pledged to deregulate the energy sector, allow the oil and gas industry to “drill, baby, drill”, and pull the US from the Paris climate agreement, which committed countries to taking steps to avoid the worst impacts of the crisis.
Yet while Trump will try to reverse progress, “this is not the end of our fight for a cleaner, safer planet”, Podesta said.
Today so far
Stephen Miller, an architect of the hardline immigration policies Donald Trump enacted during his first term, appears to be heading back to the White House. While the appointment has not been officially announced yet, CNN reports that Miller will serve as Trump’s deputy chief of staff, and JD Vance publicly congratulated Miller on getting the job. The president-elect has also appointed Tom Homan, who was one of the main officials behind Trump’s family separation policy, as his “border czar”. Homan has spent much of the past four years promising to carry out mass deportations, and will now be in a position to make good on that.
Here’s what else has happened today:
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Kamala Harris’s campaign was hobbled by Joe Biden’s failed re-election bid, and by a strategy that failed to preserve the momentum generated once the vice-president launched her bid for the White House, Notus reports.
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Harris and Biden appeared together at Arlington national cemetery to mark Veterans Day. In a brief and somber speech, Biden noted this would be his last time celebrating the occasion as president.
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Who else might make it into Trump’s cabinet? Many names have been floated, but only a few will be chosen. Here’s what we know.
Biden’s late exit, ineffective strategy hobbled Harris campaign – report
Kamala Harris’s campaign was felled by an ineffective strategy that failed to preserve the momentum she generated upon entering the presidential race, while also being hobbled by Joe Biden’s aborted attempt to win a second term, Notus reports.
Expect lots of Harris campaign postmortems to be published in the days and weeks to come as Democrats look for lessons in a campaign that was started under Biden, passed at the last minute to Harris, and ultimately failed to prevent Donald Trump from returning to the White House.
The story, based on interviews with former campaign staffers and others close to the effort, begins by noting that Biden’s campaign struggled to hire because of the president’s unpopularity:
Multiple sources who spoke with NOTUS lamented how difficult it was to hire staff at the inception of Biden’s reelection campaign. Few wanted to work for Biden and even fewer wanted to move to Wilmington, where the campaign was headquartered. One campaign aide said a few of those who were hired for senior roles were, in reality, years too junior for their responsibilities. Even when Biden was still on the ticket, aides who had run national campaigns noticed that the infrastructure was severely lacking. And when the candidate switch occurred, seasoned people who wanted to come on found it difficult to navigate the existing infrastructure. They believed that it was unlikely that Harris understood the teetering giant she inherited. And even if she did, it would have been too costly timewise to rebuild in 100 days.
It also says that despite a jump in voter enthusiasm once Harris entered the race, the campaign was not equipped to make the most of it:
The Biden campaign was also not ready for the energy and support that rushed in from Democrats when Harris first took over. One operative outside the campaign told NOTUS that during the first hours after Harris got into the race, thousands of donors who contributed to ActBlue were prompted to tip the service after they donated. When asked by Harris aides if a volunteer registration form could replace it to capture the newly interested Democrats, the campaign didn’t have such a form available. (The campaign said the link was added to the site several hours later and able to capture 170,000 volunteers that day.)
“There were things that could not be operationalized because the infrastructure was so limited,” said a second outside ally. Another said it was impossible to scale up at the pace required to keep up with the surge of enthusiastic Democrats wanting to volunteer and give money to Harris, because of the complicated way the campaign was initially stood up by Biden.
It also offers some insights into the saga that played out at the Democratic national convention, where party officials blocked the Uncommitted movement’s effort to have a Palestinian speaker address delegates:
Senior allies to Harris pushed the campaign and the DNC to have a Palestinian speaker onstage at the August convention, trying to further the goodwill Harris had earned from the Arab and Muslim communities furious over Gaza, but they were denied. One person said it was at the behest of the national security team.
The tone of Joe Biden’s speeches has shifted slightly, with his departure from the White House growing nearer and the election having concluded.
Veterans Day is usually a somber and formal occasion, and Biden kept that tone in a brief speech from Arlington national cemetery earlier today, while noting that it would be his last time marking the day as president.
“This the last time I will stand here at Arlington as commander-in-chief,” Biden said.
“It’s been the greatest honor of my life to lead you, to serve you, care for you, to defend you, just as you defended us, generation, after generation, after generation.”
While we still do not know all the names Donald Trump will pick for his cabinet positions, the Guardian’s Robert Tait reports that the president-elect wants the chamber’s next Republican leader to allow him to circumvent the normal confirmation process to get his appointees in:
Donald Trump has demanded that the three frontrunners to lead the Senate allow him to appoint officials to his new administration without confirmation hearings on Capitol Hill, as a future Republican government began to take shape the week after his election victory.
In a demonstration of his political muscle, the US president-elect urged support for “recess appointments”, which allow the president to make appointments while the Senate is temporarily paused, and can be used to circumvent the confirmation process, which can result in appointments being delayed or blocked.
The demand amounted to a full-frontal intervention in this week’s GOP’s election for a new Senate leader to replace Mitch McConnell, the party’s longtime leader who is retiring. The three men tipped to lead the Senate – Rick Scott, John Thune and John Cornyn – all quickly agreed to Trump’s request.
One of the biggest decisions Donald Trump has to make is who will be his attorney general.
The appointee will play a leading role in prosecuting the president-elect’s opponents, should Trump make good on his promise to do so.
Semafor reports that one potential candidate for the job has dropped out:
News: Missouri Sen. Eric Schmitt told Trump transition that he’s withdrawing his name from consideration for attorney general, per a person familiar. The Missouri senator will help select judges and work to move Trump’s agenda in the Senate
— Burgess Everett (@burgessev) November 11, 2024
Vance congratulates Stephen Miller on reported appointment to White House
Vice-president-elect JD Vance has congratulated immigration hardliner JD Vance on being appointed to a top White House position by Donald Trump:
Unusually, Trump has not announced the appointment, and Vance is instead reacting to CNN’s reporting that Miller’s appointment is imminent.
Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are at Arlington national cemetery in Virginia, where they have just laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in honor of Veterans Day.
It is their first joint public appearance since Kamala Harris lost last week’s presidential election to Donald Trump.
In addition to pursuing hardline immigration policies, Stephen Miller was earlier this year reported to be putting together a plan to tackle “anti-white racism”, the Guardian’s Martin Pengelly reports. Expect to hear more about that, if Miller is indeed appointed to a job in Donald Trump’s second administration:
The anti-immigration extremist, white nationalist and former Trump White House adviser Stephen Miller is helping drive a plan to tackle supposed “anti-white racism” if Donald Trump returns to power next year, Axios reported.
“Longtime aides and allies … have been laying legal groundwork with a flurry of lawsuits and legal complaints – some of which have been successful,” Axios said on Monday.
Should Trump return to power, Axios said, Miller and other aides plan to “dramatically change the government’s interpretation of civil rights-era laws to focus on ‘anti-white racism’ rather than discrimination against people of colour”.
Such an effort would involve “eliminating or upending” programmes meant to counter racism against non-white groups.
The US supreme court, dominated 6-3 by rightwing justices after Trump installed three, recently boosted such efforts by ruling against race-based affirmative action in college admissions.
America First Legal, a group founded by Miller and described by him as the right’s “long-awaited answer” to the American Civil Liberties Union, is helping drive plans for a second Trump term, Axios said.
In 2021, an AFL suit blocked implementation of a $29bn Covid-era Small Business Administration programme that prioritised helping restaurants owned by women, veterans and people from socially and economically disadvantaged groups.
Miller called that ruling “the first, but crucial, step towards ending government-sponsored racial discrimination”.
Trump to appoint immigration hardliner Stephen Miller to top White House job – report
Stephen Miller, an architect of Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, is expected to return to the White House as his deputy chief of staff for policy, CNN reports, citing two sources familiar with the plan.
Here’s more, from CNN:
Miller, who served as a senior adviser to Trump during his first administration and has been a leading advocate for more restrictive immigration policy, is expected to take on an expanded role in the president-elect’s second term.
Miller is also a lead architect of Trump’s plans for mass deportation of undocumented immigrants. He has said that a second Trump administration would seek a tenfold increase in the number of deportations to more than one million per year.
“President-elect Trump will begin making decisions on who will serve in his second administration soon. Those decisions will be announced when they are made,” Trump spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt told CNN.
With congresswoman Elise Stefanik heading to the United Nations and former acting Ice chief Tom Homan tasked with border security, who else may Donald Trump appoint to his cabinet?
The Guardian’s Lorenzo Tondo has a look at the reported contenders for top roles:
With Democrats heading for the minority in the Senate, some party thinkers are encouraging liberal supreme court justice Sonia Sotomayor to step down.
That would clear the way for Democrats – in their final weeks controlling the Senate – to confirm a younger replacement for the 70-year-old, and perhaps prevent Republicans from making any new appointments to the court. But CNN reports that the justice has no plans to retire:
“She’s in great health, and the court needs her now more than ever,” said one person close to the justice.
Over the weekend, Bernie Sanders, an influential progressive senator who is allied with Democrats, poured cold water on Sotomayor stepping down, saying he did not think it would be a good idea:
The war in the Middle East was a major issue in last week’s election, with many Muslims and Arab Americans incensed by Joe Biden’s support for Israel’s invasions of Gaza and Lebanon.
That indignation played a part in handing Michigan, a swing state that’s home to some of the largest communities of the two groups in the United States, to Donald Trump. The Associated Press reports that Trump has become the first Republican candidate in 24 years to win the city of Dearborn, where almost half of residents are of Arab descent, and many did not trust Kamala Harris to restrain Israel.
Here’s more from the AP:
In Dearborn, where nearly half of the 110,000 residents are of Arab descent, Vice President Kamala Harris received over 2,500 fewer votes than Trump, who became the first Republican presidential candidate since former President George W. Bush in 2000 to win the city. Harris also lost neighboring Dearborn Heights to Trump, who in his previous term as president banned travel from several mostly-Muslim countries.
Harris lost the presidential vote in two Detroit-area cities with large Arab American populations after months of warnings from local Democrats about the Biden-Harris administration’s unwavering support for Israel in the war in Gaza. Some said they backed Trump after he visited a few days before the election, mingling with customers and staff at a Lebanese-owned restaurant and reassuring people that he would find a way to end the violence in the Middle East.
Others, including Amen, were unable to persuade themselves to back the former president. She said many Arab Americans felt Harris got what she deserved but aren’t “jubilant about Trump.”
“Whether it’s Trump himself or the people who are around him, it does pose a great deal of concern for me,” Amen said. “But at the end of the day when you have two evils running, what are you left with?”
As it became clear late Tuesday into early Wednesday that Trump would not only win the presidency but likely prevail in Dearborn, the mood in metro Detroit’s Arab American communities was described by Dearborn City Council member Mustapha Hammoud as “somber.” And yet, he said, the result was “not surprising at all.”
The shift in Dearborn — where Trump received nearly 18,000 votes compared with Harris’ 15,000 — marks a startling change from just four years ago when Joe Biden won in the city by a nearly 3-to-1 margin.
