President Donald Trump has named Stephen Miller as his new White House chief of staff. The announcement came on Friday, November 6, just three days after Republicans lost control of Congress in the midterm elections.
Miller, 41, takes over from Susie Wiles on Monday, November 9. Trump broke the news in a post on Truth Social, calling Miller “one of my most trusted advisors”.
Wiles handed in her resignation on Thursday evening, according to people familiar with the matter cited by US media. She will move to Trump’s political operation. Trump said she “has done an outstanding job”.
A shake-up days after the midterms
The timing is hard to miss. On Tuesday, November 3, voters handed Democrats control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate. Democrats take over in January.
Picking Miller is not a pivot. If anything, it is the opposite. Miller is the aide most closely tied to the hardline immigration policies that defined Trump’s second term. Elevating him to the most powerful staff job in the West Wing suggests Trump plans to double down, not soften up. Al Jazeera put it the same way, calling the move a doubling down on Trump’s most controversial policies.
Democrats are widely expected to open investigations into Miller once they take control of Congress in January. His role in the White House, and in the deportation campaign, will almost certainly be near the top of that list.
Who is Stephen Miller?
Miller has been at Trump’s side for a decade. He joined the first presidential campaign in January 2016 and helped shape the message and the tone that carried Trump to a surprise win that November. Steve Bannon, a former Trump adviser, told the Associated Press back in 2017 that Miller helped Trump “find his voice”.
He was a conservative activist long before that. At Santa Monica High School in California, he used local radio shows to rail against school policies he saw as liberal. At Duke University, he led the Duke Conservative Union. After college he moved to Washington, working as a legislative aide to Republican members of Congress and to Senator Jeff Sessions.
When Trump won in 2016, Miller became a presidential adviser and speechwriter. He quickly became one of the loudest voices on immigration inside the White House, often framing the issue as a fight to protect Western civilisation.
His fingerprints are on some of the first term’s most contested policies. He helped shape the Department of Justice’s 2018 “Zero Tolerance” policy at the southern border, which called for the arrest of nearly every adult crossing into the US without legal papers. The policy led to widespread family separation, with children kept apart from parents held in criminal detention. Trump later changed it by executive order after a public outcry.
Miller also pushed to end DACA, the programme that let people brought to the US as children without papers get legal paperwork for school and work. And he drove the 2017 travel ban on several Muslim-majority countries. The first version blocked citizens of seven countries from entering the US for 90 days. An adjusted version was eventually upheld by the Supreme Court.
Democratic lawmakers accused Miller of pushing white nationalist rhetoric during that period. In 2019, the Southern Poverty Law Center published emails it said showed Miller supporting white nationalist websites and ideas, and Democrats pushed for his removal from the White House.
Miller also backed Trump’s unfounded claims that the 2020 election was stolen, supporting efforts to have Trump certified as the winner.
The second term: deportations front and centre
Miller never left Trump’s side. He stayed through the comeback campaign and, when the administration returned to office in January 2025, he became deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security adviser.
Since then he has helped run the mass deportation drive. Immigration enforcement agents have flooded communities across the country, increasingly picking up people with no criminal record or only minor offences, according to Al Jazeera.
In May 2025, Miller told Fox News the administration had “set a goal of a minimum of 3,000 arrests for ICE every day, and President Trump is going to keep pushing to get that number up higher each and every day”.
He has also defended the tactics used by immigration agents, at times fiercely. He first defended the January killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti during an operation in Minneapolis, calling them both “terrorists”, before walking back the remark about Pretti.
The administration has also tried to expel visa-holders and permanent residents who spoke up for Palestinian rights or criticised Israel’s actions in Gaza and the West Bank. The White House has argued those views harm US foreign policy. Miller’s part in shaping that position has drawn scrutiny.
In July, Mahmoud Khalil, a former Columbia University graduate student, sued several Trump administration officials, including Miller, accusing them of singling out him and other non-citizen Palestinians. Khalil still faces deportation proceedings over his role in pro-Palestinian protests.
Miller also tried, unsuccessfully, to end birthright citizenship in Trump’s second term. And he has become one of the loudest defenders of Trump’s military actions in the Western Hemisphere, backing the US abduction of Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro and telling CNN in January that the US had a “right to seize” Greenland because of its military might.
What happens to Susie Wiles
Wiles leaves a job she held longer than any of Trump’s other chiefs of staff. She was the first woman ever to hold the post, and she ran the operation that brought Trump back to the presidency in 2024.
Trump cycled through four chiefs of staff in his first term. Wiles lasted longer than all of them. She went public in March 2026 with a breast cancer diagnosis, after months of treatment, and later said she no longer showed evidence of the disease.
Friday was her last day in the role. She now moves to Trump’s political operation, though the White House has not said exactly what that job will look like.
Miller, for his part, sounded ready. “It has been the privilege of my lifetime to have served on his team from Day One,” he posted on X on Friday.
What happens next
Miller starts on Monday, November 9. The chief of staff is the president’s gatekeeper: the person who runs White House staff and hiring, manages the president’s calendar, and controls much of the information that reaches the Oval Office.
It is not yet clear how the new role changes his influence. He already had a huge portfolio; what the job gives him now is control of the whole machine, not just policy.
Two things will test him fast. A Democratic Congress arrives in January, and with it, investigations into the deportation campaign and Miller’s role in it. And Trump is under pressure to show the midterms were a blip, not a verdict. Miller’s appointment is Trump’s answer: no retreat, no reset, just a closer circle.
Whether that steadies the White House or deepens the fight with Congress is the question now. The answer starts to come on Monday.
Sources: Al Jazeera, USA Today, CNN, Indian Express.
