Stephen Miller re-emerges

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Outside of President Donald Trump, no White House official has accumulated more influence in this administration than Stephen Miller, the 39-year-old anti-immigration crusader whose brain and bare-knuckled tactics have been deployed to drive the agenda for the commander in chief.

Not Vice President JD Vance. Not chief of staff Susie Wiles. Not anyone else.

It is Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff for policy, who loaded up scores of executive orders for Trump to sign in his first months back in office — on topics ranging from the declaration of a national emergency at the southern border to dismantling diversity programs in the federal government and withdrawing the U.S. from the World Health Organization.

“Stephen is the president’s id,” said one former Trump adviser who knows Miller well. “He has been for a while. It’s just now he has the leverage and power to fully effectuate it.”

Democrats have long pointed to Miller, in similar if darker fashion, as the engineer of Trump’s most audacious plans and tactics. Though he receded a bit from the spotlight during billionaire Elon Musk’s ascendance in the first months of Trump’s second term, Miller is re-emerging as a target for the political opposition.

“Stephen Miller is responsible for all the bad things happening in the United States,” Sen. Ben Ray Luján said, adding that Miller was the force behind “some of the ugliest policies” in Trump’s first term.

This profile is drawn from interviews and text exchanges with more than a dozen White House officials, lawmakers and Trump-world figures familiar with Miller and his work.

Even some of those who praised Miller in interviews were reluctant to be identified because they weren’t sure what might anger him — or how the hard-liner might seek payback. As a staffer on the Hill, he threatened to turn activists on fellow Republican aides when their bosses did not line up behind his positions, one senior GOP aide on Capitol Hill recalled.

“Uh oh,” one senior White House official texted when notified that NBC News was working on a story about Miller.

But Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, who met Miller when they were both working to sink a bipartisan 2013 immigration overhaul in Congress, had no such reticence.

“I think he was an effective [Senate] staffer, and I think he is an exponentially more effective senior staffer in the White House,” Cruz said.

“I think he has been the chief architect in the White House of the president’s extraordinarily successful efforts securing the border,” said Cruz, who described Miller as a friend with whom he speaks “regularly.”