I mean this goes to another question about Stephen Miller and his view of a powerful executive.

I want to get to that, but let's stay on the immigration views.

There ' s a tweet, and he tweets a lot as we, we know, and he tweets very uh frankly about his views.

There's a tweet.

Someone should write an alternate historical novel where Americans are the first to master the automobile.

The first in flight, the first to harness the atom, the first to land on the moon, but just keep going and never open our borders to the entire third world for 60 years.

Basically, what he's saying is American innovation all happened because white men, I mean, that's the interpretation here.

Did all of these things and then the country lost focus because it started letting in the third world.

Mckay, come back to California.

I, I mean, because I do think that's crucial to understanding his immigration.

These are, this isn't first of all, it's it's ahistorical.

I mean, Americans invented plenty of things at the same time that immigrants were coming into the country.

In fact, many of the people who are immigrants invented those things as as new Americans.

But go into this the the the the visceral feeling against immigrants.

Yeah, I mean, look, obviously none of us can read his mind, but I think that to understand how these views formed, you have to understand the post 9/11 politics on the right in Southern California in particular, right?

Post 9/11 there was a general kind of rise in xenophobia, fear of, you know, Muslims outsiders, foreigners, we have been through this national trauma.

It's understandable to a certain extent, but Miller's particular fixation on immigration was really born of the right wing media ecosystem in California at the time, which was always rotating around immigration issues.

you know, I think that if he had been, you know, born in Cleveland or Montana or, you know, even, you know, Washington DC, I think it would have been a very different story, but the people that he idolized, that the local talk radio people on the right, the kind of group of conservatives he fell in with we're always talking about immigration and so that extremely negatively, of course but the only reason I say that is because Ronald Reagan, the big the the greatest Republican in the history of California.

it was not in that camp, right, that something had shifted in the decades after Reagan.

Some of it had to do with the right wing backlash to George W. Bush's attempt to find a a grand immigration compromise, but because he was always on the far right of the Republican Party, and because he came from California, immigration was kind of a natural wedge issue that he he latched on.

So what was it growing up in Southern California, he saw Hispanic s he saw the Latino population as just too big trying to dominate white America.

Well, there, there's sort of two things.

You're talking about the post 9/11 Republican sort of backlash, you know, against real efforts to actually have some sort of comprehensive immigration reform.

What you saw was sort of a xenophobic view where you generalized many immigrants coming from the Middle East as national security threats, and you've seen that rhetorrhetoric replicated by this administration.

But then when it comes to also immigrants coming from Central and Latin America, you've had, and this is still exists today, this real push by conservatives of these are, this is economic competition with people that are that are born in the states.

Now of course economic studies do do undercut that and show that immigrants broadly actually benefit the economy, but this is a prime example for the white grievance argument, right?

I want to stay on that for a second because Stephen Miller is Jewish and part of his family came over here 100 years ago as refugees from anti-Semitism in Europe.

When you're in your conversations with him, does that ever play in to uh to his understanding of the world and his own background as the grandchild, great grandchild of immigrants.

I'm gonna introduce one data point which, you know, may or may not be relevant, but he told me one of the the books that most shaped him was Wayne LaPierre's book, the head of the NRA.

In that book, Wayne LaPierre makes an argument that the Holocaust, and I think he said something like Auschwitz, our prime examples of the need for Second Amendment rights, that the, the, you know, to make what you will of that argument, but that if the Jewish people had been armed, they would have been able to stand up to this, you know, authoritarian genocidal regime.

I think that he found a way early on to to kind of meld his general right-wing worldview with his Jewish identity and background.

I think it became a little more strained as he got deeper into Trump era right wing politics and found himself kind of swimming in waters that were, let's say a little bit less friendly to yes, I mean, because there is a, there's an element of let's call it the racialist far right that doesn't have fond feelings about Jews.

Can I make just one brief editorial aside.

I'm sorry, this prompts this prompts this thought.

I wish that the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto had more guns back then, but I don't think that they still would not have been able to defeat the German army.

I mean, it sounds like a, it's just a kind of a anyway, put that aside for now.

We'll do a special episode.

Yes, I'll bring it up with Wayne LaPierre the next time he's on the show.

The thing I would just add to that too is when you look at Stephen's comments about immigration.

he does have a very narrow sort of view of who, which immigrants are justified to be in the United States, and it's not, it doesn't always track with the law.

Like if you go into a legal port of entry at the border, you have a legal process to come in the country.

He pushes back against that, right?

He pushes back against the parole system, the Biden administration started.

They've revamped their refugee program to focus on English-speaking, uh, refugees coming into the US and not from predomin ant ly African and also Muslim majority countries too.

So there's a through line there of who he thinks is deserving to be.

Well, this is why South African Afrikaners are given the only refugees are given privileges in that allowed in that system, you know, I want to talk a little bit about his power in the White House, and I came into direct contact with this question last year during the signal controversy when I was in that chat, JD Vance, everyone else, Marco Rubio are in that chat and arguing back and forth about the, the utility of striking Yemen, and then Miller comes into the chat, um, and writes, as I heard it, the president was clear green light, but we soon make clear to Egypt and Europe what we expect in return, and that shut down the debate.

It shut down JD Vance, kind of made me think, wow, Stephen Miller is worth a half hour on Washington Week if that's the that's the case that he's so powerful.

Talk about inside the White House, what kind of power you hard to overstate his power inside the Trump 2 term White House in part because his purview is so much broader than just immigration, although it certainly includes immigration, but it includes trade.

It includes foreign policy.

It includes national security.

It includes education.

The entire war on the quote unquote elite university system.

Stephen Miller in his free time when he's not dealing with immigration is the architect of that and also it's, you know, you were asking earlier if his views had become more extreme.

I think it is instructive to understand him in some of the same ways we understand President Trump himself, which is that his views haven't necessarily changed, but he used those even more than Trump in certain ways.

Stephen Miller used those 4 years out of power to basically get better, stronger, faster, more ruthless, and he understood the mistakes he made in the first term.

Why the travel ban EO, he wrote the first time, led to chaos in the executive order led to casts at the airports and got struck down in the courts.

This time he knows that if you care about being hardline on immigration, it's not just important to have your people at the Department of Homeland Security, although that is important, but there's certain positions at Health and Human Services where you want a strong ally with your point of view.

There are certain jobs in the State Department in the Western Hemisphere division, so he knows now all the levers of power, right?

But Leanne, let me ask you this Minneapolis, Tom Holman comes in and says, well, we're pulling out.

Obviously it did not go well from certainly from a public relations perspective.

ive for the administration in Minneapolis, largely because of the two deaths caused by ICE agents.

um uh of of protesters.

Did he go, did Stephen Miller go too far this time?

It seems that way.

Yeah, I think that a couple things on his standing in the White House, there was, he had a 40th birthday party that his wife Katie Miller hosted for him back in the fall or the summer actually, um, every people who attended told me that they have never seen so many people in the administration in one place.

It was every single cabinet member, official, Caroline Levitt, just everyone was there.

You needed like a designated survivor exactly, and it was um and it was show, it was, it was a, a show of how important he is in this administration.

It was also notable that there was no members of Congress there except for the Speaker, the Speaker of the House.

which gets back to your question, did he go too far?

This is something that the president has gotten a lot of pushback on.

Stephen Miller has been criticized, very publicly by Democrats and very privately by Republicans.

Although Senator Tillis, a prominent Republican, does not like him at all and has told the president that despises every single time he can publicly say how much he hates Stephen Miller.

He does it.

He will be talking about something totally different to a reporter, and he will bring up Stephen Miller.

He's also re ti ring He is also retiring, but he does, he does have a a line to the president, and he has told the president many times that Stephen Miller is doing him and the Republican Party, no justice.

We did see something rare after the Pretti shooting too.

On Miller, which was him also sort of try to clean it up and say, well, look, I was getting information from CBP agents.

There was a period there where they tried to soften that language.

That's, that's rare.

McKay, let me, let me ask you this.

What does he ultimately want?

And by the way, you have like 30 seconds to answer the question.

Um, well, I think that he wants a lot, but I think when it comes to immigration in particular, I, I, I, I think that you guys are right.

I, he, he has made it very clear and even in my conversations that he wants to entirely reframe our national understanding of our country as a nation.

He's basically in an argument with Emma Lazarus, right, in a kind of way, right?

I mean, I, there, there's a key moment in the first, uh, the first term where he was asked about the placard at the base of the Statue of Liberty.

That's, that's the poem, and he put, he completely dismisses it.

Like it would disdainfully dismisses it, and I think that that just, that is his ideological project.

If he leaves, if he can retire in a country that does not see immigrants as being welcomed into this country that does not see immigrants as part of the national story.

He will be happy.

It's a fascinating figure, obviously the most powerful non-elected official.

I think we can all agree on that, more powerful than cabinet officials.

We'll talk about him again and again, obviously, but it's all the time we have for now.