In The Worst Of All Worlds Stephen Miller Would Have Trump's Ear. We're There

"I'm Doing A Tremendous Job" by Nancy Ohanian

Yesterday, at Axios, Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen noted that the GOP's identity crisis is growing and "poses acute short- and long-term risks." They warn that Señor Trumpanzee, "with 38% approval in Gallup, is giving the party a constricted appeal, with the danger of continuing high-profile defections... The GOP, long synonymous with conservatism, is now effectively the Trump Party-- in policy, branding and support. That leaves some swaths of traditional conservatives without a major-party home, and endangers Republican electoral fortunes."

Is THAT why Pelosi is kicking Medicare-For-All and other progressive programs to the curb in favor of the conservative-beloved PAYGO? Pelosi has always been most concerned with big donors and VandeHei and Allen noted that last week 2 of the GOP's biggest donors-- the top donor in Ohio (Leslie Wexner) and the top donor in New England (Seth Klarman) both renounced the Republican Party. I bet a promise of PAYGO will have them writing checks for Pelosi and her SuperPAC.

VandeHei and Allen claim that the anti-Trump Republicanism so at home on Morning Joe with guests like Steve Schmidt, N.Y. Times columnist Bret Stephens and Washington Post columnists George Will, Michael Gerson and Max Boot is "slowly spreading. The danger for Republicans is that they get clobbered in November, and a trickle becomes a steady stream. Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska, 46, a rising star in the party, continues to flirt with leaving the party-- a small sign of a talent crisis that could lie ahead for the GOP... 'In today’s America, [traditional] conservatism is completely under siege,' [Andrew] Sullivan writes. Trump 'assaults the norms that conservatives revere, has contempt for existing institutions and sees the rule of law as a means to advance his own interests, rather than that of the society as a whole.' Gallup's most recent gauge of party identity has 28% of Americans considering themselves Republicans, 27% calling themselves Democrats and 43% identifying as independents... High profile defections like the ones above won't change the electoral math of the heartland, where GOP presidencies are won. The danger is Trump's alienation of quiet conservatives: They won't make big announcements. They just won't show up. And they could form the base for a new conservative party-- run by someone like Sasse."

With Trump too stupid and senile to do anything on his own-- other than play the clown at rallies and on Twitter-- and Bannon mostly down for the count, where is this alien ideology coming from? The push towards extreme white nationalism, xenophobia and outright fascism is, of course coming from this fella in his official white House portrait, clearly showing him making the "White Power" hand signal.

Yes, Trump's horrid little in-house Kapo, Stephen Miller. Friday Dan De Luce and Julia Ainsley reported for NBC News that Miller is winning the internal battles inside the White House. "Days before the Trump administration announced plans to slash the number of refugees allowed into the U.S. to its lowest level in 40 years," they wrote, "Stephen Miller made his case for fewer refugees to a room of senior officials at the White House. His sales job was made easier by the absence of top officials who disagree with his stance. They weren’t there because they weren’t invited, according to two people briefed on the discussions. Missing from the room last Friday were U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley and the head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, Mark Green, both of whom have promoted a more generous policy toward refugees fleeing poverty, famine and persecution, the two sources said.

The planned cut in the refugee cap, now just 30,000 for the coming fiscal year, is the latest win for Miller, who has outmaneuvered opponents in and outside the administration to push through a crackdown on all forms of immigration.

Miller's victories on the Muslim travel ban, limiting legal immigration and separating migrant families at the border show his skill in pulling bureaucratic levers, blocking opponents from key meetings, restricting the flow of information and inserting his allies in key positions, said current and former officials.

...Over the past several months, former officials and humanitarian organizations say, Miller restricted who would take part in the deliberations, while ensuring like-minded associates were in key positions at the State Department.

...Paving the way for Miller, an official at the National Security Council, Jennifer Arangio, a political appointee who worked on President Donald Trump's campaign, was fired and escorted from her office in July after clashing with Miller over refugee-related issues. And two refugee skeptics aligned with Miller are now in senior positions at the State Department: Andrew Veprek at the Bureau for Population, Refugees and Migration and John Zadrozny at the policy planning office.

...In a tumultuous White House, Miller is one of a handful of original Trump loyalists who has survived and thrived, exerting an outsize influence over immigration decisions and rhetoric.

One administration official, who was not authorized to speak on the record, said it should not be surprising that so many of Miller's ideas have come to fruition.

"Miller has survived and people who think like Miller have survived because the president agrees with these policies. He is not running a rogue operation," the official told NBC News.

Miller was once part of a small group of outsiders working as staffers on Capitol Hill who backed an aggressive line on immigration but often found themselves out of favor with the Republican Party establishment.

Many of those former colleagues are now deployed throughout the administration and have helped design and carry out some of Miller's most sweeping and contentious policies, including a ban on travel from certain countries, a higher bar for proving asylum, a reduction in refugee admissions and the separation of migrant parents from their children at the border.

Miller and his allies have even promoted the creation of a denaturalization task force, which is supposed to ferret out people who lied on their applications and to strip them of their citizenship.

Critics say Miller is overseeing a systematic attack on all forms of immigration, illegal and legal, by promoting an underlying idea that foreign-born citizens or immigrants represent a dangerous threat to the country.

"I think he's going to go down in history having a lot of blood on his hands. He is driving the most nativist agenda we have seen in 100 years," said Frank Sharry, executive director of America's Voice, an immigration reform advocacy group in Washington. "But he has had mixed results."

Some of those mixed results include the legal blowback on the travel ban, which went through three versions before finally holding up in federal court. Miller also pushed for the end of DACA, the program designed to help children brought to the country illegally by their parents to remain in the U.S. But courts have stopped the administration from taking away those rights.

The most hard-line measures have also proved politically unpopular, according to opinion polls, with large majorities of American voters voicing opposition to ending DACA or detaining children separately from relatives entering the country illegally.

So what happened to Javanka?