Who is Stephen Miller and what does he have to do with Project 2025?

The midterms triggered it

President Trump said Friday that Stephen Miller was replacing Susie Wiles as White House Chief of Staff, mere days after Republicans lost control of Congress in the midterm elections. The staffing shake-up came as Trump remained angry over Tuesday's losses, and represents a gamble on reinforcing the administration's policy agenda and perhaps moving further to the right, posing a sharp contrast with voters' decision to make the largest shift to the left in half a century.

Wiles was being blamed for advocating for Trump's super PAC's massive spending in the midterms ($400 million), which amounted to a whole lot of nothing for the party. Former White House adviser Steve Bannon said Wiles should be "removed immediately" over the GOP's loss, saying "because of the results, they should be removed and removed immediately."

Trump himself told reporters he "wanted to make a change."

How it happened

A White House official said Wiles gave her resignation on Thursday night. Wiles posted on X: "Today is my last day as White House Chief of Staff." Trump, for his part, was publicly gracious: he wrote on Truth Social that "Susie Wiles, who has done an outstanding job, will be moving over to the Trump Political Operation," adding "I want to thank her for her service as Chief of Staff. She has done a great job!"

Who Susie Wiles is

She has been credited with steering the most disciplined of his three presidential bids. She built a reputation as a strict manager who reduced the staff turnover and volatility of press leaks that plagued Trump's first term. Wiles was widely viewed as the most powerful person in the White House outside the president himself, and she achieved something few in his orbit could: earning his trust, influencing his decisions and bringing discipline to an administration defined by historic infighting and upheaval.

What it signals

Trump tapped Miller to succeed Wiles, elevating an adviser who reportedly helped develop plans to advance the administration's agenda without congressional approval, as Democrats prepare to take control of Congress in January. An architect of Trump's explosive first hundred days exerting executive authority, Miller had been working on plans to keep operating a muscular White House even in the face of big Democratic majorities.

Wiles is not fully leaving Trump's orbit, though her resignation follows a pattern of other top female officials who have left or been fired from Trump's second administration and been replaced by men. Her resignation brings the number of prominent women who have left the Trump administration this year up to 7.

The leaked emails: the clearest evidence

The Southern Poverty Law Center reviewed more than 900 emails between Stephen Miller and Breitbart News editors and found that Miller regularly promoted white nationalist literature and racist propaganda as he shaped the far-right website's coverage of issues related to immigrants.

Among the specific revelations: Miller shared articles from the white nationalist website VDARE, which traffics in the "white genocide" or "great replacement" myth that people of color are being systematically replaced by white people.

The emails also show Miller recommending that Former Breitbart write about The Camp of the Saints, a book linked to the far-right movement that portrays immigrants as dark-skinned, feces-eating invaders of white society.

The leaked emails reveal an obsession with the Confederacy and the denigration of Black and Hispanic communities, and tout eugenics and white nationalist conspiracy theories while offering news tips on how to amplify stories about Black and Hispanic crime.

Former Breitbart editor Katie McHugh, who leaked the emails, told the SPLC:

"What Stephen Miller sent to me in those emails has become policy at the Trump administration."

His own family speaks out

His bigotry is considered so notorious that even his own family members have publicly denounced him. His uncle, David S. Glosser, said he "shudder[s] at the thought" of what would have become of Miller's ancestors if they had been subjected to "the policies Stephen so cooly espouses, the travel ban, the radical decrease in refugees, the separation of children from their parents."

His denial, and the official pushback

Miller, who is Jewish and the grandson of immigrants, has rejected accusations that he is a white nationalist. The White House press secretary at the time dismissed the SPLC as a "far-left smear organization," and a deputy spokesperson, citing Miller's Jewish heritage, said Miller "loves this country and hates bigotry in all forms."

What followed

Following the SPLC's investigative series, more than 80 Democratic members of Congress called for his resignation. The chairs of House caucuses representing racial minorities and liberals issued a joint statement calling Miller a "white nationalist," and more than 50 social justice groups signed an open letter to Trump accusing Miller of "stoking bigotry, hate, and division."

The evidence isn't rumor or spin. It's his own words, in his own emails, recommending white nationalist sources to a journalist he was using to shape national coverage. He denied the label. The emails are what they are, and now he's the most powerful staff position in the White House.

Where it came from

Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, derived the term from the Greek word meaning "good in birth" or "good in stock," and first used it in an 1883 book, Inquiries into Human Fertility and Its Development. A popular eugenics movement then emerged in the United Kingdom and spread to many countries, including the United States, Canada, Australia and most of Europe.

The science it claimed to rest on was always wrong. Eugenicists used an incorrect and prejudiced understanding of the work of Darwin and Gregor Mendel to support the idea of "racial improvement." They believed they could perfect human beings and eliminate so-called social ills through genetics and heredity, using methods such as involuntary sterilization, segregation and social exclusion to rid society of people deemed "unfit."

What it looked like in practice

The American eugenics movement focused on sterilizing the "feebleminded" while also promoting the racial ideology that white Anglo-Saxons were the "superior" race. From 1909 to 1979, around 20,000 forced sterilizations occurred in California state mental institutions alone. And it did not stop there. Nazi Germany took eugenic ideology further than any other state in history, using it as one of the core justifications for the Holocaust.

The connection to white nationalism and Stephen Miller

This is why the question matters. Eugenics has always been the intellectual skeleton underneath white nationalist ideology: the claim that some people are biologically superior to others, and that society should be arranged around protecting that "stock."

VDARE, the white nationalist site Miller promoted, regularly publishes the work of eugenicists, nativists and other extremists. Miller's emails to Former Breitbart tout eugenics and white nationalist conspiracy theories and offered news tips on how to cover immigration and amplify stories about Black and Hispanic crime. Miller also referred to legislation by former President Calvin Coolidge that limited immigration to the United States based on eugenics. A US Senate resolution introduced in response to these revelations noted that Miller encouraged Breitbart to incorporate white supremacist, racist and eugenics ideologies in its news coverage.

Eugenic ideology has also appeared in the language of highly influential politicians: during his presidential campaign, Donald Trump referred to "bad genes" when discussing immigrants.

Why it is not science

Eugenics is the scientifically inaccurate theory that humans can be improved through selective breeding of populations, and its implementation has caused widespread harm, particularly to populations that are marginalized. Every serious scientific institution, including the National Human Genome Research Institute, rejects it. Human traits like intelligence, character and behavior are shaped by an enormously complex interaction of genes, environment and experience that no selective breeding program can predict or control.

The practical application of eugenics has, without exception in history, ended in atrocity: forced sterilizations, ethnic cleansing, genocide. That is not a coincidence. It is what the logic of the ideology produces when it reaches power.