In despotic declaration, Trump senior advisor says Trump’s power “will not be questioned”
The Trump administration held a media coming out party for senior policy advisor Stephen Miller, who went on four of the five Sunday shows to stonewall about the bombshell revelations involving Russia and the Trump administration. And in an even more ominous moment, Miller firmly declared that Donald Trump's power as the president is beyond question.
Donald Trump senior policy advisor Stephen Miller’s debut on the Sunday shows was rife with troubling foreshadowing, with his high-volume repetition of Trump talking points and botched invocation of Trump’s “voter fraud” lie.
Miller also artlessly made it plain that the purpose of his visits was to shield Trump Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and Vice President Mike Pence from accountability for National Security Advisor Michael Flynn’s lies about his contact with Russia.
There was one moment, though, which stood out for its shocking audacity: Miller explicitly told Face the Nation’s John Dickerson that Trump’s power exceeds that of the judiciary, the people of the United States, the free press, or anyone else.
Miller railed against a “supreme” judicial branch in other television appearances, but on CBS, he made Trump’s despotic ambitions explicit (emphasis added):
The end result of this, though, is that our opponents, the media, and the whole world will soon see, as we begin to take further actions, that the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial, and will not be questioned.
Those “further actions” remain frighteningly and ominously unclear, but Miller’s blunt declaration makes plain what those of us resisting Trump have been saying all along: This unpopularly-elected and historically unpopular president sees himself essentially as a dictator. And now that this belief has been openly stated as official administration policy, it should not be ignored or forgotten by the people, and should strengthen the resolve of the resistance.