This is the Daily Blast from the New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network.

I'm your host, Greg Sargent.

This week, Stephen Miller unleashed a long, crazed, angry, shrill rant about demonstrators in Washington, D.C., who were protesting President Trump's military occupation of the city.

It was classic authoritarian adjutop attacking leftists and even communists as rabble-rousers

who are secretly trying to make the city more dangerous to the city's salt-of-the-earth working-class

residents. But we think this bizarre Miller episode is best seen as an expression of weakness.

Trump, Miller, and their allies were certain that there's a latent majority out there

prepared to rally behind authoritarian rule.

But that's not what's happening.

Poll after poll has shown that the public is rebelling.

Maybe that's why Miller is panicking.

The question is, why won't Democrats act like it? We keep hearing them saying things like Trump's militarization of U.S. cities is a distraction, but it's not a distraction. It's the main

event. Monica Potts, a staff writer at the New Republic, has a great new piece

arguing that Trump's DC takeover is very expressly about consolidating power, that calling it a

distraction risks diverting us from the importance of what's happening, and that the opposition

party needs to act like it. Good to have you on, Monica. Thanks for having me. It's good to be here. So Stephen Miller unleashed this crazed rant about

all this on Wednesday. Let's just dive right in and listen to it. They're the ones who've been

advocating for the 1%, the criminals, the killers, the rapists, the drug dealers. And I'm glad they're here

today. Because me, Pete, and the vice president all going to leave here, and inspired by them,

we're going to add thousands more resources to this city to get the criminals and the gang members out of here.

We're going to see it to see those networks, and we're going to prove that a city can serve for the law-abiding citizens who live there.

We are not going to let the communists destroy a great American city, let alone the nation's capital.

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