The Daily Blast: Trump Advisers Quietly Turn on Stephen Miller as Brutal ICE Poll Hits

The DSR Network

Chris Cotnoir

Government

4.5 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 28 January 2026

⏱️ 26 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

After we recorded this episode, we noticed that Axios is reporting that anger is rising at Stephen Miller inside Donald Trump’s inner circle. Some White House officials blame Miller for smearing ICE murder victim Alex Pretti. This comes as reports in The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times suggest that other top advisers want ICE to change course in a way that is running afoul of Miller’s designs. That all this is leaking out shows internal dissatisfaction with Miller is growing. Meanwhile, a new YouGov poll finds 55 percent of Americans and 67 percent of independents have very little confidence in ICE. Both reflect large recent spikes. We think all this reflects a deeper Miller-MAGA miscalculation. So we’re talking about all this with The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer, who spent time in Minneapolis and wrote a good piece on the outpouring of popular energy there. We discuss what he saw on the ground among ordinary people, why it badly undermines the Miller-MAGA theory of American politics, and how MAGA poses a far bigger threat to social cohesion than immigrants do. Looking for More from the DSR Network? Click Here: https://linktr.ee/deepstateradio Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the Daily Blast from the New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network.
0:16.4	I'm your host, Greg Sargent.
0:31.4	It's now very clear that the horrors we're seeing in Minneapolis are dividing Donald Trump's inner circle and roiling MAGA media figures.
0:35.3	Two new reports suggest that Trump might be sidelineing Stephen Miller.
0:40.0	The White House is refusing to endorse efforts by Miller and J.D. Vance to smear ISIS murder
0:45.4	victims. Trump himself is scrambling to put a gentler face on the government's response to
0:50.9	these killings, and a new poll finds that ICE's standing is absolutely cratering.
0:57.2	All this may reflect a deeper miscalculation at play. The MAGA reading of the moment has turned out
1:03.6	to be all wrong. Adam Surwer, a staff writer at the Atlantic, spent some time in Minneapolis and
1:09.5	wrote a good new piece exploring
1:11.0	how the extraordinary outpouring of popular energy there has blown a big hole in mega ideology.
1:17.7	Adam, really good to have you on.
1:19.4	Thank you so much for having me. Great to be here.
1:22.2	So let's start here. The Wall Street Journal reports that some inside the administration
1:26.8	want to minimize ISIS clashes with protesters,
1:30.4	but notes that Stephen Miller is continuing to demand aggressive enforcement and doesn't want the administration to be seen as backing down.
1:38.2	The New York Times reports that Trump met for two hours with Christy Knoem about all this, but Miller was not included.
1:45.8	Adam, Miller is like the fount of Trump's ethno-nationalist agenda. I think it's clear there's a
1:50.8	real ideological split emerging inside the administration. What do you make of this?
1:56.0	Yeah, look, as long as Miller's there, you know, Miller has very extreme views on immigration, as you've
2:02.8	written about, as I've written about. He's a man who thinks that the United States went wrong
2:07.2	when it removed the racist restrictions that prevented non-white people from immigrating to United
	...

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