With the exit of Sebastian Gorka from the White House staff announced Friday evening, the eyes of conservatives in and out of Washington were almost immediately trained on Senior Advisor Stephen Miller.
Miller, 32, is inarguably the last conservative who follows the “nationalist non-interventionist” agenda that was championed by Steve Bannon, who left as counselor to the president eight days ago, and by Gorka himself.
A sure sign of Miller’s status came Friday night in a tweet from liberal Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Tennessee: "Sebastian Gorka, a fiery nationalist and Bannon ally, abruptly exits White House 2 down and 1 to go. Stephen Miller!"
Even before the departures of Bannon and Gorka, others on the right were being shown the door from the National Security Council staff. At least five NSC staffers with ties to former NSC Advisor Gen. Michael Flynn were recently transferred or terminated, reportedly at the insistence of the present NSC Adviser Gen. H.R. McMaster.
That leaves Miller, the onetime communications director for Attorney General Jeff Sessions (while he was senator from Alabama) as the sole "keeper of the flame" for what Gorka called the "MAGA (Make America Great Again) promise" in his resignation letter. These include a fair trade approach, a non-interventionist tactic with foreign conflicts, and a hardline on immigration.
In effect, Duke University graduate Miller is revising the same role played by Pat Buchanan in the second term of the Nixon administration. With most of his fellow conservatives leaving the White House staff for other assignments, Buchanan — primarily a speechwriter but also an adviser on policy — was the figure conservatives increasingly turned to for help with a Republican president they often felt was giving them a cold shoulder.
At a White House briefing August 2, Miller won widespread cheers on the right for his exchange with CNN White House Correspondent Jim Acosta over the administration’s RAISE Act (which limits immigration to those with strong proficiency in English).
When Acosta asked if this meant limiting immigration to "people from Great Britain and Australia," Miller countered with "shock" that Acosta felt English was spoken in only those two countries and at what he called the correspondent's "cosmopolitan bias." (English is the official language in dozens of countries and spoken in more than 100 countries).
John Gizzi is chief political columnist and White House correspondent for Newsmax. For more of his reports, Go Here Now.
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