The Stephen Miller Gaffe Every Judge Needs To Bookmark

I would guess that judges, like most humans in the third decade of the 21st century, spend a lot of time online, enough to know how to bookmark a social media post in which the president's closest advisor gives away the whole ballgame in a good-faith gaffe for the ages.

Wherever judges choose to poison their brains with social media content, I'm begging them to save – somehow, someway – Stephen Miller accidentally telling a live cable news audience that the Trump regime plans to argue it has what's known as "plenary authority" to ignore and sideline all checks and balances and basically do whatever they fuck they want to do to solve the make-believe crime emergency that must exist if they are to for through with the whole tyranny thing.

Plenary authority, as you'll see in the video below, means "limitless" and "unchecked" power. Miller, of course, was not supposed to lay out these legal plans on live television, and he knew as much if his off-putting "I'm not here" routine is any indication. It reminded me of Pam Bondi's frozen face during a testy Senate hearing in which she was asked if she had ever seen photos of Trump with Jeffrey Epstein's victims.

In both cases, Miller and Bondi did some quick long-term thinking and decided the best course of action was to shut the fuck up and say not one more word on the topic at hand. Maybe – unlike the doomers among us – Miller and Bondi realize history did not end in 2024. Watch Miller's eyes as he freezes: He's like a baby rabbit playing dead when my dog catches it in the backyard.

Probably you're not shocked that the regime's plan has been to claim unlimited authority over the United States as the reanimated corpse of the Confederacy invades opposition strongholds mostly for social media video and useful propaganda that can be spread on the international fascist social media organ we call the X platform, formerly known as Twitter. Regime officials have explicitly ignored judicial rulings for months now, both in Elon Musk's coup of the American government and in dispatching a secret police force to round up anyone who looks like an immigrant and disappear them without a shred of due process.

This is not new, you might say. And in many ways, you're right.

OK Tough Guy

Stephen Miller wants you to tremble before him. Laugh instead.

Bad Faith TimesDenny Carter

But Miller, the architect of the push to silence all regime opposition based on an unreality in which the US is besieged by left-wing terror, saying publicly that Trump's people will tell judges – and perhaps the Supreme Court – that the president holds plenary power is a nuclear-level gaffe. Democratic Party gaffes are when Joe Biden mistakes Medicaid for Medicare, or when a backbench congressman says they might have to slightly raise taxes on people with multiple yachts. Republican gaffes are when an unelected bureaucrat who cosplays a 1930s European strongman in his spare time says we are going to melt down all remaining constitutional guardrails and smile while we're doing it.

What goes unsaid: No one planning to claim plenary authority over a country believes they have any popular support. Miller knows most of the country is repulsed by his ideas, his hatred of America as it actually exists.

Miller's on-air gaffe means judges – when the regime unveils its official plenary plan, maybe following another isolated violent incident – can point to Miller's comments as proof that this was always the strategy. Judges have done this for months now, pointing to social media posts and interview excerpts to dispatch the regime's bad-faith legal arguments. It's a weakness of theirs, being unable to shut the fuck up about their evil little plans.

I don't mean to write so much about Stephen Miller on BFT. He's an odious figure, but an important one, and a key figure in the creation and perpetuation of bad-faith arguments meant to justify the regime's naked power grabs. Miller for much of the past six months – since Musk was dismissed from Trump's inner circle after starving millions of human beings in developing nations – has effectively acted as the president of the United States. Everyone, it seems, gets their turn as president while the elected president dodders around without much idea as to what's going on around him.

“I see him now, he is double-down emboldened,” Olivia Troye, who served as homeland security and counterterrorism adviser, said of Miller, with whom she briefly worked. “He believes that he’s got all of the power. He’s Trump’s right-hand person… We know that he is all about using lawfare for whatever purpose.”

Miller thinks he's slick. He's not. He is, however, an aficionado of bad faith politics. I guess he'll always have a place on this blog.

Follow Denny Carter on Bluesky at @dennycarter.bsky.social