Leaks Target Stephen Miller After Republican Election Wreckage

After Republicans were soundly defeated in Tuesday’s midterm elections, the GOP’s knives are coming out for Stephen Miller. Leaks from within the Trump administration are targeting the White House adviser and deputy chief of staff for policy, with unnamed sources attacking him.According to The Wall Street Journal, First Lady Melania Trump at one point complained to President Trump that people she knew were getting deported, leading the president to tell his aides that Miller’s aggressive deportation plans were going too far.Another report in The New York Times noted that White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, herself potentially on the chopping block after Republicans’ election fiasco, was not a fan of Miller’s heavy handed immigration approach, and had tried for months to get Trump to take a different route.After federal immigration agents killed nurse Alex Pretti in January, Miller joined then–Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem in calling the Minneapolis nurse a “domestic terrorist,” which didn’t go over well with the rest of the White House. Trump, worried about the video of Pretti’s death, told his press secretary Karoline Leavitt to distance him from Miller and Noem’s comments, and told immigration czar Tom Homan to go to Minnesota to fix the situation. After that, Democrats took the edge in polls about immigration policy.The fact that Republicans are bringing this up now, following devastating losses in previously safe, deep-red areas, suggests that they want Miller out. They have good reasons, but they should have done this a long time ago.Miller’s racism and anti-immigrant xenophobia were well-known, even going back to Trump’s first term. He has long sought to unleash the full power of government might against immigrants that he deems less than human, despite his own Russian Jewish ancestors arriving as refugees. He probably had a hand in Trump’s decision to restrict refugee admission to white South Africans only, even though their refugee status is dubious at best.Miller’s push for high deportation quotas has given heavy rein to a bloated, overfunded Immigration and Customs Enforcement that engages in violence and oversteps its bounds, even targeting U.S. citizens. It was too much for one acting head of ICE, Todd Lyons, who quit in April due to health issues. The backlash was a major reason why Republicans were pummeled on Tuesday, and if Republicans are now blaming Miller, let’s hope that he is soon shown the door. It appears that Elon Musk was so embarrassed by the shellacking that Republicans received in the midterms on Tuesday that he deleted his Election Day post endorsing the party.Musk, the world’s richest man, spent $474 million on Republican campaigns. On Tuesday, he posted “Vote red today!” on X. Then he deleted it. His own artificial intelligence chatbot, Grok, confirmed the post was scrubbed.“He hasn’t said why. Archives and multiple reports confirm the Election Day ‘Vote red today!’ post (plus an earlier pinned one urging Republican Senate votes) were removed after results showed major GOP losses, including Texas races he heavily funded,” Grok wrote online. “Other recent pro-GOP posts and RTs remain visible.”Screengrab/Elon Musk/XThe election results must have been incredibly alarming for Musk, who has dumped nearly $1 billion dollars into influencing U.S. elections in the past two years. And even more troubling for him is that the cornerstones of his business operations—both SpaceX and Tesla—are located in Texas. Musk chose to flee to Texas from California, believing it was safe from Democrats. And it was—until Tuesday. Now Musk will have to deal with Democratic Governor Gina Hinojosa and Democratic Senator James Talarico. The state’s newly minted Democratic Attorney General Nathan Johnson has already stated his intention to investigate the SpaceX Starlink grants that Texas awarded Musk, while Hinojosa plans on enacting a data center moratorium across the state, two policies that will have a direct negative impact on Musk’s business ventures.“Want to be clear that in 2024 Elon was so sure he was a political mastermind everyone loved he felt confident enough to do a winky nazi salute twice on national television, and then since then he totally failed in his role in the White House, lost a Wisconsin special election, burned half a billion dollars losing the midterms, and is now pretending he never said anything all,” a large liberal X account wrote. “What a massive downfall.”People like Ken Paxton and Greg Abbott were serious allies for Musk, allowing him to do essentially whatever he wanted in the state. Now they’ve been wiped out, even as he gave their campaign hundreds of millions of dollars. That may explain the deleted post. Providence, Rhode Island, became the largest city in America to divest from Israel on Tuesday night. And it did so with the help of Jewish voters.Providence voters passed Question 7, a ballot measure that forces the city to end investments in “foreign countries conducting ethnic cleansing, apartheid, illegal military occupation, or genocide”—like Israel. The initiative, first submitted by the Providence for Palestine Coalition, received 75 percent of the vote, with 81 of 82 polling places partially counted. The measure does not name Israel specifically. David Morales, Providence’s recently elected democratic socialist mayor, campaigned in favor of the measure, and has promised to enforce it. His failed primary opponent Republican incumbent Mayor Brett Smiley campaigned against the issue alongside the Jewish Alliance of Greater Rhode Island. But not all Jewish Americans agreed, with many voters backing the measure. “Oh hey the ballot question to divest Providence’s pension funds from genocide and apartheid passed with 75% of the vote, and is winning in every single precinct, including across Providence’s very Jewish East Side,” organizer and New Republic contributing editor Aaron Regunberg wrote online. Screenshot/Rhode Island Board of Elections“The measure in Providence to divest pension funds from any foreign country committing human rights abuses is dominating in Jewish precincts,” Drop Site News editor Ryan Grim noted. “The narrative about Jewish voters told by the national media simply isn’t right.”Republican lawmakers are being forced to own up to just how badly the midterm elections went for their parties—and it’s delicious.Speaking at a press conference Wednesday, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis blamed Republican lawmakers for making bad votes, like opposing legislation that would ban stock trading, and for the botched release of the government’s files on disgraced sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.Florida saw Republicans narrowly keep control of the government, but in Texas, DeSantis said, “not only did they lose a very highly publicized U.S. Senate race, they lost everything.”“Let’s just be clear, that is going to hurt, not just for the next two years. That’s something that can reverberate for the next decade or more,” DeSantis said. “And if the Republican Party doesn’t have Texas as an anchor then we are not going to be viable nationally.”Republicans may not be able to retake the Senate in 2028, DeSantis warned, and it was “probably not viable” to retake the House. This was the “worst-case scenario,” he added.Texas Senator John Cornyn, who will be succeeded by Democrat James Talarico, declared that his party had forgotten what really mattered.“Last night, Republicans lost the U.S. House, the U.S. Senate, and my home state of Texas, a conservative cornerstone for more than three decades, because our party forgot the basic rules of coalition politics: 1. Add, don’t subtract 2. Be likeable 3. Do what you promised 4. Character & integrity still matter,” he wrote on X.Former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney also weighed in on his party’s clear miscalculation.“Bad policy, bad character make bad politics: erratic tariffs, impulsive Iran war, blanket pardons, apparent corruption, weaponized justice, ICE brutality, mountainous deficits, hiding Epstein, abandoning allies and coddling enemies. Hoping for a course correction, for the country and for my party,” Romney wrote on X Wednesday.Earlier Wednesday, Vice President JD Vance opted out of a mea culpa, instead blaming Republican losses on President Donald Trump’s unpopular war against Iran. Strangely, even Donald Trump Jr. agreed.With Democratic victories in state legislatures and governorships across the country Tuesday, the Electoral College could now be in jeopardy—even without a near-impossible constitutional amendment. If passed by enough states, the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact would effectively nullify the Electoral College and, with it, the possibility of a candidate being elected president without winning the popular vote. Since the compact was introduced in 2006, 19 states have passed it, agreeing to assign their electoral votes to whichever candidate wins the national popular vote. That amounts to 222 of the 270 electoral votes that a candidate needs to win the presidential election. On Tuesday, Democrats took control of state legislatures and governorships in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona, Wisconsin, and Nevada, all states that haven’t agreed to the compact. If all five vote to join, then the total number of electoral votes apportioned based on the national popular vote jumps to 283. That all depends on whether Democrats in these states think that the compact is a priority. Democrats in Michigan failed to pass the compact when they held a trifecta from 2023 to 2024, and Nevada’s Democratic governor vetoed the compact in 2019, saying that it would hurt the state’s role in presidential elections. There are also potential constitutional issues. In Article 2, Section 1, Clauses 2 and 3, the Constitution says that states can appoint electors “in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.” But in Article 1, Section 10, Clause 3, it also prohibits interstate compacts without the consent of Congress. The Democratic takeover of Congress would seemingly make this moot, and in theory, if the compact comes to a vote in the House and Senate, it wouldn’t even need the president’s signature. But Democrats still don’t have a filibuster-proof majority of 60 votes in the Senate, and with their dwindling national popularity, Republicans would undoubtedly try to block nullifying the Electoral College. After all, four of the five presidents who have won the presidency while losing the popular vote were Republicans, including President Donald Trump in 2016. Read more about the midterms: