Stephen Miller (Image: Screenshot from video uploaded by ABC News on Nov 12, 2024)
By Roswell
My wife made an off-the-cuff remark the other night:
“It could be worse. What if Stephen Miller was the Secretary of War?”
It was one of those throwaway lines she delivers while passing the salt, but it landed like a drone strike. Because she was right. Pete Hegseth as Secretary of War is already the political equivalent of handing a chainsaw to a man who thinks safety gloves are for communists. But Stephen Miller? That’s a whole new category of nightmare – somewhere between dystopian fan fiction and a UN emergency session.
Her remark lingered because it wasn’t really a joke. In the current political climate, it felt like an uncomfortably plausible cautionary tale.
With Hegseth, you get chest-thumping Fox-prime-time militarism and a slightly confused sense of geography. His approach to foreign policy is loud, impulsive, and steeped in cable-news patriotism where complex international realities are reduced to slogans and talking points. Hegseth blusters. He provokes. He stirs. His instincts are performative and his worldview a fog of grievance, nostalgia, and certainty. That alone is dangerous when you control an arsenal.
Hegseth is a man who would accidentally start a conflict with the wrong country.
Stephen Miller, however, would start one with the right country – for all the wrong reasons.
Because Miller represents something fundamentally different, and far more chilling. Where Hegseth is driven by emotion, Miller is driven by ideology. Where Hegseth seeks confrontation, Miller seeks control. Where Hegseth might blunder into a conflict, Miller would engineer one.
Miller’s public reputation – “evil” in the shorthand of many critics – did not materialise by accident. His fingerprints are on some of the most extreme policies of the Trump era: family separation, asylum bans, attempts to redefine who counts as a refugee, and visa restrictions designed to reshape America’s demographic future. These were not impulsive decisions. They were carefully constructed systems of cruelty, designed not for show, but for effect.
He is an architect, not an arsonist.
He plans. He designs. He implements.
The thought of a man like that running the machinery of war – military force, detention regimes, targeted operations, covert authorities – should give pause to even the most complacent observer. Because in Miller’s worldview, policy is not merely a tool. It is a weapon.
And in a world where Trump surrounds himself with loyalists, enablers, and ideologues, the idea of someone like Miller holding the war portfolio stops feeling hypothetical. It becomes a mirror we are almost afraid to look into: a reminder that authoritarianism doesn’t always come wearing a uniform. Often it comes wearing a suit, speaking in legalistic precision, insisting that everything it does is simply “restoring order.”
Hegseth is dangerous in the way a reckless driver is dangerous – unpredictable, erratic, capable of causing destruction by sheer momentum. Miller would be dangerous in the way a strategist is dangerous – intentional, meticulous, utterly convinced of the righteousness of his mission.
One governs through impulse.
The other would govern through design.
And that’s why my wife’s remark stayed with me. Because for all the chaos of the present moment – for all the conspiracies, fragility, and anger – there is a darker version of this world that could exist, and nearly did. A version where cruelty is not accidental but systemic. Not chaotic but orchestrated.
“It could be worse,” she said.
She’s right.
And the fact that this hypothetical even feels imaginable is, in itself, a warning.
Hegseth wants a war because it looks good in slow-motion. Miller wants a war because he’s already drafted the paperwork, colour-coded the punishments, and rehearsed the speech about “restoring civilisational purity.”
This article was originally published on The Australian Independent Media Network.
