Stephen Miller Is Trump's Shadow President, New Book Reveals

In the chaotic machinery of Donald Trump’s second term, one figure has managed the impossible: staying in the president’s good graces while wielding extraordinary power. Stephen Miller, according to a sweeping new account by New York Times White House correspondents Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, has emerged as the second most powerful person in the administration—a position he’s maintained with what the authors describe as almost superhuman ability.

Haberman and Swan’s book, Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, covers Trump’s first year back in office, ending with the February 2026 launch of war with Iran. The roughly 500-page account paints a portrait of an impulsive, often distracted president surrounded by a rotating cast of loyalists, opportunists, and ideologues. But it’s Miller who consistently appears as the gravitational center of actual policy implementation, particularly the xenophobic and authoritarian measures that drove millions into the streets for“No Kings”protests across the country.

The authors note that Miller’s fingerprints are all over the administration’s most controversial actions: racial profiling, indiscriminate detentions, masked security forces roaming American streets. Yet Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget and architect of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, remains largely a background figure in the book—despite potentially implementing changes far more transformative than Miller’s work. As the authors acknowledge, who talks to journalists shapes the historical record, and Vought apparently kept his distance.

The portrait of Trump himself is oddly diminished. He’s presented as intermittently engaged in governance, far more preoccupied with redecorating the White House (famously supergluing gilded curlicues to the walls) than with affairs of state. His main concerns seem to be staying out of prison and proving he’s not a“loser.”For two months between his 2024 election victory and his second inauguration, sources told Haberman and Swan that Trump reached an almost“Zen-like”contentment—a rare psychological state for him that evaporated the moment he returned to power.

What emerges is a troubling paradox: a president with singular control over one of the nation’s two major political parties who simultaneously seems barely present in the machinery of actual governance. That vacuum gets filled by people like Miller, who’ve weaponized their loyalty into real power. Trump’s charisma and“feral instinct for power”keep him the undisputed boss, but the day-to-day reality of running the government belongs to someone else entirely.