THE NEW YORK TIMES: President Trump’s trusted adviser is casting his hard-right gaze abroad, saying the world must be governed by “force.”
Stephen Miller has spent the bulk of his White House career furthering hard-right domestic policies that have resulted in mass deportations, family separations and the testing of the constitutional tenets that grant American citizenship.
Now, Mr. Miller, President Trump’s 40-year-old deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security adviser, is casting his hard-right gaze further abroad: toward Venezuela and the Danish territory of Greenland, specifically.
Mr. Miller is doing so, the president’s advisers say, in service of advancing Mr. Trump’s foreign policy ambitions, which so far resemble imperialistic designs to exploit less powerful, resource-rich countries and territories the world over and use those resources for America’s gain. According to Mr. Miller, using brute force is not only on the table but also the Trump administration’s preferred way to conduct itself on the world stage.
“We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” Mr. Miller told Jake Tapper of CNN on Monday, during a combative appearance in which he was pressed on Mr. Trump’s long-held desire to control Greenland.
“These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time,” he said.
This aggressive posture toward Greenland — and in turn, the rest of the world — is a perfect encapsulation of the raw power that Mr. Trump wants to project, even against Denmark, the NATO ally that controls Greenland. The moment also illustrates how people like Mr. Miller have ascended to the inner circle of a leader who has no interest in having his impulses checked, and how they exert their influence once they arrive there.
The moment also shows just how differently Mr. Trump has operated in his second term from how he did in his first. » | Katie Rogers | Katie Rogers is a White House correspondent who has covered both Trump administrations. She reported from Washington. | Tuesday, January 6, 2026
