During election years, the media tends to focus on the top of the party tickets. When Donald Trump is one of the candidates, this temptation is especially strong. But although Trump’s steady stream of outbursts and lies require attention, they should not take up so much oxygen that we forget about his cabal of senior advisers. Unlike the candidate, they are not incompetent bumblers, but are ruthless operatives preparing to change the course of the country starting on the afternoon of Jan. 20. When mainstream outlets forget about them, it amounts to media malpractice.
The danger posed by this oversight is compounded by signs of Trump’s cognitive decline. If he wins reelection, the quartet of Tom Homan, Stephen Miller, Robert O’Brien and Kash Patel — call them Trump’s four policy horsemen — will have an even greater ability to manipulate him than they already do. During his first term, Trump hired and fired countless senior officials who acted as restraints on his craziest ideas. None of them will be there in his second and final act. Trump’s top four and others like them have already passed his loyalty test. With the guardrails removed, the below figures would have tremendous power. Who are they?
Tom Homan
Trump’s former acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is a 34-year veteran of the Border Patrol. “Trump comes back in January. I’ll be on his heels … and I will run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen,” he said in July. “They ain’t seen shit yet. Wait until 2025.” Former Border Patrol agent Jenn Budd, author of a sharply critical agency memoir, titled “Against the Wall,” told me that Homan is “a huge bully” and points out that he was a vigorous advocate of the child separation policy during the first Trump administration. She further warns that resistance within the agencies has been extinguished. “The people who acted as brakes during Trump’s first time around are gone,” she warns.
Robert C. O’Brien
O’Brien was Trump’s fourth and final national security adviser, serving from 2019 to 2021. During the final chaotic weeks of Trump’s term, he reportedly endorsed a U.S. attack on Iran, allegedly saying, “Mr. President, we should hit ’em hard, hit ’em hard, with everything we have.” (He has denied making the statement.) Insider reports are that Trump was only dissuaded by vigorous opposition from the secretary of defense, Mark Esper, and Mark Milley, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. Esper and Milley are gone. The current U.S. military leaders quite rightly keep their views private, but Trump would be their constitutional commander-in-chief. He could fire generals and admirals until he gets those who will approve his rash impulses.
Robert O’Brien’s understanding of “peace through strength” could plunge the United States into an even wider war in the Mideast.
O’Brien has little experience overseas for a once-and-future national security adviser, with one puzzling exception. In the late 1980s, he attended the University of the Orange Free State, in a South Africa that still lived under apartheid. Why would a young American then want to study at the equivalent of the University of Mississippi in the 1950s? The British press looked into O’Brien’s connection to South Africa. The Guardian quoted Jonathan Jansen, who was the university’s top official years after apartheid ended; he explained that in the ’80s the school had been “very conservative and routinely racist,” and that there were “no black students or staff except those cleaning the place and working in the gardens.” But somehow a New York Times article that appeared when Trump appointed O’Brien in 2019 missed the South Africa link.
This summer, O’Brien auditioned for his old job with an alarming article in Foreign Affairs magazine. He insinuates that Iran had violated the nuclear deal that it had reached with the Obama administration, which he says justified Trump’s 2018 repudiation of the agreement, despite independent investigators’ verifying that Iran was living up to its side of the deal. O’Brien also attacks the Democrats and others for “criticizing the democratic bona fides” of authoritarian leaders like Viktor Orbán of Hungary and Brazil’s ex-president, Jair Bolsonaro. It is all too easy to imagine that O’Brien’s understanding of “peace through strength” could plunge the United States into an even wider war in the Mideast. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is clearly rooting for Trump to win, and he is trying to lure the United States into a conflict with Iran, partly to stave off his own political demise and the resumption of his trial for corruption.
The Belly Flop of Trumpism Without Trump
There are surely some doubtful foreign policy advisers hovering around the Harris-Walz campaign, also looking for high-level posts in January. But, unlike O’Brien, none of them seems likely to get the United States directly involved in another shooting war.
Stephen Miller
Miller would be Homan’s chief ally and Trump’s likely deportation czar. An intense loyalist in Trump’s first administration, he was the main architect of the 2018 child separation policy that ripped 5,000 migrant children from their parents. About that, he has no remorse. “If Commie Kamala wins,” he recently ranted on X, “the 15 MILLION illegals she has let in will be made into full voting citizens, and she will bring in another 30 MILLION more. If Trump wins, the 15 MILLION are going home and no more are being let in.” Miller sounds like an unhinged extremist living in his parents’ basement, but he’s actually well-organized and he will be positioned to turn his ideas into policy with Trump’s full trust and backing.
“You could see it in [Stephen Miller’s] eyes. There’s no other word to describe the feeling: It was wickedness.”
In Jean Guerrero’s excellent book about Miller, “Hatemonger,” she delved into his pathological hatred of immigrants, particularly Latinos. She quotes Oscar de la Torre, a Mexican American counselor at Santa Monica High School, which Miller attended and which has a significant Latino population. De la Torre said the teenage Miller “felt a sense of fulfillment” when his outbursts produced anger in others. “You could see it in his eyes. There’s no other word to describe the feeling: It was wickedness.”
In the Trump administration’s first weeks, Miller and Homan could direct the Department of Homeland Security to start fulfilling a major campaign promise to conduct massive raids at workplaces in search of undocumented workers. Their model will be the huge August 2019 raids in Mississippi, in which 600 federal agents raided poultry plants across the state and arrested 690. Mass arrests at workplaces could be a public relations success by reinforcing the MAGA view that the undocumented are stealing jobs from Americans. (The Biden administration had ended these workplace sweeps.) Such raids could also raise the temperature in the MAGA world and trigger vigilante attacks, such as those seen in the recent wave of anti-immigrant violence in Britain. Miller recently posted that the Democrats’ “plan is to turn America into a destitute refugee colony. Milwaukee becomes Mogadishu, Pittsburgh becomes Port-au-Prince, and St. Cloud becomes Caracas.”
Kash Patel
The least well-known of Trump’s quartet of powerful advisers may be the most dangerous. A high-level source in Washington, D.C., with ties to both the intelligence and military communities says that Patel is the Trump acolyte who they fear the most. Patel started off as a low-level MAGA apparatchik, but his loyalty and extremism were rewarded with dizzying promotions. By the end of Trump’s term, he was chief of staff to the acting secretary of defense, Christopher Miller. David Ignatius, the veteran Washington Post journalist, reported that “Patel was the key civilian official at the Pentagon during the last two months of Trump’s presidency.” (Even worse: Trump reportedly considered appointing Patel as the acting director of the CIA.)
Kash Patel warned that if Trump is elected again the administration would “come after” its opponents.
In his rant-filled book, “Government Gangsters,” Patel refers to the Republican former FBI director “corrupt James Comey.” Congressman Adam Schiff, a Democrat, is either “shifty” or a “scumbag,” and President Biden is “bought for and paid by the Chinese.” He ends the book with an enemies list of 60 names, who he identifies as “Members of the Executive Branch Deep State.” Anyone who challenged Donald Trump made it onto the list, including GOP officials who had served as high-level Trump advisers. The book is suffused with Trump hero-worship and faithfully echoes the former president’s manias. Patel’s sucking up got results; he boasts that aboard Air Force One the president once asked him “who should be the director of national intelligence.”
Last December, Patel warned that if Trump is elected again the administration would “come after” its opponents, including both government officials and journalists. In an appearance on Steve Bannon’s podcast, he promised, “We will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government, but in the media.”
Patel, like Homan, Miller and O’Brien, could soon be standing in the Oval Office, manipulating an increasingly addled Donald Trump. It’s time the mainstream U.S. press stopped covering every twitch in the opinion polls and started telling Americans more about the men who could be making policy come January.
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