THE STEPHEN MILLER PARLOR GAME: RASPUTIN, HEYDRICH, OR JUST THE GUY WHO ATE PASTE IN THE BACK OF HOMEROOM?
There's a party game people play now, mostly in group chats that used to be about fantasy football and are now about the Insurrection Act. It goes like this: who is Stephen Miller most like?
Not "is Stephen Miller bad." That question got settled somewhere around the summer of 2018, when the country watched footage of children in cages and a White House aide went on television to explain, calmly, why that was fine, actually. The game now is more like a morbid Bachelor draft. Round one picks: Rasputin. Heydrich. McCarthy. Cohn. Calhoun. Cromwell. Someone always throws in "the actual Devil" as a wildcard, and someone else, invariably, says "Hannibal Lecter," because there is something about the unblinking calm of the man that makes people reach for fiction rather than history, like the true comparison is too uncomfortable to sit with for long.
Dick Cheney gets an honorable mention in these conversations, the way a heavyweight gets an honorable mention at a featherweight title fight. Sure, he was terrifying. But he wasn't standing at the podium in 2025 as Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Homeland Security Advisor, running immigration enforcement quotas like a regional sales manager hitting KPIs, except the product is human beings and the quota is reportedly 3,000 arrests a day.
So let's actually play the game. Let's take it seriously, the way a historian would, because Miller deserves the indignity of being correctly categorized rather than the cheap flattery of hyperbole.
Round One: The Mystic vs. The Memo
Start with Rasputin, because it's everyone's first instinct and it's almost entirely wrong, which is itself instructive.
Rasputin's power was intimate, superstitious, and chaotic — a wandering monk who convinced a desperate Tsarina he could heal her hemophiliac son, and who parlayed that miracle into court influence that destabilized an empire through sheer erratic cronyism. It was a relationship built on mysticism and need.
Miller's power is the opposite of mystical. It is aggressively, almost proudly bureaucratic. He is not whispering visions into Trump's ear at 2 a.m.; he is drafting the executive order, footnoting the statute, and having it ready by morning. If Rasputin was chaos dressed as fate, Miller is a flowchart dressed as ideology. Wrong comparison. Next.
Round Two: The Efficiency Problem
Heydrich is the one people reach for when they want the listener to flinch, and it works, because it's supposed to. Reinhard Heydrich ran the Reich Security Main Office and was a chief architect of the Final Solution — a totalitarian technocrat operating with zero democratic constraint, building a literal machinery of extermination.
Here's the uncomfortable part for people who like tidy Nazi analogies: the comparison isn't just historically sloppy, it's actually the thing that lets Miller off easy, in a weird way, because it locates the danger in the past tense — in a regime that was uniquely monstrous and uniquely gone. Miller isn't operating in the ashes of Weimar. He's operating inside a constitutional republic that still has courts, still has elections, still has a press that, however battered, keeps finding out about the family separation memos and the wrongful-detention shootings and reporting them. The machinery he wants doesn't have the totalitarian off-ramps removed yet. That's not exoneration. That's the actual emergency: he's trying to build Heydrich's efficiency inside Madison's guardrails, and every day the guardrails hold is a day the comparison remains, mercifully, inaccurate.
Round Three: The Ones That Actually Fit
Here's where the game gets less satisfying and more useful, because the real ancestors of Stephen Miller aren't in Berlin or a Russian court. They're in Washington, and one of them is a straight line to Trump himself.
Roy Cohn. This isn't even a stretch — it's a lineage. Cohn was McCarthy's chief counsel during the Red Scare, an intensely ideological brawler who treated governance as blood sport and later became a personal mentor to a young Donald Trump. Miller is Cohn's structural descendant: the true believer who understands that hearings, quotas, and administrative leverage can do to modern "internal enemies" what McCarthy's subpoenas did to suspected communists in 1953. Different target, same appetite for turning the machinery of the state into a loyalty test.
John C. Calhoun is the uncomfortable one, because Calhoun was a legitimately serious mind — a former Vice President — who spent his intellectual capital building the most rigorous constitutional defense of an indefensible social order the country ever produced. That's the Miller move: not brute rhetoric, but lawyered rhetoric. The Public Charge Rule. The third-iteration travel ban that survived the Supreme Court. America First Legal, a whole nonprofit dedicated to giving restrictionism a legal brief. Calhoun didn't yell about white supremacy; he theorized it into constitutional doctrine. Miller doesn't yell about ending birthright citizenship; he drafts the order.
Thomas Cromwell rounds it out nicely — Henry VIII's ruthlessly efficient fixer, the man who dismantled the English Catholic Church through bureaucratic and legal maneuver rather than open war, absorbing the aristocracy's hatred so the king never had to. Every strongman needs a Cromwell: someone who will do the unglamorous, grinding work of dismantling institutions one regulation at a time, and who will happily stand in the blast radius of public fury so the principal doesn't have to.
The Verdict
So, most evil person in 21st-century American government? That's a genuinely hard bracket — ask ten people and you'll get ten brackets, and reasonable people land in very different places depending on whether they're weighing body counts, constitutional damage, or sheer duration of harm. But "most influential ideologue currently serving," the category Miller actually occupies, has a much shorter finalist list, and he's on it precisely because he's not a mystic and not a death-camp administrator — he's the McCarthy-Cohn-Calhoun-Cromwell type, the unelected true believer who turns a leader's appetite into a durable, litigated, footnoted machine.
That's the genuinely alarming part, and it's why the parlor game keeps reaching for supernatural comparisons instead of sitting with the political-science one: "the Devil" is at least comfortingly foreign. A guy from Santa Monica who went to Duke, staffed Jeff Sessions, wrote "American Carnage," and now runs deportation quotas out of the West Wing is not foreign at all. He's exactly what the American system produces when enough people decide cruelty is just a policy preference like any other.
— Big Education Ape
A note on the game itself: it's worth saying plainly that Miller's defenders don't see any of this as villainy — they see a country reclaiming control over its borders and its bureaucracy from what they'd call decades of drift, and they'd point to falling refugee ceilings and enforcement numbers as promises kept, not crimes committed. That's the actual fight underneath the parlor game, and it's a fight over legitimate ends, even when the means — family separation, expedited removal without hearings, the body count from botched raids — are where even a lot of immigration hawks get off the bus.
