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Newly promoted White House chief of staff Stephen Miller has a new — or at least renewed — plan to return Trump and the GOP to glory: He wants to win back the men. Or more specifically, per Axios, he wants the administration to remind the young and minority men who swung nearly 40 points toward Democrats in the midterms why Trump is still the leader for them.
Miller has, of course, always been a fan of man. He repeatedly promoted Trump as the only real choice for real men during the 2024 presidential campaign, and at one point even suggested to young men that being loud and proud for Trump would get them laid:
If you’re a young man — it’s very important in an election season — who’s looking to impress ladies, to be the alpha, to be attractive, the best thing you can do is to wear your Trump support on your sleeve. Show that you are a real man. Show that you are not a beta, right? Be a proud and loud Trump supporter and your dating life will be fantastic.
Like all other midterm swing voters, young men were primarily motivated by economic concerns created, overlooked, or greatly exacerbated by the Trump administration. Axios reports that Miller thinks refocusing on culture-war issues and affordability will do the job:
Miller wants to spend more time highlighting administration policies he believes haven’t gotten enough attention, and that will appeal to working-class voters concerned about the economy, insiders tell Axios.
His priorities will sound familiar to Trump watchers: eliminating what the administration considers “woke” policies from colleges and workplaces, lowering prescription drug prices, and rooting out government and health-care fraud. He also wants to emphasize reducing the federal bureaucracy and push for permitting reform, while highlighting how those efforts could help address affordability.
Those policies may also sound familiar to anyone who has paid any attention to what Trump and his allies have pushed and blamed others for over the past several years. And they seem to indicate that Miller believes a back-to-MAGA-basics approach — minus the Iran war, plus more lip service to costs of living — will somehow magically restore Trump’s 2024 coalition. It might, however, be hard to be alpha on affordability without the Democrat-controlled Congress onboard.
