Ta-Nehisi Coates on the Liberal Absolution of Charlie Kirk and the Lost Cause
The Benjamin Dixon Show
Premiered 17 hours ago
Premiered 17 hours ago
Thursday, September 18, 2025
FASCIST AMERICA 2025: The Pathologically Criminal and Utterly Corrupt, Immoral And Hypocritical Trump/MAGA Regime Is Relentlessly Attacking and Working Overtime To Fundamentally Destroy All Free Speech Rights in the United States While Making A Sheer Public Mockery of The Very Idea of Law and the Constitution. This is Fascism On Steroids And Nothing Will Change Until We All Find The Collective Will, Courage, Independence, And Integrity To Fight and Defeat These Malevolent Forces No Matter What
‘Censoring you in real time’: suspension of Jimmy Kimmel show sparks shock and fears for free speech
ABC decision over Kimmel comments about Charlie Kirk’s killing comes hours after Trump-appointed chair of US media regulator threatened broadcaster’s license
What did Jimmy Kimmel say about Charlie Kirk?
ABC pulls Jimmy Kimmel show over Kirk comments – live updates
Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension has been met with outrage by free speech groups who call it part of an effort by the Trump administration to stifle dissent. Photograph: Rich Polk/Variety/Getty Images
by Jonathan Yerushalmy
September 17, 2025
September 17, 2025
The Guardian
Politicians, media figures and free speech organisations expressed anger and alarm at the suspension of Jimmy Kimmel’s late night show, warning that critics of Donald Trump were being systematically silenced.
ABC announced it was suspending Jimmy Kimmel Live! indefinitely after comments Kimmel made about Charlie Kirk’s killing led a group of ABC-affiliated stations to say it would not air the show.
On Wednesday evening, California governor Gavin Newsom called the firing of commentators and cancelling of shows “coordinated” and “dangerous.” He went on to say that the Republican party “does not believe in free speech. They are censoring you in real time.”
Democratic senate minority leader Chuck Schumer said “everybody across the political spectrum should be speaking out to stop what’s happening to Jimmy Kimmel.” His colleague Chris Murphy said it was likely the start of a campaign to “use the murder of Charlie Kirk as a pretext to use the power of the White House to wipe out Trump’s critics and his political opponents”, while Democratic politician Ro Khanna said “this is perhaps the first administration to make comedy illegal”.
Actor Ben Stiller said the decision to suspend Kimmel’s show “isn’t right”, while comedian and occasional Daily Show host Michael Kosta wrote: “This is a serious moment in American history. TV networks MUST push back. This is complete BS.”
Comedian and actor Wanda Sykes said in a video that Trump “didn’t end the Ukraine War or solve Gaza within his first week, but he did end freedom of speech within his first year. Hey, for those of you who pray, now’s the time to do it. Love you, Jimmy.”
Hacks star Jean Smart wrote that she was “horrified” by the decision. “What Jimmy said was FREE speech, not hate speech. People seem to only want to protect free speech when it suits THEIR agenda,” she wrote on Instagram. “Though I didn’t agree at ALL with Charlie Kirk; his shooting death sickened me; and should have sickened any decent human being. What is happening to our country?”
Sharing recent footage of Fox commentator Brian Kilmeade calling for mentally ill and homeless people to be killed, comedian Paul Scheer wrote: “So let me get this straight. Kimmel is off the air for his comments about the politicization of an assassination but this is totally fine.” Kilmeade later apologised for his “extremely callous” remarks.
Comedian Mike Birbiglia wrote: “If you’re a comedian and you don’t call out the insanity of pulling Kimmel off the air – don’t bother spouting off about free speech anymore.”
MSNBC political commentator Chris Hayes called it the most “straightforward attack on free speech from state actors I’ve ever seen in my life”.
In his monologue on Monday, Kimmel said that “we hit some new lows over the weekend with the Maga gang desperately trying to characterise this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.”
On Tuesday he said Trump was “fanning the flames” by attacking people on the left.
ABC, which has aired Kimmel’s late-night show since 2003, moved swiftly after Nexstar Communications Group said it would pull the show, saying Kimmel’s comments about Kirk’s death “were offensive and insensitive at a critical time in our national political discourse”.
Donald Trump and figures aligned to his Maga movement reacted with glee to the news, with the president calling it “Great News for America”. Trump posted: “Congratulations to ABC for finally having the courage to do what had to be done. Kimmel has ZERO talent.”
The president, who is on a state visit to the UK and hours earlier had attended a banquet hosted by King Charles, also appeared to encourage the NBC network to cancel other late night shows hosted by Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers.
Earlier on Wednesday, the chair of the US media regulator, Brendan Carr, who was appointed by Trump, appeared on a rightwing podcast and threatened broadcasters’ licenses if action was not taken against the late night host.
In the interview with Benny Johnson, Carr suggested suspending Kimmel could be an appropriate action from ABC.
After ABC’s announcement hours later, Johnson boasted online that it was his interview with Carr that had led to Kimmel’s suspension. “It’s called soft power,” he said. “The Left uses it all the time. Thanks to President Trump, the Right has learned how to wield power as well.”
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression said the timing of ABC’s decision, after the comments from Carr, “tells the whole story”.
“Another media outlet withered under government pressure,” the free speech advocacy group said, adding “we cannot be a country where late night talk show hosts serve at the pleasure of the president. But until institutions grow a backbone and learn to resist government pressure, that is the country we are.”
Truth Wins Out (TWO), a nonprofit dedicated to exposing extremism, said the move was part of a rightwing “Cancel Crusade” that has “weaponised outrage to silence dissent and intimidate media outlets.”
“This is a new McCarthyism that has expanded the boundaries of ‘woke’ to once unimaginable dimensions. It is chilling the free press and punishing truth‑tellers.”
TWO’s statement references the wave of firings that have followed Kirk’s death, with companies sacking employees for making comments that are deemed to be insensitive or divisive.
There have been reports of teachers, firefighters, journalists, nurses, politicians, a Secret Service employee, a junior strategist at Nasdaq and a worker for a prominent NFL team, being sacked or censured in some form after publishing opinions on Kirk’s politics or death.
Efforts to track down, intimidate and harass people perceived not to have sufficiently mourned the killing of the Kirk were endorsed on Monday by JD Vance.
The US vice-president guest-hosted Kirk’s podcast and said that people who “see someone celebrating Charlie’s murder” should “call their employer. We don’t believe in political violence, but we do believe in civility, and there is no civility in the celebration of political assassination.”
Kimmel, like CBS late-night host Stephen Colbert, had consistently been critical of Trump and many of his policies on his show and his suspension comes just weeks after rival network CBS said that it was cancelling Stephen Colbert’s show at the end of this season for financial reasons, although some critics have wondered if his stance on Trump played a role.
Explore more on these topics:
Jimmy Kimmel
Donald Trump
Charlie Kirk shooting
Trump administration
US politics
Freedom of speech
news
Politicians, media figures and free speech organisations expressed anger and alarm at the suspension of Jimmy Kimmel’s late night show, warning that critics of Donald Trump were being systematically silenced.
ABC announced it was suspending Jimmy Kimmel Live! indefinitely after comments Kimmel made about Charlie Kirk’s killing led a group of ABC-affiliated stations to say it would not air the show.
On Wednesday evening, California governor Gavin Newsom called the firing of commentators and cancelling of shows “coordinated” and “dangerous.” He went on to say that the Republican party “does not believe in free speech. They are censoring you in real time.”
Democratic senate minority leader Chuck Schumer said “everybody across the political spectrum should be speaking out to stop what’s happening to Jimmy Kimmel.” His colleague Chris Murphy said it was likely the start of a campaign to “use the murder of Charlie Kirk as a pretext to use the power of the White House to wipe out Trump’s critics and his political opponents”, while Democratic politician Ro Khanna said “this is perhaps the first administration to make comedy illegal”.
Actor Ben Stiller said the decision to suspend Kimmel’s show “isn’t right”, while comedian and occasional Daily Show host Michael Kosta wrote: “This is a serious moment in American history. TV networks MUST push back. This is complete BS.”
Comedian and actor Wanda Sykes said in a video that Trump “didn’t end the Ukraine War or solve Gaza within his first week, but he did end freedom of speech within his first year. Hey, for those of you who pray, now’s the time to do it. Love you, Jimmy.”
Hacks star Jean Smart wrote that she was “horrified” by the decision. “What Jimmy said was FREE speech, not hate speech. People seem to only want to protect free speech when it suits THEIR agenda,” she wrote on Instagram. “Though I didn’t agree at ALL with Charlie Kirk; his shooting death sickened me; and should have sickened any decent human being. What is happening to our country?”
Sharing recent footage of Fox commentator Brian Kilmeade calling for mentally ill and homeless people to be killed, comedian Paul Scheer wrote: “So let me get this straight. Kimmel is off the air for his comments about the politicization of an assassination but this is totally fine.” Kilmeade later apologised for his “extremely callous” remarks.
Comedian Mike Birbiglia wrote: “If you’re a comedian and you don’t call out the insanity of pulling Kimmel off the air – don’t bother spouting off about free speech anymore.”
MSNBC political commentator Chris Hayes called it the most “straightforward attack on free speech from state actors I’ve ever seen in my life”.
In his monologue on Monday, Kimmel said that “we hit some new lows over the weekend with the Maga gang desperately trying to characterise this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.”
On Tuesday he said Trump was “fanning the flames” by attacking people on the left.
ABC, which has aired Kimmel’s late-night show since 2003, moved swiftly after Nexstar Communications Group said it would pull the show, saying Kimmel’s comments about Kirk’s death “were offensive and insensitive at a critical time in our national political discourse”.
Donald Trump and figures aligned to his Maga movement reacted with glee to the news, with the president calling it “Great News for America”. Trump posted: “Congratulations to ABC for finally having the courage to do what had to be done. Kimmel has ZERO talent.”
The president, who is on a state visit to the UK and hours earlier had attended a banquet hosted by King Charles, also appeared to encourage the NBC network to cancel other late night shows hosted by Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers.
Earlier on Wednesday, the chair of the US media regulator, Brendan Carr, who was appointed by Trump, appeared on a rightwing podcast and threatened broadcasters’ licenses if action was not taken against the late night host.
In the interview with Benny Johnson, Carr suggested suspending Kimmel could be an appropriate action from ABC.
After ABC’s announcement hours later, Johnson boasted online that it was his interview with Carr that had led to Kimmel’s suspension. “It’s called soft power,” he said. “The Left uses it all the time. Thanks to President Trump, the Right has learned how to wield power as well.”
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression said the timing of ABC’s decision, after the comments from Carr, “tells the whole story”.
“Another media outlet withered under government pressure,” the free speech advocacy group said, adding “we cannot be a country where late night talk show hosts serve at the pleasure of the president. But until institutions grow a backbone and learn to resist government pressure, that is the country we are.”
Truth Wins Out (TWO), a nonprofit dedicated to exposing extremism, said the move was part of a rightwing “Cancel Crusade” that has “weaponised outrage to silence dissent and intimidate media outlets.”
“This is a new McCarthyism that has expanded the boundaries of ‘woke’ to once unimaginable dimensions. It is chilling the free press and punishing truth‑tellers.”
TWO’s statement references the wave of firings that have followed Kirk’s death, with companies sacking employees for making comments that are deemed to be insensitive or divisive.
There have been reports of teachers, firefighters, journalists, nurses, politicians, a Secret Service employee, a junior strategist at Nasdaq and a worker for a prominent NFL team, being sacked or censured in some form after publishing opinions on Kirk’s politics or death.
Efforts to track down, intimidate and harass people perceived not to have sufficiently mourned the killing of the Kirk were endorsed on Monday by JD Vance.
The US vice-president guest-hosted Kirk’s podcast and said that people who “see someone celebrating Charlie’s murder” should “call their employer. We don’t believe in political violence, but we do believe in civility, and there is no civility in the celebration of political assassination.”
Kimmel, like CBS late-night host Stephen Colbert, had consistently been critical of Trump and many of his policies on his show and his suspension comes just weeks after rival network CBS said that it was cancelling Stephen Colbert’s show at the end of this season for financial reasons, although some critics have wondered if his stance on Trump played a role.
Explore more on these topics:
Jimmy Kimmel
Donald Trump
Charlie Kirk shooting
Trump administration
US politics
Freedom of speech
news
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2025/sep/17/jimmy-kimmel-republicans-charlie-kirk
Jimmy Kimmel: Republicans ‘working very hard to capitalize’ on Charlie Kirk’s killing
Late-night hosts discuss Maga’s baseless claims about ‘violence’ from the ‘far left’ and Trump’s new $15bn lawsuit against the New York Times
Jimmy Kimmel Live! suspended indefinitely after host’s Charlie Kirk comments
Guardian staff
17 September 2025
Late-night hosts discuss Maga’s baseless claims about ‘violence’ from the ‘far left’ and Trump’s new $15bn lawsuit against the New York Times
Jimmy Kimmel Live! suspended indefinitely after host’s Charlie Kirk comments
Guardian staff
17 September 2025
Jimmy
Kimmel: ‘The president and his henchmen are doing their best to fan the
flames, so they can I guess attack people on the dangerous left.’ Photograph: YouTube
Late-show hosts recap Donald Trump’s chilly reception in the UK, his corrupt business deals with the UAE and Maga’s fearmongering around the “radical left”.
Jimmy Kimmel
On Monday night, Trump became the first US president to sue the New York Times, for defamation to the tune of $15bn. “Where does he even come up with this?” wondered Jimmy Kimmel on Tuesday evening. “These are like numbers my children make up when they’re talking about money.”
“I thought he said the New York Times was failing,” he added. “He thinks they have $15bn? How much would he sue for if he thought they were doing well?”
“He won’t win this. The New York Times won’t settle,” Kimmel noted. “Besides how ridiculous it is, this might be one of the funniest legal documents I’ve ever seen. It’s quite a tongue bath.” One page lists Trump’s “hundreds of history-making appearances” including WrestleMania V, All My Children, Ghosts Can’t Do It, Two Weeks Notice, the Miss America pageants and “much more”.
“This is quite a resume,” Kimmel deadpanned. “You know he met Melania on 90 Day Fiance.”
Meanwhile, “many in Maga-land are working very hard to capitalize on the murder of Charlie Kirk”. On Monday, JD Vance, who once called Trump “America’s Hitler”, hosted Kirk’s podcast from the White House and blamed the left, without evidence. Said Vance: “While our side of the aisle certainly has its crazies, it is a statistical fact that most of the lunatics in American politics today are proud members of the far left.”
“And by ‘statistical fact’, he means ‘complete bullshit’,” Kimmel corrected. In fact, the Department of Justice removed from its website a study finding that violence from far-right groups is the greatest source of domestic terror and extremist violence in the US. “Here’s a question JD Vance might be able to answer: who wanted to hang the guy who was vice president before you?” Kimmel said. “Was that the liberal left? Or the toothless army who stormed the Capitol on January 6.”
“The president and his henchmen are doing their best to fan the flames, so they can I guess attack people on the dangerous left,” Kimmel added, noting the incongruence with the right’s former vision of so-called “snowflake” liberals. “Which is it?” he wondered. “Are they a bunch of sissy pickleball players because they’re too scared to get hit by tennis balls? Or are they a well-organized army of commandos? Because they can’t be both.”
Wednesday, September 17, 2025
FASCIST AMERICA 2025: Stephen Miller, The Deadly Trump Regime, and the Real Ongoing Legacy of MAGA and Charlie Kirk
President Stephen Miller's White Nationalist Agenda Revealed
Wajahat Ali
September 16, 2025
VIDEO:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiubGiw2lSE
Wajahat Ali
September 16, 2025
VIDEO:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiubGiw2lSE
An avowed white nationalist soldier is now the most powerful and influential unelected official in the world. His name is Stephen Miller and he's America's shadow president. With Donald Trump cankled and declining, Miller has the reins to implement his white nationalist vision for America. In a fantastic deep dive, Rolling Stones reporter Nikki McCann Ramirez and her colleagues discussed Miller’s “reign of terror” and how Republicans who once mocked him as a freak are now bending the knee to the shadow President.
https://thelefthook.substack.com/p/pr...
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/stephen-miller-trump-terror-ice-immigration-military-1235426023/
Trump’s Zealot
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/stephen-miller-trump-terror-ice-immigration-military-1235426023/
Trump’s Zealot
Inside Stephen Miller’s Reign of Terror
Everything you loathe or love about Donald Trump’s America, you hate or cherish about Miller’s republic of fear
by Asawin Suebsaeng, Nikki McCann Ramirez, Andrew Perez
September 14, 2025
Rolling Stone
Illustration by VICTOR JUHASZ
It was after 3 a.m. on Nov. 6 last year, and nobody on the planet was happier than a balding, slender man standing near the reception desk of the Hilton West Palm Beach.
Donald Trump had just finished hosting his 2024 election watch party at the adjacent Florida convention center, declaring victory in a speech eloquently touting “the most incredible political thing.” Jubilant Republican donors, campaign staff, future government officials, and attendees (of course, Jon Voight) flooded over to the luxury hotel to celebrate.
At the front of the lobby stood Stephen Miller, the man Trump would soon tap as his White House’s undisputed orchestrator of policies and executive authority.
Miller had been one of the first Trump administration’s key policy drivers, particularly when it came to the president’s throttling of legal immigration. Senior officials in President Joe Biden’s administration will tell you the country is still living with the damage Miller did to immigration during Trump’s first term, and that the Biden team was unable, or unwilling, to undo much of it with their four years in power.
But that night in Florida, something was different for the then-39-year-old Miller. A universe of possibilities was unfurling before him.
Amid the revelry, Miller huddled with other high-ranking Trump personnel and said his thank you’s to the ad hoc procession of euphoric conservative voters and GOP bigwigs who congratulated him over and over. They all could see it wasn’t just Trump’s victory that night — it was Miller’s, and many felt obliged to kiss his Trump-endowed ring.
To see the expression of unbridled joy written across Miller’s face at that moment of Trump’s restoration was to stare into the eyes of someone who could see the future: Trump’s top adviser, his most faithful believer, the one close aide who had somehow survived the countless purges of MAGA officials in the first term, knew the country was now his.
Speaking to one overjoyed woman, Miller said, “It’s gonna be great.”
More than seven months into Trump’s second term, Stephen Miller has become America’s — if not the world’s — most powerful unelected bureaucrat. With Trump’s blessing, Miller has been allowed to run and remake the country in a manner virtually unheard of for a U.S. government official of his rank. Think of any egregious policy from the Trump administration: Chances are, it was driven by Stephen Miller.
All of it bears Trump’s signature, but the president is not the one spending his nights writing executive orders and bending legal theory to his will; nearly all of this bears the authorship (or, at least, co-authorship) of Miller. Everything you loathe or love about Donald Trump’s America, you hate or cherish about Stephen Miller’s republic of fear.
Under Miller’s guiding hand, the government can deport (or kidnap and rendition) you or your spouse, without due process, to a foreign gulag, if the president feels like it. The White House can repeatedly threaten to take away the most basic of constitutional protections, such as habeas corpus. The president can launch Justice Department criminal investigations against his enemies who, by all known accounts, did nothing wrong except annoy the commander-in-chief, or refuse to help him steal an election. The president and his lieutenants can arrest you at a routine courthouse check-in, at your church, outside your kid’s school, even if you have no criminal record. They’ve instituted a heavily draconian system of immigration arrest “quotas,” ensuring a regime not mainly of mass deportation, but of mass disappearances and indefinite detention in jails and newly erected camps.
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They’ve quickly turned much of federal law enforcement into the masked, nameless, unaccountable secret police, working at the whims of the president and his staff. The president can deploy armed National Guard troops, and even U.S. Marines, to the streets of an American city any time he wants — and deem it enemy territory. The administration has made censoring media organizations, comedians, and aging rock stars a policy priority, in an anti-free-speech crusade waged from the West Wing to the Federal Communications Commission.
“Shadow Sec Def.”
“Prime Minister Miller.”
“The REAL Attorney General.”
“The DHS boss.”
“President Miller.”
Trump administration officials and other Republicans close to the president and this White House are paranoid that Miller will one day hear them gossiping about him behind his back — but they still whisper the unofficial titles and nicknames that they bestow onto the White House deputy chief of staff.
When Rolling Stone asks one senior administration official about former Fox News star and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, this source says, unprompted, that “he does what Stephen wants him to do.”
Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell says that Hegseth “enjoys a great working relationship with Stephen Miller. They are completely aligned on carrying out President Trump’s America First agenda.”
‘One Intense Motherfucker’
As a teenager in Santa Monica, California, Miller craved nothing more than triggering the good-looking kids in school who wanted nothing to do with him.
Jason Islas, who first met Miller at Lincoln Middle School in Santa Monica, says he and Miller and a third friend were a tight-knit band of outsiders who spent middle school doing preteen-boy stuff, like talking about Star Trek (Islas remembers Miller as a big Captain Kirk fan). That all changed, though, in the summer of 1999, between eighth and ninth grades, when, Islas says, Miller informed him they couldn’t be friends anymore. “One of the things he did say was that he didn’t like the fact that I’m of Latin heritage,” Islas recalls.
In the decades that followed, Miller did not grow — except to become more hardened in his extremist views. When he worked as a communications aide in the office of Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions during the Obama years, he was so widely disliked by his conservative colleagues on Capitol Hill that Republican staff in other offices would invent or spread malicious rumors about Miller, such as that he liked to play with porcelain dolls. (A White House official insists that any such characterization of his time on the Hill is “inaccurate and baseless gossip.”) The staffers at the time never dreamed that he’d ever amount to much more than a punch line or an obscure cautionary tale of what happens when you read too many far-right hate websites and dive into Washington’s most feverish swamps.
Even today, not much has changed. As the president’s policy architect and enforcer, he is obsessed, according to three Trump advisers, with deploying the might of the government to stamp out what he deems “anti-white hatred” and “anti-white racism” and “anti-white discrimination” — no matter the cost.
Miller speaks almost exclusively in apocalyptic terms, in the caricatured language of military combat, forever war, and invasion against the culture and the homeland.
He’s yearned to erect a vast hyper-militarized network of what he’s dubbed “camps” for detention and mass deportation — a network he hopes will change the American political and physical landscape forever.
Miller, who is Jewish, has been denounced by his own uncle as a one-man betrayal of Jewish moral and political values. Miller has long held the deepest admiration for the Immigration Act of 1924, and wishes to bring America back to those days. The law is notorious for making the Holocaust deadlier for Jews who tried to flee the Nazis, only to be denied safe passage to the U.S.
Immediately after election night 2024 was called, human rights groups and pro-immigration advocates could not help but consider that they were not prepared for the onrush that Miller was about to unleash. Of all of the Trump appointees, he was the one who kept them up at night. For all of incoming Trump “border czar” Tom Homan’s big talk on mass deportations, he was nothing compared to Miller. To those familiar with Homan’s work, the former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) could recognize, occasionally, that there were some rules and restrictions, here and there. For a guy like Miller, the only laws that mattered were the ones he and Trump could pervert.
Miller may be the avatar of the anonymous racist internet troll brought to agonizing life and imbued with power. But that does not mean he doesn’t thoroughly believe in the righteousness of the ideology he’s selling. In his mind, he’s the triumphant hero — a one-man antidote to effete liberalism, and a holy warrior against the permissive legal and illegal immigration that has left him and his peers feeling mugged by pluralistic reality.
Talk to Republicans operating at the highest levels of Trumpville and you get a unique mix of admiration and unease when you ask them what they think about Miller. “One intense motherfucker,” a longtime Trump adviser notes.
Even attempts by his friends to make him sound gentler, kinder, or funnier often fall flat, making him seem like a crank or the meanest dork you’ve ever met. For instance, multiple longtime Miller associates say that the top White House aide is one of the most “MAHA” people you’ll ever meet, and has plunged headlong into Robert F. Kennedy Jr.-style food and health (or anti-health) agitprop. Accounts of his social life make him sound, to put it gently, tedious.
One conversational victim of his recounts to Rolling Stone what it was like to get hit on by a premarital Miller, circa 2017, at a bar not far from Dupont Circle. The story involves being grilled about which country was named on the collar of her clothing (don’t say China), and getting accused of being a “globalist” because she wasn’t the right kind of conservative.
Female strangers aren’t the only ones in Washington who think he’s weird. Over the years of their close working relationship, President Trump — ever the gossipy Mean Girl with a nuclear arsenal — has not shied away from insulting Miller behind his back. According to two sources with direct knowledge of the matter, Trump has commented to others in the past about Miller’s intense, awkward, and at times off-putting demeanor.
But to Trump, Miller is a useful battering ram, the policy answer to his lingering question of “Where’s my Roy Cohn?”
“Stephen Miller has been one of President Trump’s longest serving and most trusted advisers for nearly a decade, and I can personally attest to the respect the president has for Stephen because I witness it every day,” says White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt. “That’s why Stephen serves as the deputy chief of staff for policy and Homeland Security adviser, because the president has the utmost faith in him and his proven leadership abilities. In addition to being extremely effective at his jobs, Stephen is a loyal colleague and friend. Any suggestion otherwise is false gossip from people who don’t actually know him.”
In addition to the press secretary’s statement, the Trump White House sent Rolling Stone a lengthy list of testimonials — resembling an extremely MAGA LinkedIn endorsements section — from Republican lawmakers to prove that people like Stephen Miller personally.
Sen. Josh Hawley, for instance, says he’s glad to call Miller “a friend,” adding that “he cares deeply about helping create a future where American families can thrive.”
“Stephen Miller is bright, thoughtful, takes the time to listen to our members and their concerns, and has always been easy to work with,” says House Majority Leader Rep. Steve Scalise, adding: “I am proud to call Stephen Miller a close friend.”
The White House provided similar statements from Sen. Tom Cotton, Sen. Mike Lee, and Rep. Jim Jordan, with a spokesperson saying they expected that all of the lawmakers’ praise for Miller would be included in this story.
They’ve quickly turned much of federal law enforcement into the masked, nameless, unaccountable secret police, working at the whims of the president and his staff. The president can deploy armed National Guard troops, and even U.S. Marines, to the streets of an American city any time he wants — and deem it enemy territory. The administration has made censoring media organizations, comedians, and aging rock stars a policy priority, in an anti-free-speech crusade waged from the West Wing to the Federal Communications Commission.
“Shadow Sec Def.”
“Prime Minister Miller.”
“The REAL Attorney General.”
“The DHS boss.”
“President Miller.”
Trump administration officials and other Republicans close to the president and this White House are paranoid that Miller will one day hear them gossiping about him behind his back — but they still whisper the unofficial titles and nicknames that they bestow onto the White House deputy chief of staff.
When Rolling Stone asks one senior administration official about former Fox News star and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, this source says, unprompted, that “he does what Stephen wants him to do.”
Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell says that Hegseth “enjoys a great working relationship with Stephen Miller. They are completely aligned on carrying out President Trump’s America First agenda.”
‘One Intense Motherfucker’
As a teenager in Santa Monica, California, Miller craved nothing more than triggering the good-looking kids in school who wanted nothing to do with him.
Jason Islas, who first met Miller at Lincoln Middle School in Santa Monica, says he and Miller and a third friend were a tight-knit band of outsiders who spent middle school doing preteen-boy stuff, like talking about Star Trek (Islas remembers Miller as a big Captain Kirk fan). That all changed, though, in the summer of 1999, between eighth and ninth grades, when, Islas says, Miller informed him they couldn’t be friends anymore. “One of the things he did say was that he didn’t like the fact that I’m of Latin heritage,” Islas recalls.
In the decades that followed, Miller did not grow — except to become more hardened in his extremist views. When he worked as a communications aide in the office of Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions during the Obama years, he was so widely disliked by his conservative colleagues on Capitol Hill that Republican staff in other offices would invent or spread malicious rumors about Miller, such as that he liked to play with porcelain dolls. (A White House official insists that any such characterization of his time on the Hill is “inaccurate and baseless gossip.”) The staffers at the time never dreamed that he’d ever amount to much more than a punch line or an obscure cautionary tale of what happens when you read too many far-right hate websites and dive into Washington’s most feverish swamps.
Even today, not much has changed. As the president’s policy architect and enforcer, he is obsessed, according to three Trump advisers, with deploying the might of the government to stamp out what he deems “anti-white hatred” and “anti-white racism” and “anti-white discrimination” — no matter the cost.
Miller speaks almost exclusively in apocalyptic terms, in the caricatured language of military combat, forever war, and invasion against the culture and the homeland.
He’s yearned to erect a vast hyper-militarized network of what he’s dubbed “camps” for detention and mass deportation — a network he hopes will change the American political and physical landscape forever.
Miller, who is Jewish, has been denounced by his own uncle as a one-man betrayal of Jewish moral and political values. Miller has long held the deepest admiration for the Immigration Act of 1924, and wishes to bring America back to those days. The law is notorious for making the Holocaust deadlier for Jews who tried to flee the Nazis, only to be denied safe passage to the U.S.
Immediately after election night 2024 was called, human rights groups and pro-immigration advocates could not help but consider that they were not prepared for the onrush that Miller was about to unleash. Of all of the Trump appointees, he was the one who kept them up at night. For all of incoming Trump “border czar” Tom Homan’s big talk on mass deportations, he was nothing compared to Miller. To those familiar with Homan’s work, the former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) could recognize, occasionally, that there were some rules and restrictions, here and there. For a guy like Miller, the only laws that mattered were the ones he and Trump could pervert.
Miller may be the avatar of the anonymous racist internet troll brought to agonizing life and imbued with power. But that does not mean he doesn’t thoroughly believe in the righteousness of the ideology he’s selling. In his mind, he’s the triumphant hero — a one-man antidote to effete liberalism, and a holy warrior against the permissive legal and illegal immigration that has left him and his peers feeling mugged by pluralistic reality.
Talk to Republicans operating at the highest levels of Trumpville and you get a unique mix of admiration and unease when you ask them what they think about Miller. “One intense motherfucker,” a longtime Trump adviser notes.
Even attempts by his friends to make him sound gentler, kinder, or funnier often fall flat, making him seem like a crank or the meanest dork you’ve ever met. For instance, multiple longtime Miller associates say that the top White House aide is one of the most “MAHA” people you’ll ever meet, and has plunged headlong into Robert F. Kennedy Jr.-style food and health (or anti-health) agitprop. Accounts of his social life make him sound, to put it gently, tedious.
One conversational victim of his recounts to Rolling Stone what it was like to get hit on by a premarital Miller, circa 2017, at a bar not far from Dupont Circle. The story involves being grilled about which country was named on the collar of her clothing (don’t say China), and getting accused of being a “globalist” because she wasn’t the right kind of conservative.
Female strangers aren’t the only ones in Washington who think he’s weird. Over the years of their close working relationship, President Trump — ever the gossipy Mean Girl with a nuclear arsenal — has not shied away from insulting Miller behind his back. According to two sources with direct knowledge of the matter, Trump has commented to others in the past about Miller’s intense, awkward, and at times off-putting demeanor.
But to Trump, Miller is a useful battering ram, the policy answer to his lingering question of “Where’s my Roy Cohn?”
“Stephen Miller has been one of President Trump’s longest serving and most trusted advisers for nearly a decade, and I can personally attest to the respect the president has for Stephen because I witness it every day,” says White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt. “That’s why Stephen serves as the deputy chief of staff for policy and Homeland Security adviser, because the president has the utmost faith in him and his proven leadership abilities. In addition to being extremely effective at his jobs, Stephen is a loyal colleague and friend. Any suggestion otherwise is false gossip from people who don’t actually know him.”
In addition to the press secretary’s statement, the Trump White House sent Rolling Stone a lengthy list of testimonials — resembling an extremely MAGA LinkedIn endorsements section — from Republican lawmakers to prove that people like Stephen Miller personally.
Sen. Josh Hawley, for instance, says he’s glad to call Miller “a friend,” adding that “he cares deeply about helping create a future where American families can thrive.”
“Stephen Miller is bright, thoughtful, takes the time to listen to our members and their concerns, and has always been easy to work with,” says House Majority Leader Rep. Steve Scalise, adding: “I am proud to call Stephen Miller a close friend.”
The White House provided similar statements from Sen. Tom Cotton, Sen. Mike Lee, and Rep. Jim Jordan, with a spokesperson saying they expected that all of the lawmakers’ praise for Miller would be included in this story.
Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
‘Get It Done’
Nowadays, according to various sources working in and close to the Trump West Wing, the president’s lieutenant is technically a deputy White House chief of staff, but he far outpaces the actual White House chief of staff — Trump’s former 2024 campaign co-chief Susie Wiles — as Trump’s primary chief of administration policy.
Miller touches virtually every policy and executive action (especially as it relates to domestic initiatives), effectively all documents, Trump directives, constitutionally dubious orders, and memos. The architecture of Trump’s military crackdowns (in Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and coming to a Democratic-dominant city near you) is in part a product of Miller’s vision for dominating liberal strongholds he despises.
“It’s a blast for Stephen,” says another fellow Trump adviser, in describing Miller’s role in orchestrating the domestic deployments of U.S. armed forces.
The Trump administration’s sweeping clampdown on diversity programs, higher education, and free speech Trump does not care for is a direct expression of Miller’s ethos, bringing to life a long-held ambition of federalizing the conservative “culture war” in ways once thought uncouth. Trump’s sprawling immigration and border enforcement is just “The Stephen Miller Show,” brought to you by Stephen Miller Productions LLC, and personally stage-managed by Stephen Miller.
With each shred of paper that the president will sign to launch these domestic programs, the Trump lieutenant peruses it, sometimes marks it up with edits, and pushes other Trump officials across the federal apparatus to, in his words, “get it done.”
His berating of intra-departmental and agency officials has become the stuff of legend, if not waking nightmares. Since the beginning of the second Trump administration, two sources who’ve worked in the federal government and have personally dealt with Miller tell Rolling Stone that his berating has made them each cry at work.
During intra-agency discussions, Miller has routinely name-called, yelled, threatened officials’ jobs or future in the party, and attempted to humiliate people in front of their colleagues. He becomes enraged if he feels the immigrant-arrest numbers aren’t padded enough, or if he believes Trump’s domestic agenda is being stalled, even slightly. He is known for working long hours and micromanaging the brutal policies coming out of the new administration. He has a longstanding reputation, dating back to 2017, in the Republican upper ranks as someone willing to say anything, do anything, and betray almost anyone, in the service of Trump and, more vitally, keeping his power and proximity to the president intact.
Within the highest levels of the Trump administration, the idea that Attorney General Pam Bondi runs the Justice Department or that Kristi Noem runs the Department of Homeland Security is woefully incomplete. Nominally independent departments are run by the West Wing of the White House — and therefore, largely, by Miller.
When some government personnel would note that Trump can deploy National Guard troops and armed U.S. Marines to Democratic-run urban areas, but that the troops can’t conduct traditional law enforcement, per se, Miller was the one telling administration lawyers and staff that Trump wanted them to figure out ways around that legal inconvenience, and to report back with whatever legal theories they’d produce.
Miller has made it a top priority for the opening months of this Trump term to normalize the deployment of U.S. troops on American soil — not for states of emergency, but for domestic political purposes. According to those who’ve spoken with them about it, Trump and Miller view those who object as “weak,” “cowards,” and “pro-crime.”
‘We Just Have to Follow Orders’
In the aftermath of Trump’s deployment of the National Guard and U.S. Marines to assist with ICE operations in Los Angeles, Miller insisted that purging undocumented migrants from the city would create a utopia for the remaining residents.
“You have any idea how many resources will be opened up for Americans when the illegals are gone?” Miller told Fox News. “No more waiting in line at an emergency room, no more massive traffic in Los Angeles. Your health insurance premiums go down, your public-school classroom size will shrink … and if you do need to get support from the government, you’re not going to be in line behind millions of illegal aliens from the third world. This is going to be such a gift to the quality of life of everyday Americans.”
In July, when speaking to the press pool in front of the White House, Miller was asked if it was the best use of the administration’s resources to be going after “moms with young kids.” In return, he grilled the reporter on what percentage of undocumented migrants should be allowed to stay. “Do you think we have some sort of Magic 8 Ball to see which particular illegal aliens … are going to go on to commit a rape or murder?”
Miller has no legal background, but according to Trump officials, Miller was the mastermind behind Trump’s ploy to use the Alien Enemies Act to conduct mass deportations without due process, a plot he detailed in 2023 during an interview with conservative radio hosts Clay Travis and Buck Sexton.
Miller was also the first member of the administration to publicly suggest the suspension of habeas corpus, the core constitutional right of protection from arbitrary detention by the state. Speaking to reporters at the White House in May, Miller said, “The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus can be suspended in a time of invasion, so I would say that is an option we’re actively looking at.” There is, of course, no invasion.
For those who want to grasp the true nature of Miller’s legacy and his role in our world, you have to look far beyond 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. To understand Trump’s principal enforcer, you need to understand what he is doing to countless people, all over the country — and then you’d have to understand his personal, instinctive response when he hears about the stories of his victims.
Across the country there are thousands of families ripped apart by the Trump-Miller gang, and most of those stories you won’t read about or may never hear about. One of these was relayed earlier this year to Rolling Stone by an Ohio-based immigration lawyer. This magazine verified details of this account, and agreed to use pseudonyms for the wife, husband, and three-year-old daughter. The lawyer asked not to be identified, due to Miller’s and the Trump administration’s zeal for targeting pro bono immigration attorneys.
In 2020, “Richard” (as we’ll call him) fled his Latin American home country to seek asylum in the U.S. As Richard will tell you, he had served in the military in his home country, but had grown fearful of what might happen to him if he remained, citing corruption and powerful organized crime.
By 2025, he had already made a life for himself in the United States. He had a wife — “Ellen” — and a small daughter, “Jessica,” and they were living in Columbus, Ohio. He worked to support the family, and Ellen stayed home with Jessica. There is no known history of petty or violent crime or any criminal record between them. However, in early 2024, the couple showed up for one of their scheduled hearings and left without actually attending it, but only because somebody at the check-in desk erroneously told them they were not on the schedule that day. That one mishap — which by all accounts, was not their fault — was enough to doom their family under Trump’s second administration.
This past June, Richard received a text message from ICE asking that he appear for a check-in at the local ICE office. Due to the Trump administration’s barrage of new policies and arrest quotas pushed by Miller and Trump, his lawyer was suspicious. Still, Richard had faith in this great country. He wanted to show he was no criminal, that he wanted to come here the right way, and that he had nothing to hide.
The Ohio-based attorney met the family of three at the federal check-in outside of Columbus, with all of them waiting in line to get into the building. Jessica and Ellen were wearing matching attire — Jessica’s hair in pigtails with ribbons, wearing a pink dress. The lawyer recalls the daughter and father laughing as Jessica played with her dad’s cheeks, which he blew up as if to mimic a puffer fish.
After they passed the waiting area, two armed ICE officers would soon flank them, and one of them told the attorney and the family that the officers had no choice. ICE had its directive “from Washington,” the officer said, which had been issued after Trump’s inauguration in January — new standards and demands for higher arrest and deportation numbers (regardless of any existing criminal record) that were directly authored by Miller.
The officer said they had to put the father in handcuffs right then and there, and take him away. “We just have to follow orders,” the ICE officer said.
At first, the Spanish-speaking family did not know what was happening. The lawyer had to translate all of this, back and forth, as the couple and their legal representative pleaded with the ICE officers to allow them to self-deport as a family. Surely doing so would save the American taxpayer money.
The ICE officer apologized. There was nothing anyone, apparently, could do.
The officers were courteous enough to offer to allow Ellen and Jessica to leave the room, so the child did not have to see them handcuffing her dad. The father squatted low to pick up Jessica and hug her goodbye. Jessica, confused and sobbing, would not let go, wrapping her arms around her father’s neck and her legs around his body.
One of the two ICE officers informed the family they needed to get things moving along, just as Ellen had her hands around Jessica’s waist, unable — at first — to pry the preschool-age girl off her dad. One ICE officer had his hand on the father’s shoulder, while the other officer hovered over the family.
“Daddy!” the girl screamed in Spanish. “I want Daddy! I want my daddy!”
Ellen was finally able to remove a hysterical Jessica from the room, and as the ICE officers took Richard, she kept yelling, “Daddy, Daddy, Noooooooooo!!!!” As they walked back to the waiting room, the lawyer could see the faces of the immigrants and others who were sitting in the waiting area, looking on in confused horror at what must have been waiting for them on the other side of that door. Months later, the attorney tells Rolling Stone, “I can still hear the little girl’s screams.”
Ellen and Jessica would pack up and leave for Richard’s home country. The two expected to reunite with him there within days. Instead, to their terror, the Trump administration disappeared him into a Louisiana detention facility for nearly two months. They have since been reunited, but the scars have yet to heal. The lawyer says that Jessica still wakes up in the middle of the night, shouting for “Daddy.”
Under every modern president there is harsh immigration enforcement, and heartbreaking decisions are made. But this story is only happening because the Trump White House and Miller are leaning on agencies to crack down in every state, just so Miller can run up the scoreboard on arrests.
To you, this may seem sad, even appalling. To Miller, he thinks your outrage is very funny. In private conversations this year, the top Trump adviser has said that liberals promoting immigrant families’ “sob stories” are engaging in emotional “blackmail” that Miller and the government simply will not fall for. He laughs it off, before getting back to work creating more horror stories.
In this article:
Arrest
Deportation
Donald Trump
Homeland Security
ICE
Immigration
Kristi Noem
Military
National Guard
Pam Bondi,
Stephen Miller,
Tom Homan,
White House
Tuesday, September 16, 2025
FASCIST AMERICA 2025: The Criminally Hegemonic Rule Of White Supremacy As Both Ideological Doctrine and Practice/Policy in the Fascist Trump Regime Is Essential To Understanding How And Why The United States Is Under Siege and Will Remain So Unless and Until We Actively Engage, Fight, And Defeat the Malevolent Forces/Ideas/Values/Lies and Distortions That Are Holding This Society Hostage
PLEASE NOTE: What follows below is the Trump Administration's despicably insidious and brazenly racist scheme to return to the ‘separate but equal doctrine’ in education that was in formal effect from the end of the Reconstruction era in 1876 until 1954 when the Supreme Court determined that racially segregated ‘Jim Crow’ educational policy was unlawful and unconstitutional in the famous Brown v. Board of education case in Topeka Kansas. The ‘bait and switch’ maneuver here in redirecting funds slated for blacks and other minority students in STEM programs in integrated and transferring them to HBCUs and Charter Schools is clearly designed to establish a nakedly ‘divide-and-conquer’ policy by making it falsely appear that the government ‘supports’ higher education for Black and Latino American students while at the very same time using these now diverted/eliminated funds from other mainstream colleges and universities to fund institutions that were specifically created for black and other minority students because traditionally so-called ‘white’ institutions openly discriminated against them by opposing their admission on the basis of race. In the meantime Trump’s Department of Education head Linda McMahon is working tirelessly to eliminate the Department of Education altogether and forever at Trump’s and MAGA’s command…]
“The Trump administration on Monday announced that it would inject nearly $500 million into historically Black colleges and tribal universities, a windfall funded largely by cuts to programs elsewhere for minority students.
The administration will also redirect money to other political priorities for President Trump, including an extra $137 million for American history and civics education and $60 million more for charter schools.
The increases follow a White House request for a 15 percent budget cut to the Education Department next year, as President Trump seeks support to permanently shutter the agency. History programs will now receive about seven times their expected funding for this year, and charter schools will see a 13 percent increase.
To pay for the changes, the administration cut money from other parts of the education budget The details of the changes were described by three people familiar with the department’s plans who insisted on anonymity to speak about private discussions.
The biggest cut, announced by the department last week, is a $350 million hit to programs that support minority students in science and engineering programs, schools with significant Hispanic enrollment, and other federal grants at minority-serving institutions.
The administration also cut money from gifted and talented programs, which it said use racial targeting in recruitment in some cases, and from magnet schools, which have been used as a tool for combating school segregation.
In a statement announcing the new funding for Mr. Trump’s political priorities, the secretary of education, Linda McMahon, said that the department was “redirecting financial support away from ineffective and discriminatory programs toward those which support student success.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/15/us/hbcus-trump-administration-funding.html
Trump Redirects Millions to Historically Black Colleges, Charter Schools
The Trump administration is cutting money from programs that have supported minority students, including at other universities.
Listen to this article · 8:19 minutes
Learn more
The
Trump administration’s plan would divert money from other education
programs to historically Black colleges and universities, like Howard.
Credit: Maansi Srivastava for The New York Times
by Sarah Mervosh and Michael C. Bender
September 15, 2025
New York Times
The Trump administration on Monday announced that it would inject nearly $500 million into historically Black colleges and tribal universities, a windfall funded largely by cuts to programs elsewhere for minority students.
The administration will also redirect money to other political priorities for President Trump, including an extra $137 million for American history and civics education and $60 million more for charter schools.
The increases follow a White House request for a 15 percent budget cut to the Education Department next year, as President Trump seeks support to permanently shutter the agency. History programs will now receive about seven times their expected funding for this year, and charter schools will see a 13 percent increase.
To pay for the changes, the administration cut money from other parts of the education budget The details of the changes were described by three people familiar with the department’s plans who insisted on anonymity to speak about private discussions.
The biggest cut, announced by the department last week, is a $350 million hit to programs that support minority students in science and engineering programs, schools with significant Hispanic enrollment, and other federal grants at minority-serving institutions.
The administration also cut money from gifted and talented programs, which it said use racial targeting in recruitment in some cases, and from magnet schools, which have been used as a tool for combating school segregation.
In a statement announcing the new funding for Mr. Trump’s political priorities, the secretary of education, Linda McMahon, said that the department was “redirecting financial support away from ineffective and discriminatory programs toward those which support student success.”
Sign up for the Race/Related Newsletter Join a deep and provocative exploration of race, identity and society with New York Times journalists. Get it sent to your inbox.
President Trump has routinely sought to align himself with historically Black colleges and universities as a way to earn good will from Black voters, who have long been skeptical of his leadership.
In his first term, Mr. Trump secured more than $250 million in annual funding and canceled repayment of more than $300 million in federal relief loans for the schools. In April, he signed an executive order that created a job in the White House to oversee a new “Initiative on Historically Black Colleges and Universities,” although that position remains unfilled.
At the same time, the president has repeatedly minimized the history of Black people in the United States, including last month when he complained that the Smithsonian museums focus too much on “how bad slavery was.”
Traditionally, the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights has focused a major part of its legal workload on complaints of racial discrimination. Under the Trump administration, the office has prioritized accusations of discrimination against white students and pared back protections for transgender students. New discipline guidance from the White House instructs schools not to consider racial disparities, focusing solely on the behavior of students.
The halt of $350 million in federal funding last week targeted seven grants for minority-serving institutions, which are colleges with significant minority student enrollment. The Trump administration eliminated the funding, saying that programs with racial quotas were inherently racist and violated civil rights law.
Instead, that money will be put toward historically Black colleges and universities, which were created to educate Black students at a time when other colleges would not serve them, and are open to students of all races. These institutions will receive $1.34 billion this year, 48 percent more than was budgeted, according to the department.
Lodriguez Murray, a senior vice president at UNCF, previously the United Negro College Fund, said the extra money is a “godsend” for H.B.C.U.s. They have been underfunded since their inception, he said, and about 70 percent of their students come from low-income families.
“We welcome the additional resources,” he said, adding that he believed the money could be substantial enough to make a difference on campuses, even if it is a one-time boost.
Marybeth Gasman, the executive director of the Rutgers Center for Minority Serving Institutions, said that new spending should not come at the expense of programs aimed at supporting Black and Hispanic students at other schools. She said minority-serving institutions educate more than half of all students of color, and she urged Congress to push back against the executive branch’s unilateral attempt to allocate money.
“None of these institutions should be pitted against each other, which seems to be what the Trump administration is doing,” said Ms. Gasman, the associate dean for research in the Rutgers Graduate School of Education.
Tribal colleges, which are typically controlled and operated by Native American tribes and receive federal support, will also get about $108 million this year, double their expected allotment from the Education Department, federal officials said.
Tribal colleges also receive money through the Department of the Interior, funding that the Trump administration had proposed cutting earlier this year, though lawmakers on Capitol Hill have resisted.
The Education Department is muscling the money into Mr. Trump’s agenda, with two weeks to go before the fiscal year expires on Sept. 30, taking advantage of what is essentially a loophole created by the ongoing partisan standoff in Washington. The changes are a one-time infusion and apply only to this year’s funding.
The money for history and civics education will go to a pet project of Mr. Trump, who bemoaned on the campaign trail last year what he viewed in American schools as a lack of national pride. He vowed to find a way to “certify teachers who embrace patriotic values, support our way of life.”
As president, he has threatened to strip funding from schools that stray from themes of “patriotic education.” Now, the federal government will spend $160 million on American history and civics education this year, up from $23 million that Congress had authorized.
The money will pay for teachers’ training ahead of the 250th anniversary of the country’s founding next year. The program will put an emphasis on primary documents from the era of the founding fathers, an idea popular in conservative circles.
The money will primarily come from a nearly $140 million cut to teacher training programs that federal officials say were promoting racially “divisive ideology” in the classroom.
Charter schools have also long been a key piece of Mr. Trump’s education policy, which emphasizes giving parents more choice.
The first official school visit by Linda McMahon, the education secretary, was to Vertex Partnership Academies, a charter school in the Bronx. Mr. Trump is also seeking an increase for charter schools through his budget request for next year.
Charters — publicly funded but privately run schools — will have $500 million to spend this year, up from the $440 million that federal lawmakers had approved.
To pay for the new money for charter schools, the administration cut $15 million from magnet schools, $9 million from gifted and talented programs, and $31 million from Ready to Learn, which funded PBS shows for young children.
Congress typically controls how federal money is spent. But without enough support to approve an annual spending bill, Congress has instead relied on stopgap measures to keep the government open. These temporary measures ensure that funding levels are maintained at existing levels but, unlike regular spending bills, do not specify how that money should be spent.
Many Democrats opposed the most recent stopgap measure in March, warning that the lack of explicit directions would essentially create slush funds for the White House.
Now, six months later, the administration is seizing the moment, using flexibility allowed by the stopgap to redirect money toward Mr. Trump’s priorities.
Sarah Mervosh covers education for The Times, focusing on K-12 schools.
Michael C. Bender is a Times correspondent in Washington.
See more on: Education Department (US), Donald Trump
COMMENTS SECTION
New York Times
J
Joe.Gould
LES3h ago
Taking money from minority students at non-HBCU institutions of higher education & giving it to them if they are enrolled at an HBCU institution looks like an effort to segregate minority students….
Jean commented 3 hours ago
Jean
Holland, OH
3h ago
Baffling & convoluted mix of contradictions.
JN commented 3 hours ago
J
JN
NY3h ago
It looks like a Trojan Horse.
Blue Witch commented 3 hours ago
B
Blue Witch
Washington State3h ago
I applaud any extra funding for universities and colleges that primarily serve Black people and Native Americans. But since the money was clawed away from programs supporting minority students at institutions catering to a mixed student body, this looks suspiciously like the re-segregation of higher ed. And I find that thought deeply disquieting.
JB commented 3 hours ago
J
JB
Walnut Creek3h ago
It would seem that the award of funds to programs whose admission criteria is primarily or solely based on race is prima facie illegal discrimination and should never been instituted. The linked article specifically said that there would be no more of this but rather repurposing the funds to equivalent programs aimed at needs based criteria.
Paul-A commented 3 hours ago
P
Paul-A
St. Lawrence, NY3h ago
I'm confused by this action, because it seems to run against Trump's life-long track record of disdain for Black people. And are HBCU allowed to teach the truths about slavery (which Trump has outlawed)?
1 Reply
Ellen commented 3 hours ago
E
Ellen
Or3h ago
@Paul-A it’s a bait and switch. He gives a little more money to Black schools while funneling the bulk of the money to ultra right Christian charter schools. Bet Catholic schools also make out like bandits (Supreme Court buttering up)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/15/opinion/charlie-kirk-ezra-klein-politics.html
Opinion
letters
by Sarah Mervosh and Michael C. Bender
September 15, 2025
New York Times
The Trump administration on Monday announced that it would inject nearly $500 million into historically Black colleges and tribal universities, a windfall funded largely by cuts to programs elsewhere for minority students.
The administration will also redirect money to other political priorities for President Trump, including an extra $137 million for American history and civics education and $60 million more for charter schools.
The increases follow a White House request for a 15 percent budget cut to the Education Department next year, as President Trump seeks support to permanently shutter the agency. History programs will now receive about seven times their expected funding for this year, and charter schools will see a 13 percent increase.
To pay for the changes, the administration cut money from other parts of the education budget The details of the changes were described by three people familiar with the department’s plans who insisted on anonymity to speak about private discussions.
The biggest cut, announced by the department last week, is a $350 million hit to programs that support minority students in science and engineering programs, schools with significant Hispanic enrollment, and other federal grants at minority-serving institutions.
The administration also cut money from gifted and talented programs, which it said use racial targeting in recruitment in some cases, and from magnet schools, which have been used as a tool for combating school segregation.
In a statement announcing the new funding for Mr. Trump’s political priorities, the secretary of education, Linda McMahon, said that the department was “redirecting financial support away from ineffective and discriminatory programs toward those which support student success.”
Sign up for the Race/Related Newsletter Join a deep and provocative exploration of race, identity and society with New York Times journalists. Get it sent to your inbox.
President Trump has routinely sought to align himself with historically Black colleges and universities as a way to earn good will from Black voters, who have long been skeptical of his leadership.
In his first term, Mr. Trump secured more than $250 million in annual funding and canceled repayment of more than $300 million in federal relief loans for the schools. In April, he signed an executive order that created a job in the White House to oversee a new “Initiative on Historically Black Colleges and Universities,” although that position remains unfilled.
At the same time, the president has repeatedly minimized the history of Black people in the United States, including last month when he complained that the Smithsonian museums focus too much on “how bad slavery was.”
Traditionally, the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights has focused a major part of its legal workload on complaints of racial discrimination. Under the Trump administration, the office has prioritized accusations of discrimination against white students and pared back protections for transgender students. New discipline guidance from the White House instructs schools not to consider racial disparities, focusing solely on the behavior of students.
The halt of $350 million in federal funding last week targeted seven grants for minority-serving institutions, which are colleges with significant minority student enrollment. The Trump administration eliminated the funding, saying that programs with racial quotas were inherently racist and violated civil rights law.
Instead, that money will be put toward historically Black colleges and universities, which were created to educate Black students at a time when other colleges would not serve them, and are open to students of all races. These institutions will receive $1.34 billion this year, 48 percent more than was budgeted, according to the department.
Lodriguez Murray, a senior vice president at UNCF, previously the United Negro College Fund, said the extra money is a “godsend” for H.B.C.U.s. They have been underfunded since their inception, he said, and about 70 percent of their students come from low-income families.
“We welcome the additional resources,” he said, adding that he believed the money could be substantial enough to make a difference on campuses, even if it is a one-time boost.
Marybeth Gasman, the executive director of the Rutgers Center for Minority Serving Institutions, said that new spending should not come at the expense of programs aimed at supporting Black and Hispanic students at other schools. She said minority-serving institutions educate more than half of all students of color, and she urged Congress to push back against the executive branch’s unilateral attempt to allocate money.
“None of these institutions should be pitted against each other, which seems to be what the Trump administration is doing,” said Ms. Gasman, the associate dean for research in the Rutgers Graduate School of Education.
Tribal colleges, which are typically controlled and operated by Native American tribes and receive federal support, will also get about $108 million this year, double their expected allotment from the Education Department, federal officials said.
Tribal colleges also receive money through the Department of the Interior, funding that the Trump administration had proposed cutting earlier this year, though lawmakers on Capitol Hill have resisted.
The Education Department is muscling the money into Mr. Trump’s agenda, with two weeks to go before the fiscal year expires on Sept. 30, taking advantage of what is essentially a loophole created by the ongoing partisan standoff in Washington. The changes are a one-time infusion and apply only to this year’s funding.
The money for history and civics education will go to a pet project of Mr. Trump, who bemoaned on the campaign trail last year what he viewed in American schools as a lack of national pride. He vowed to find a way to “certify teachers who embrace patriotic values, support our way of life.”
As president, he has threatened to strip funding from schools that stray from themes of “patriotic education.” Now, the federal government will spend $160 million on American history and civics education this year, up from $23 million that Congress had authorized.
The money will pay for teachers’ training ahead of the 250th anniversary of the country’s founding next year. The program will put an emphasis on primary documents from the era of the founding fathers, an idea popular in conservative circles.
The money will primarily come from a nearly $140 million cut to teacher training programs that federal officials say were promoting racially “divisive ideology” in the classroom.
Charter schools have also long been a key piece of Mr. Trump’s education policy, which emphasizes giving parents more choice.
The first official school visit by Linda McMahon, the education secretary, was to Vertex Partnership Academies, a charter school in the Bronx. Mr. Trump is also seeking an increase for charter schools through his budget request for next year.
Charters — publicly funded but privately run schools — will have $500 million to spend this year, up from the $440 million that federal lawmakers had approved.
To pay for the new money for charter schools, the administration cut $15 million from magnet schools, $9 million from gifted and talented programs, and $31 million from Ready to Learn, which funded PBS shows for young children.
Congress typically controls how federal money is spent. But without enough support to approve an annual spending bill, Congress has instead relied on stopgap measures to keep the government open. These temporary measures ensure that funding levels are maintained at existing levels but, unlike regular spending bills, do not specify how that money should be spent.
Many Democrats opposed the most recent stopgap measure in March, warning that the lack of explicit directions would essentially create slush funds for the White House.
Now, six months later, the administration is seizing the moment, using flexibility allowed by the stopgap to redirect money toward Mr. Trump’s priorities.
Sarah Mervosh covers education for The Times, focusing on K-12 schools.
Michael C. Bender is a Times correspondent in Washington.
See more on: Education Department (US), Donald Trump
COMMENTS SECTION
New York Times
J
Joe.Gould
LES3h ago
Taking money from minority students at non-HBCU institutions of higher education & giving it to them if they are enrolled at an HBCU institution looks like an effort to segregate minority students….
Jean commented 3 hours ago
Jean
Holland, OH
3h ago
Baffling & convoluted mix of contradictions.
JN commented 3 hours ago
J
JN
NY3h ago
It looks like a Trojan Horse.
Blue Witch commented 3 hours ago
B
Blue Witch
Washington State3h ago
I applaud any extra funding for universities and colleges that primarily serve Black people and Native Americans. But since the money was clawed away from programs supporting minority students at institutions catering to a mixed student body, this looks suspiciously like the re-segregation of higher ed. And I find that thought deeply disquieting.
JB commented 3 hours ago
J
JB
Walnut Creek3h ago
It would seem that the award of funds to programs whose admission criteria is primarily or solely based on race is prima facie illegal discrimination and should never been instituted. The linked article specifically said that there would be no more of this but rather repurposing the funds to equivalent programs aimed at needs based criteria.
Paul-A commented 3 hours ago
P
Paul-A
St. Lawrence, NY3h ago
I'm confused by this action, because it seems to run against Trump's life-long track record of disdain for Black people. And are HBCU allowed to teach the truths about slavery (which Trump has outlawed)?
1 Reply
Ellen commented 3 hours ago
E
Ellen
Or3h ago
@Paul-A it’s a bait and switch. He gives a little more money to Black schools while funneling the bulk of the money to ultra right Christian charter schools. Bet Catholic schools also make out like bandits (Supreme Court buttering up)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/15/opinion/charlie-kirk-ezra-klein-politics.html
Opinion
letters
Charlie Kirk and the ‘Right Way’ to Practice Politics
September 15, 2025
New York Times
Credit: Cheney Orr/Reuters
To the Editor:
Re “Kirk Was Practicing Politics the Right Way,”
by Ezra Klein (column, Sept. 13):
Mr. Klein is wrong in his claims that Charlie Kirk practiced politics “in exactly the right way” and that he and Mr. Kirk were on the “same side of the continued possibility of American politics.”
Charlie Kirk dealt almost exclusively in bad-faith arguments, distorting facts and bringing up the irrelevant, often employing rhetorical tactics to verbally and emotionally dominate his opponent.
The “right way” to do politics is not to say horrid things for shock value, as Mr. Kirk was known to do.
Mr. Klein is also wrong to ignore the detrimental influence of Mr. Kirk’s organization, Turning Point USA, one that has employed “edgy” politics and demeaning tactics to attract legions of young people to its cause. In what world is this the “right way” to do politics?
No one deserves to be murdered. Nor does anyone deserve to be lionized for fomenting hatred toward others and seeking to dominate and humiliate his opponents.
Ethan Feingold
Chicago
To the Editor:
Ezra Klein argues that Charlie Kirk did politics the right way, regardless of his views. Mr. Klein thus separates political practice from its content. That is both unwise and dangerous.
Mr. Kirk was critical of civil rights. He was against L.G.B.T.Q. rights. He consistently vilified marginalized people. What does it mean to attack these groups in the “right” way?
Does open dialogue now render any speech a societal good? Speech should not be policed. True. But not all speech done freely is good for the country.
Mr. Klein’s focus on free speech done “right” rests on the false notion that maintaining civil discourse sufficiently prevents violence. But this ignores the violence latent in Mr. Kirk’s content.
Free speech can be used for good or ill. An effective exercise of that right does not ensure its benefit. Mr. Klein confuses the two. When used to harmful ends, it should never be lionized, regardless of its civility.
No one should be gunned down for their views. But Mr. Kirk’s death does not mark the loss of a society-advancing speaker.
Jed Forman
Des Moines
The writer is an assistant professor in Buddhist studies at Simpson College, Indianola.
To the Editor:
The organization Charlie Kirk founded, Turning Point USA, hosts a “Professor Watchlist.” I was placed on this list in 2022, when I was a writer of a guest essay in The Times’s Opinion section.
The list was Mr. Kirk’s attempt to intimidate college professors like me from speaking out publicly about the issues we care about. Its goal was to goad people to harass the professors on this list.
Mr. Kirk and his list did not intimidate me. It helps that I have tenure in the supportive environment of Smith College. But many of my colleagues hesitate to speak or write publicly because of the tactics used by Mr. Kirk and those he inspired. This list has led to doxxing, harassment and threats against many faculty members.
This is not “practicing politics the right way.”
Carrie N. Baker
Northampton, Mass.
The writer is a professor and the chair of the Program for the Study of Women, Gender and Sexuality at Smith College.
*[The following remarks are taken from the ‘Comments section’ of the NY Times following the publication of today’s article “Trump Redirects Millions to Historically Black Colleges, Charter Schools” by Sarah Mervosh and Michael C. Bender, September 15, 2025]
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/15/us/hbcus-trump-administration-funding.html
Comments 429
New York Times
T Nelson commented 3 hours ago
T
T Nelson
Maine3h ago
So, bring back “separate but equal “?
CrystalClear commented 3 hours ago
C
CrystalClear
US3h ago
Looks a lot like the Trump Administration is seeking to re-segregate higher ed again -- "separate but equal" comes to mind...
Patrick Henry commented 3 hours ago
P
Patrick Henry
Virginia3h ago
Is this the start of separate-but-equal?
Notsolongago commented 3 hours ago
N
Notsolongago
Miami, FL3h ago
I hope that this attempt at buying the votes of Black voters will not blind folks to the reality that the Republican party is a White racial identity party with administration officials (and by proxy people such as Charlie Kirk) that the Southern Poverty Law Center has demonstrated deploy white supremacist rhetoric, spread anti Black racist disinformation, and have been directly tracked to white supremacist networks. The BASE of the Republican party are White Christian nationalist southerners attending predominantly white churches, and espousing white neo-confederate ideology. Is this really what HBCUs would like to empower and support?
Tim Lynch commented 3 hours ago
T
Tim Lynch
Philadelphia, PA3h ago
The shell game continues.
Karen commented 3 hours ago
K
Karen
Southwest Virginia3h ago
Call me skeptical but what's the catch? You know there will be a catch. I'd bet the Trump regime will then say which history these colleges are allowed to teach. It'll be "you took our money, now teach what I tell you." I also see it as an attempt to "make" Blacks and Native Americans attend only their own colleges. Segregation basically.
Huh?
Ny3h ago
“…The Trump administration eliminated the funding, saying that programs with racial quotas were inherently racist and violated civil rights law…”
Mom on Hayward Fault commented 3 hours ago
M
Mom on Hayward Fault
Calif3h ago
How to fund “separate but equal.”
Paul from Oakland commented 3 hours ago
P
Paul from Oakland
SF Bay Area3h ago
This is a rather obvious effort at segregation: Financially support historical Black colleges by taking away the hundreds of millions that other universities have historically received to ensure diversity in their student bodies.
CR commented 3 hours ago
C
CR
CO3h ago
Separate but equal, of course.
Ernest commented 3 hours ago
E
Ernest
Nashville3h ago
To quote a phrase from back in the day, Don’t Believe The Hype. It’s a set up.
JeanieDiva commented 3 hours ago
J
JeanieDiva
NYC3h ago
So when are we going to admit, in print and elsewhere, that the christian nationalists have taken over the Federal government? When is it going to be stated, clearly and with passion, that we are now living in a dictatorship? Who is calling to call out what is happening without softening it? Those who do say something are often punished. The millions and millions of people who think we should follow the manifesto of Project 2025 are happy. They are backed by numerous multi-millionaires who have been organizing their ideology for decades. The MSM has not been forthcoming about the push by the Southern Baptist Convention supporting these goals and the Seven Mountains idea. Every single American should seriously wake up to the FACT that we are promoting white supremacy, and hatred of all kinds. Emperor Trump is doing very well fiddling while the country burns. His enablers know exactly how to manipulate him but he is still "the President" and treated as if he were just another man in the job. He's not. Jamelle Bouie's newsletter today says it all.
Carmelita commented 3 hours ago
C
Carmelita
Miami3h ago
I feel like I’m in an alternative universe. As a product of an HBCU and knowing that, although 3% of colleges, they’re responsible for over 70% of Black teachers, doctors, and lawyers makes me proud. Having been historically and currently underfunded, is this the way to reparations? I’m wary about this.
Mark commented 3 hours ago
M
Mark
Mr. Klein is wrong in his claims that Charlie Kirk practiced politics “in exactly the right way” and that he and Mr. Kirk were on the “same side of the continued possibility of American politics.”
Charlie Kirk dealt almost exclusively in bad-faith arguments, distorting facts and bringing up the irrelevant, often employing rhetorical tactics to verbally and emotionally dominate his opponent.
The “right way” to do politics is not to say horrid things for shock value, as Mr. Kirk was known to do.
Mr. Klein is also wrong to ignore the detrimental influence of Mr. Kirk’s organization, Turning Point USA, one that has employed “edgy” politics and demeaning tactics to attract legions of young people to its cause. In what world is this the “right way” to do politics?
No one deserves to be murdered. Nor does anyone deserve to be lionized for fomenting hatred toward others and seeking to dominate and humiliate his opponents.
Ethan Feingold
Chicago
To the Editor:
Ezra Klein argues that Charlie Kirk did politics the right way, regardless of his views. Mr. Klein thus separates political practice from its content. That is both unwise and dangerous.
Mr. Kirk was critical of civil rights. He was against L.G.B.T.Q. rights. He consistently vilified marginalized people. What does it mean to attack these groups in the “right” way?
Does open dialogue now render any speech a societal good? Speech should not be policed. True. But not all speech done freely is good for the country.
Mr. Klein’s focus on free speech done “right” rests on the false notion that maintaining civil discourse sufficiently prevents violence. But this ignores the violence latent in Mr. Kirk’s content.
Free speech can be used for good or ill. An effective exercise of that right does not ensure its benefit. Mr. Klein confuses the two. When used to harmful ends, it should never be lionized, regardless of its civility.
No one should be gunned down for their views. But Mr. Kirk’s death does not mark the loss of a society-advancing speaker.
Jed Forman
Des Moines
The writer is an assistant professor in Buddhist studies at Simpson College, Indianola.
To the Editor:
The organization Charlie Kirk founded, Turning Point USA, hosts a “Professor Watchlist.” I was placed on this list in 2022, when I was a writer of a guest essay in The Times’s Opinion section.
The list was Mr. Kirk’s attempt to intimidate college professors like me from speaking out publicly about the issues we care about. Its goal was to goad people to harass the professors on this list.
Mr. Kirk and his list did not intimidate me. It helps that I have tenure in the supportive environment of Smith College. But many of my colleagues hesitate to speak or write publicly because of the tactics used by Mr. Kirk and those he inspired. This list has led to doxxing, harassment and threats against many faculty members.
This is not “practicing politics the right way.”
Carrie N. Baker
Northampton, Mass.
The writer is a professor and the chair of the Program for the Study of Women, Gender and Sexuality at Smith College.
*[The following remarks are taken from the ‘Comments section’ of the NY Times following the publication of today’s article “Trump Redirects Millions to Historically Black Colleges, Charter Schools” by Sarah Mervosh and Michael C. Bender, September 15, 2025]
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/15/us/hbcus-trump-administration-funding.html
Comments 429
New York Times
T Nelson commented 3 hours ago
T
T Nelson
Maine3h ago
So, bring back “separate but equal “?
CrystalClear commented 3 hours ago
C
CrystalClear
US3h ago
Looks a lot like the Trump Administration is seeking to re-segregate higher ed again -- "separate but equal" comes to mind...
Patrick Henry commented 3 hours ago
P
Patrick Henry
Virginia3h ago
Is this the start of separate-but-equal?
Notsolongago commented 3 hours ago
N
Notsolongago
Miami, FL3h ago
I hope that this attempt at buying the votes of Black voters will not blind folks to the reality that the Republican party is a White racial identity party with administration officials (and by proxy people such as Charlie Kirk) that the Southern Poverty Law Center has demonstrated deploy white supremacist rhetoric, spread anti Black racist disinformation, and have been directly tracked to white supremacist networks. The BASE of the Republican party are White Christian nationalist southerners attending predominantly white churches, and espousing white neo-confederate ideology. Is this really what HBCUs would like to empower and support?
Tim Lynch commented 3 hours ago
T
Tim Lynch
Philadelphia, PA3h ago
The shell game continues.
Karen commented 3 hours ago
K
Karen
Southwest Virginia3h ago
Call me skeptical but what's the catch? You know there will be a catch. I'd bet the Trump regime will then say which history these colleges are allowed to teach. It'll be "you took our money, now teach what I tell you." I also see it as an attempt to "make" Blacks and Native Americans attend only their own colleges. Segregation basically.
Huh?
Ny3h ago
“…The Trump administration eliminated the funding, saying that programs with racial quotas were inherently racist and violated civil rights law…”
Mom on Hayward Fault commented 3 hours ago
M
Mom on Hayward Fault
Calif3h ago
How to fund “separate but equal.”
Paul from Oakland commented 3 hours ago
P
Paul from Oakland
SF Bay Area3h ago
This is a rather obvious effort at segregation: Financially support historical Black colleges by taking away the hundreds of millions that other universities have historically received to ensure diversity in their student bodies.
CR commented 3 hours ago
C
CR
CO3h ago
Separate but equal, of course.
Ernest commented 3 hours ago
E
Ernest
Nashville3h ago
To quote a phrase from back in the day, Don’t Believe The Hype. It’s a set up.
JeanieDiva commented 3 hours ago
J
JeanieDiva
NYC3h ago
So when are we going to admit, in print and elsewhere, that the christian nationalists have taken over the Federal government? When is it going to be stated, clearly and with passion, that we are now living in a dictatorship? Who is calling to call out what is happening without softening it? Those who do say something are often punished. The millions and millions of people who think we should follow the manifesto of Project 2025 are happy. They are backed by numerous multi-millionaires who have been organizing their ideology for decades. The MSM has not been forthcoming about the push by the Southern Baptist Convention supporting these goals and the Seven Mountains idea. Every single American should seriously wake up to the FACT that we are promoting white supremacy, and hatred of all kinds. Emperor Trump is doing very well fiddling while the country burns. His enablers know exactly how to manipulate him but he is still "the President" and treated as if he were just another man in the job. He's not. Jamelle Bouie's newsletter today says it all.
Carmelita commented 3 hours ago
C
Carmelita
Miami3h ago
I feel like I’m in an alternative universe. As a product of an HBCU and knowing that, although 3% of colleges, they’re responsible for over 70% of Black teachers, doctors, and lawyers makes me proud. Having been historically and currently underfunded, is this the way to reparations? I’m wary about this.
Mark commented 3 hours ago
M
Mark
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