Stephen Miller Says ‘Quiet Part Out Loud,’ Claims Trump Has Unlimited ‘Plenary Authority’ Before Going Silent in Interview

White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller appeared to slip up in an interview Monday, admitting that he believes President Donald Trump possesses the authority of a dictator.

Miller, who has made himself the face of the Trump administration's efforts to crush political dissent, made the comments while appearing on CNN to defend the president's deployment of troops to Portland and Chicago, which have run into roadblocks from federal courts.

The anchor, Boris Sanchez, asked Miller about a ruling by US District Judge Karin Immergut on Saturday that the president had no legal or factual basis to commandeer the Oregon National Guard and deploy the forces in Portland against protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Over the weekend, Miller had referred to the ruling as a "legal insurrection," adding that "the president is the commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces, not an Oregon judge."

Given Miller's comments, Sanchez asked, "Does the administration still plan to abide by that court ruling?"

Miller responded: “Well, the administration filed an appeal this morning with the 9th Circuit. I would note the administration won an identical case, in the 9th Circuit, just a few months ago, with respect to the federalizing of the California National Guard. Under title 10 of the US Code, the president has plenary authority, has…”

Miller then suddenly stopped speaking.

"Stephen? Stephen? Hey, Stephen, can you hear me?" Sanchez asked as Miller sat, wordlessly, his eyes blinking and darting around.

Sanchez then apologized, saying, "It seems like we're having a technical issue," before cutting to a break.

The recording of the interview reveals that there was not, in fact, a "technical issue." Miller had appeared to cut himself off in the middle of his sentence before sitting motionless for approximately 15 seconds.

In a post with over 32,000 likes, one social media user speculated that it was because Miller had "said the quiet part out loud," adding, "The plan wasn't to be made public. Clearly, someone hit the panic button in his earpiece."

After returning from the commercial, the interview continued. But the oddly specific phrase "plenary authority" was not invoked again. As the same user noted, the interview appears on CNN's YouTube channel, but has mysteriously been edited to remove Miller's mention of "plenary authority."

According to Cornell University's Legal Information Institute, "plenary authority" refers to “power that is wide-ranging, broadly construed, and often limitless for all practical purposes.”

The law Miller cited, Title 10 of the US Code, states the three conditions under which the president may deploy a state's National Guard: if there is a military invasion by a foreign power, if there is a rebellion against the US government or the danger of one, or if the president is “unable with the regular forces” to execute US laws.

The phrase "plenary authority" does not appear anywhere in the code. But as Huffington Post reporter Sara Boboltz explained, "Miller appeared to mean that the president has total control over everything the military does, even though he shares some of that power with Congress."

Though Trump has asserted that Portland is "war-ravaged" to justify his use of military force, Immergut—a Trump appointee—shot this characterization down in her ruling as "untethered to facts," as there was “substantial evidence that the protests at the Portland ICE facility were not significantly violent or disruptive in the days—or even weeks—leading up to the president’s directive.”

But Miller's invocation of the phrase "plenary authority" in this context seems to imply that Trump alone is the judge of what situations warrant the use of the most extreme emergency powers.

"Trump just threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act if governors and judges act lawfully within the constitutional system in ways that displease him," said New Republic writer Greg Sargent on social media. "Miller's statements show their real position: Trump's power to invent pretexts for emergency actions is limitless."

Sargent described this theory in more detail in a piece published Wednesday: "Miller is working overtime to polarize the public debate about Trump’s increasingly dictatorial abuses of power. And he’s doing so quite consciously. He relentlessly depicts Democrats as allied with a vast, inchoate class of violent criminals and insurrectionists operating in every shadow of American life."

Trump's deployments of troops to US cities are decisively unpopular. A CBS survey published Sunday found that 58% of Americans oppose Trump’s National Guard deployments.

But Sargent argued that "Miller plainly believes there’s a latent majority out in the country that can be sleepwalked into authoritarianism," in part due to the muted response from many top Democrats.

With the exceptions of California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker—the latter of whom Trump stated should be arrested on Wednesday along with Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson—Sargent says that many of the opposition party's leaders have declined to confront Trump's narratives of urban anarchy head-on, seeing them as a "trap" to lure them into "a losing debate about crime."

One Democratic strategist recently told Politico that “just like with immigration, Trump has found another issue where the Democratic Party is on a back foot“ and repeated false claims that crime is rampant in the nation’s large cities; in fact, violent crime is on the decline in the major cities the president has targeted, with particularly stark drops in Portland.

"Do Democrats, broadly speaking, have a theory of this moment that’s consciously matched to MAGA’s authoritarian politics? They need one," Sargent said. "Because guess who does have a theory of the moment? Miller does. And he’s amassing unprecedented power to put it into practice as we speak."