The Mechanic Behind the Machine

There is a question worth sitting with before the argument begins.

When Roy Cohn died of AIDS in 1986, disbarred, disgraced, and denied by the friend who had called him fifteen times a day, the political project he had spent his life building was nowhere near finished. The infrastructure he helped construct for Joseph McCarthy survived McCarthy by thirty years. The playbook he handed to a young Queens real estate developer named Donald Trump has now become the operating manual for American governance. And the institutional apparatus Cohn spent decades building, including the legal precedents, the enforcement culture, and the normalized use of state power against designated enemies is still running, upgraded for the present moment by a forty-year-old former Senate staffer from Santa Monica who understands it more completely than anyone else in Washington.

His name is Stephen Miller. And to understand what he is and what he is building, you need to understand Roy Cohn first.

Part One: The Original Triad

The story most people know goes like this: Joseph McCarthy, the hard-drinking senator from Wisconsin, launched a Red Scare that destroyed careers and terrorized a generation, until Edward R. Murrow and the Army-McCarthy hearings brought him down. End of story.

The story that matters goes differently.

McCarthy was not primarily an ideologist. He was a performer; a man with tremendous political instinct for fear and a gift for the kind of aggressive, consequence-free accusation that makes cautious people freeze. He was useful as a vehicle. He was not, by himself, capable of building anything that lasted.

Roy Cohn built the things that lasted.

When the Rosenberg espionage trial brought the twenty-four-year-old Cohn to the attention of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, Cohn immediately understood the opportunity. With Hoover’s patronage and Cardinal Spellman’s blessing, he became McCarthy’s chief counsel, beating out Robert F. Kennedy for the job. From that position he did two things simultaneously: he gave McCarthy’s instincts an institutional and legal architecture he could not have developed on his own, and he built a private relationship with Hoover that gave him access to the full surveillance power of the federal government.

The arrangement was elegant and deeply corrupt. McCarthy had the platform and the public menace. Hoover had the files and the institutional permanence. Cohn was the bridge. He was the man who made himself useful to both, who translated the senator’s political aggression into investigative procedures, who fed Hoover’s adversaries into the media machinery, and who accumulated, in the process, enough leverage over enough powerful people to make himself effectively untouchable.

Historian Christopher Elias, in his study of the three men, identifies what he calls “surveillance state masculinity” - the political style that Hoover, McCarthy, and Cohn collectively invented and perfected: aggressive, unapologetic, operating through insinuation and coded threat, and using the tools of gossip and innuendo to destroy enemies while claiming to defend national security. The tactics were the hallmarks of the tabloid industry elevated to state power: guilt by association, manipulated photographs, whisper campaigns, and the strategic deployment of fear.

It worked. And it survived all three of them.

When McCarthy died in 1957, the project continued. When Hoover died in 1972, the institutional culture he had built continued. And when Cohn spent the following decade mentoring a young real estate developer, teaching him that attack is always better than defense, that loyalty runs one direction, that the purpose of the legal system is to be weaponized against your enemies rather than to constrain your own behavior, he handed the playbook forward one more generation.

That developer was Donald Trump. And the man who received the playbook from Trump, who has spent nearly a decade upgrading it into a functioning machinery of authoritarian governance, is Stephen Miller.

Part Two: The Mechanic

Like McCarthy, Trump is fundamentally a performer with powerful political instincts and no deep ideological commitments. He discovered that fear and aggression work, that the rules apply to other people, and that a sufficiently bold accusation, repeated often enough, becomes its own kind of truth. He is the vehicle. He is not the architect.

Miller is the architect. He has been the ideological constant in an administration defined by turnover and opportunism. While figures like J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio evolved their positions to align with Trump’s political needs, Miller arrived fully formed. His views on immigration, on the uses of executive power, on the irrelevance of judicial oversight, and on the fundamental premise that the nation belongs to some Americans and not others - these have not changed since he was writing opinion columns at Duke University, and since he was working for Jeff Sessions, and since he was a twenty-year-old calling immigration a threat to Western civilization.

Where Trump provides the political instinct and the public performance, Miller provides what one recent profile described as “an intellectual framework and policy understanding and philosophy of views that Trump sort of intuited, but might not have originally been able to articulate.” This is almost word for word what historians say about Cohn’s relationship with McCarthy. The politician had the instinct. The mechanic built the machine.

Miller has described his job as taking what President Trump wants to do and executing it ruthlessly and urgently. There are areas, colleagues report, where Miller is far more extreme than even Trump himself. Once Trump decides something, Miller doesn’t try to quietly undermine him, he executes. This is exactly what Cohn did for McCarthy.

And the machine Miller has built is formidable.

In his official capacity as deputy chief of staff for policy, he meets daily with Trump and the chief of staff to review executive orders and set the day’s agenda. He has his hands in immigration, homeland security, law enforcement, foreign policy, trade, and the administration’s war on higher education. He oversees teams writing initial executive orders, briefs lawmakers on Capitol Hill, and serves as the liaison between the White House and the agencies implementing policy.

But his power does not end at the White House gate. He founded America First Legal, an outside litigation organization designed to advance the same agenda through the courts on a parallel track. He was a central figure in the development of Project 2025’s policy architecture - the blueprint for systematic transformation of the federal government prepared before the 2024 election and implemented the morning after it. He has, in short, done what Cohn did: built infrastructure that exists both inside and outside the formal government, so that the project can survive any particular political moment.

This is the point most commentary on Miller misses. He is not merely executing Trump’s agenda. He is constructing the institutional apparatus, including the legal precedents, the agency cultures, the enforcement infrastructure, and the outside organizations that will remain when Trump is gone. He is building for what comes after.

In the original triad, Trump is McCarthy. Miller is Cohn. And the Hoover, the permanent institutional power that will outlast both of them, is the apparatus Miller is currently building.

Part Three: The Playbook Is Identical

What Hoover, McCarthy, and Cohn built in the 1950s was not primarily an anti-communist operation. That was the stated justification just as the War on Drugs was the stated justification for building the carceral infrastructure of the following decades. What they actually built was a template for the domestic use of state power against designated enemies, normalized through repetition, constitutionally seasoned through court challenges that they mostly won, and available for reuse against any future population that power decided to target.

The template has five elements. Every one of them is visible in Miller’s operation today.

1. The enemy within. Authoritarian consolidation requires a domestic population framed not as a policy problem but as an existential threat - an enemy to be defeated rather than a community to be governed. For McCarthy and Cohn it was communists and homosexuals. For Miller it is immigrants, trans people, and the academic and cultural institutions he describes as the infrastructure of liberal indoctrination. The specific target matters less than the function it serves: generating the fear that justifies emergency measures and suspends the normal rules of democratic accountability.

2. The infrastructure of coercion. Cohn and Hoover built dossiers. They accumulated compromising information about enemies and potential allies alike. The purpose was not primarily blackmail. It was the creation of a climate in which people could not be sure what was known about them, and therefore could not be sure they were safe to resist. Miller’s equivalent is the data infrastructure of immigration enforcement. The databases, the facial recognition systems, the information-sharing arrangements between federal agencies and local law enforcement that creates a population living under constant surveillance, uncertain of their status, and unable to generate effective political resistance.

3. Prosecutorial weaponization. Cohn’s great innovation was understanding that you don’t need to win in court to destroy someone. Instead you need to make them afraid of the process. The investigation, the subpoena, the threat of charges: these are the weapons, not the conviction. Miller has been explicit about the equivalent. He has publicly declared that habeas corpus can be suspended when the administration decides it is necessary. He has directed the Attorney General toward election officials who provide ballots to voters the administration disputes. The legal machinery is being pointed at political opponents as deliberately as Cohn ever pointed it at suspected communists.

4. The permanently marginalized population. McCarthy and Cohn’s project was most effective on populations that anti-communism had already isolated from majority solidarity. The War on Drugs extended this logic to Black and brown communities, building the carceral infrastructure on bodies that generated insufficient coalition resistance to stop it. Miller’s project begins with undocumented immigrants - the population with the least legal standing - and is explicitly designed to expand as the infrastructure is normalized. This is not conjecture. It is the operational logic of every authoritarian consolidation project in history. You start with the population least able to resist. You build the tools. You expand.

5. The permanence project. This is what most distinguishes the mechanic from the vehicle and what most directly echoes Cohn. McCarthy was not building for the long term. He was riding a wave, and he rode it until it crashed. Cohn was always building for the long term: the legal precedents, the institutional cultures, and the playbook handed forward to the next generation. Miller has said clearly that he views the current moment as the opportunity to make changes that cannot be undone. The executive orders are designed to establish precedents. The agency transformations are designed to create cultures that will resist normalization. America First Legal is designed to continue the legal warfare regardless of who holds the White House.

Roy Cohn would have recognized the ambition. He spent his career making changes he intended to be permanent. Many of them were.

Part Four: Why This Matters

The conventional way to discuss Stephen Miller is as an extremist - someone whose views are beyond the pale, whose influence represents a betrayal of American values, whose power should be checked by the normal mechanisms of democratic accountability. This framing is accurate and insufficient.

What Miller represents is not primarily an ideological problem, though his ideology is genuinely dangerous. He represents a structural problem: the construction, using legitimate state authority and normalized legal precedents, of an apparatus of coercion that will be available to whoever controls the executive branch for as long as it exists.

Hoover’s FBI did not end with Hoover. It required decades of reform efforts, several major scandals, and significant legislative action, and it was never fully dismantled. The infrastructure Cohn helped build for the surveillance state persisted through administrations of both parties. The carceral infrastructure built through the War on Drugs - which drew directly on the Hoover-Cohn template - is still running fifty years later.

The question is not whether Miller’s specific policy preferences will survive the current political moment. The question is whether the institutional infrastructure he is building will survive, and what it will be used for when it is inherited by whoever comes next. That is the Cohn question, and it is the most important one.

Cohn is remembered primarily as McCarthy’s creature - the villain of a specific era, buried with that era when McCarthy fell. The richer and more disturbing truth is that Cohn’s most consequential work came after McCarthy. It came in the decades of building, connecting, normalizing, and handing forward. It came in the thirty-year project that produced Donald Trump. It is still coming, in the administration that Trump’s presidency made possible, in the man who is currently doing what Cohn did but with more formal power, more institutional access, and a more sophisticated understanding of how to make the changes permanent.

McCarthy died in disgrace. Cohn died disbarred. The project they built is still running.

That is the lesson. That is what we are facing. And that is why the question of Stephen Miller is not primarily about Stephen Miller, it is about the infrastructure he is building, the precedents he is setting, and the apparatus that will remain when this particular political moment has passed.

Cohn built for fifty years. Miller is building for longer.

The Name That Was Asked For

There is a scene in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, to me the most important American play of the last fifty years, in which Roy Cohn, dying of AIDS, insists that he is not a homosexual. He is, he says, a heterosexual man who happens to have sex with men. The distinction is not about sex. It is about power. “A heterosexual man,” Cohn says, “is a man who in fifteen years of trying has never been able to get a pissant antidiscrimination bill through the city council. A homosexual is a man who knows nobody and who nobody knows. Who has zero clout.”

Cohn understood, before almost anyone else in American politics, that the categories are not about identity. They are about power. What you call yourself is less important than what you can make happen, what you can prevent from happening, and who you can hurt if you need to.

Miller understands this too. He has said, in the language of his moment, that we live in a world “governed by strength, governed by force, governed by power.” He did not invent that understanding. He inherited it, through Trump, from the man who spent decades teaching it.

The question Cohn’s ghost keeps asking, and the question Trump spent years demanding an answer to, is: Where’s my Roy Cohn?

He has been found.