On Tuesday, American voters sent Stephen Miller back to the factory.

Miller’s name was on no ballot. But his work was everywhere. The masked vans, the quota, the arrest at the mandatory check-in, the five-year-old in the slammer. All the world could see that under Trump’s henchman Miller, a young kid in a bunny hat had somehow become the new enemy of the republic. Voters looked at it and said no. In droves. Anywhere else, that would be a repudiation.

Democrats took the Senate, flipping seven seats for a 54-44 majority with two races still to call. In the House they were on track for their biggest majority since 2008.

Immigration was not the only charge. Voters were angry about prices, tariffs, corruption and the war in Iran. But immigration was where the cruelty showed.

Nearly six in 10 voters told exit pollsters the crackdown had gone too far. Six in 10 disapproved of ICE.

In Maine, Susan Collins lost to Troy Jackson. One Biddeford voter told The Boston Globe immigration was largely why. In Houston, Minneapolis and Biddeford, hundreds of people pressed their “I Voted” stickers on to memorials for people killed by ICE.

Alex Pretti. Renée Good. Lorenzo Salgado Araujo. Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero.

A sticker on a shrine. That is what a referendum looks like when the dead can’t vote.

On Friday, Donald Trump made Stephen Miller his chief of staff, replacing Susie Wiles. In a Truth Social post he called Miller one of his “most trusted” advisers. Three weeks earlier, asked on Newsmax whether he trusted Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump had said:

“I don’t trust anybody, honestly. In the world of politics, I don’t trust anybody.“

Every shopper knows the move. The washing powder fails. Sales slump. But nobody touches the formula. They change the box. New. Improved. Now with added enzymes.

America asked for less Miller. It is getting the extra-large, economy, family size, concentrated. Now!

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin put the relaunch in a three-word jingle: “Deportations will continue.” JD Vance said he was open to changing enforcement but would not wear amnesty, as if those were the only two settings on the machine. As if his president hasn’t been generous with other pardons. It is the false dilemma, a fallacy old enough to draw a pension, and it has one job. Keep the machine running.

The machine has a quota. In May last year Miller went on Fox to brag to Sean Hannity, the network’s shrillest shill.

“Under President Trump’s leadership, we are looking to set a goal of a minimum of 3,000 arrests for ICE every day.” That was ten times the daily arrest rate under Biden.

He told agents, according to The Guardian, to “turn the creative knob up to 11“. One official recalled Miller’s frustration with agents who were chasing criminals: “Why aren’t you at Home Depot?“

Three thousand a day.

Not a policy. A sales target. Somewhere in Washington a whiteboard counts human beings the way a car yard counts units shifted, and the man who drew it up now runs the building.

ICE has never hit its quota. Arrests fell nearly 20 percent between June and July last year. But hitting it was never the point. An impossible target keeps the racist base geed up, and it never runs out. It goes looking for easier prey: the father at the check-in, the kid on the way to work.

In Chelsea, Massachusetts, a recent high school graduate was taken on his way to work. Gladys Vega of La Colaborativa calls part of the city a “ghost town”. Her volunteers now walk students home from the high school. “Our young people are a mess,” she says.

In Providence, ICE detained a father who had been filmed last month surrounded by agents while holding his children.

Three thousand a day.

Trump has always had the words for this, however much he struggles with an autocue. In January 2018, in the Oval Office, he asked lawmakers: “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” He meant Haiti, El Salvador and Africa. He wanted more people from places like Norway.

In September last year he turned a version of the word on his own country. “Chicago is a hellhole right now. Baltimore is a hellhole right now.” Then he sent in the National Guard.

Miller has his own lexicon. Election day 2024? “Illegals are raping and murdering American children.” He wants “a moratorium on immigration from third world countries until we can heal ourselves as a nation.”

Heal ourselves. From what? He does not always say. Norway is a clue. But any fool can hear the racism.

Last December he went further, to Will Cain on Fox News. “Not only is the first generation unsuccessful,” Miller explained. Somalia was his “clear example”. “You see persistent issues in every subsequent generation”: “consistent high rates of welfare use, consistent high rates of criminal activity, consistent failures to assimilate.”

Every subsequent generation. Let us test the theory on a family close to home.

On 7 January 1903, a man called Wolf-Leib Glosser stepped onto Ellis Island from Antopol, a shtetl in the marshes of what is now Belarus. Its own Jews called it Mud. Pogroms, epidemics and emigration kept it small. He had $8 to his name. He spoke Polish, Russian and Yiddish, and no English. He started as a peddler and worked in sweatshops. In time he owned a haberdashery in Johnstown, Pennsylvania.

Wolf-Leib Glosser was Stephen Miller’s great-great-grandfather. Later the family firm grew big enough to list on the American Stock Exchange. Four generations on, the family has produced a White House chief of staff.

Miller’s uncle, the neuropsychologist David Glosser, wrote it up in Politico in 2018. “If my nephew’s ideas on immigration had been in force a century ago,” he wrote, “our family would have been wiped out.”

Those who stayed got Stalin in 1939 and Hitler in 1941. Of the 2,000 Jews who remained in Antopol, the Nazis murdered all but seven.

In November 1988, Ronald Reagan passed on a line from a letter he said he got. “You can go to live in France, but you can’t become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany, but you can’t become a German. But anyone, from any corner of the world, can come to live in the United States and become an American.”

Reagan’s party has gifted the White House to a descendant of Antopol who wants to slam the door behind him.

And the President? He has other things on his mind.

Every ruler who mistakes himself for a nation needs a monument. Nero cleared a swathe of Rome after the fire of 64 AD and built himself a Golden House, with a colossal statue of himself out the front. Trump, a legend in his own reflection, has had to make do with Washington.

He knocked down the East Wing to build a ballroom. He has a helipad coming for the South Lawn. He has gilded the Oval Office down to the cherubs in the door frames. Of course, he has to show off his expertise for this job.

“You’ve never been able to match gold with gold paint,” he explained, “that’s why it’s gold.” Genius.

Naturally he wants a triumphal arch, 250 feet of granite near the Arlington Memorial Bridge, topped with three golden statues. A reporter asked him who it was for. “Me.”

Then the arch went to war. At “the strong request of the United States Military”, Trump announced, it would become “a top grade Military Complex/Triumphal Arch“, fitted for drones, snipers and ammunition.

The vanity and the violence were always the same project.

Operation Epic Fury began on 28 February. Pete Hegseth, Secretary of War, called it “the most lethal, most complex and most precise aerial operation in history.”

That first morning a strike hit the Shajareh Tayyebeh Girls’ Elementary School in Minab, in southern Iran. Saturday is the first day of the Iranian school week. Classes were underway. UNICEF says 168 girls were killed.

Two days later Hegseth stood at the Pentagon lectern. “No apologies, no hesitation, epic fury.“

Two days after that: “America is winning decisively, devastatingly, and without mercy.“

By the April ceasefire, General Dan Caine was counting more than 13,000 targets struck. Hegseth said Iran had “begged” for the ceasefire, and that America had used “less than 10%” of its capabilities.

He was not reporting a war. He was launching a product. In March he had boasted that Epic Fury packed twice the power of the 2003 attack on Iraq. New. Improved. Now with added enzymes.

Thirteen thousand targets. Three thousand arrests a day. Same shop, same whiteboard. In this administration the number is the policy, and the dead are the receipts.

Now the bad news for anyone who stayed up to watch the map turn blue.

A chief of staff needs no Senate confirmation. Fifty-four senators cannot touch him.

And look who walked out as he walked in. Whether she jumped or was pushed, Trump chose her successor in the week of the rebuke. Goodbye, Susan L. Summerall Wiles, “the most feared and least known political operative in America”. We barely knew you.

Susie Wiles was no saint. She ran Trump’s 2024 campaign and covered for him in the West Wing. But she was a moderate Republican, not a MAGA zealot, and her job was to impose some discipline on his disorder. Trump called her the Ice Maiden.

She knew exactly what she was minding. Last December she told Vanity Fair that Trump has “an alcoholic’s personality” and “operates [with] a view that there’s nothing he can’t do. Nothing, zero, nothing.” She insisted she was “not an enabler.”

That was the brake. The brake has gone.

Miller brings form. At Duke he worked alongside Richard Spencer, who later boasted: “Clearly I was influencing him.” Miller denies it. In 2015 and 2016, more than 900 leaked emails show, he fed white nationalist material to Breitbart.

The president who believes there is nothing he can’t do now has a chief of staff who believes there is nothing he shouldn’t.

The money is already in the bank. Last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill gave ICE $45 billion for detention, enough on ICE’s own costings for 116,000 beds, and nearly $30 billion more for agents, transport and technology. It can spend the lot any time until 30 September 2029.

The new Congress sits in January. It can subpoena. It can hold hearings. It can sit Mullin under the lights and make him say “deportations will continue” to a committee instead of to X. That matters. A record matters.

But a hearing does not stop a van. The power of the purse arrives after the purse has been spent, by a Congress that no longer exists, on camps that will outlast the one that replaced it.

Congress keeps business hours. ICE works Saturdays.

From January, Democrats get a say over new money. They do not get the veto, or the money already appropriated, or any brake on a bureaucracy built to move fast and out of sight.

So this is what the voters bought on Tuesday. They bought hearings, subpoenas and the chance to make the White House explain itself in public. They did not buy a pause button. Far too many corporate media commentators are talking as if the tape has stopped, even rewound. Nonsense. Think fast forward.

The people lodged a protest. The White House filed it as a product review, read the one-star ratings and promoted the man who wrote the formula.

Trump mocks “shithole countries”. He sneers at American hellholes. Now he is digging his own. Call it the United States of Paranoid Hate. On Monday its racist-in-chief moves into the chief of staff’s office, and the mantra goes up on the whiteboard.

Three thousand. A day. Every day, until 30 September 2029.

America asked for the volume down. Trump handed the controls to the man who turned it up to 11. He has only just begun.