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Stephen Miller is leading a public war against the Republican party’s libertarians as he reframes the “one big beautiful bill” to being the key that unlocks President Trump’s mass deportation agenda.

Going mainly after libertarian-leaning lawmakers like Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), who have brought up concerns about the megabill’s deficit impact, the White House deputy chief of staff — and chief architect of Trump’s immigration agenda — is taking a sledgehammer to what remains of the libertarian-conservative fusionism that was prominent in the party pre-Trump.

“The libertarians in the House and Senate trying to take down this bill — they’re not stupid. They just don’t care,” Miller said in an interview with conservative activist and commentator Charlie Kirk last week.

“Immigration has never mattered to them, it will never matter to them, deportations have never mattered to them, it will never matter to them. You will never live a day in your life where a libertarian cares as much about immigration and sovereignty as they do about the Congressional Budget Office.”

Miller’s personal advocacy for the bill ramped up amid outcry from deficit hawks within Congress and from outside voices like Elon Musk. And while he echoed other top Republicans in denying the CBO budget math, Miller has particularly focused on one of the legislation’s key pillars: The billions of additional dollars to fund construction of the border wall and deportation efforts such as detention facilities, more ICE officers, and transporting deportees.

The uprisings by those objecting to deportations that popped in Los Angeles over the weekend — prompting Trump to deploy the National Guard in response — is further fueling Miller’s arguments. And there is plenty of polling to explain the strategy: A CBS News poll released Monday, for instance, found 54 percent of Americans approved of Trump’s deportation efforts.

Miller has explicitly wondered if libertarian-leaning Republicans like Massie were fighting the bill in order to oppose the deportation program. Massie, calling from the road on his way back to D.C. on Monday, told me that is not the case.

“He and I have the same immigration, deportation, wall policy, with the exception of E-verify. That's the only libertarian objection I have,” Massie said. “He's appealing to a trope that all libertarians are open borders, and he knows that's not true about me. He and I have spent hours talking, Stephen Miller and I, on these drives to and from DC .... He's trying to spread some doubt about the messenger, and not my message.”

But times are different now.

“He can't be as honest and candid as he was with me when he didn't Donald Trump as his boss,” Massie said. “He's got his job is to sell this bill, and he's trying to put lipstick on a pig, and Rand Paul and I are pointing out it's a pig.”

Paul again became a Miller target after he told Fox News’s Maria Bartiromo on “Sunday Morning Futures” that the funding Trump administration is seeking for the border wall is “excessive” and he would probably do “half as much” as what he wants for hiring more agents. The border, Paul argued, is “largely controlled right now,” warning against hiring “an army of border patrol agents that we have on the hook for payments and pensions

Miller seethed. “While ICE officers are battling violent mobs in Los Angeles, Rand Paul is trying to........

© The Hill