If President Donald Trump wants to win back voters who ditched Republicans for Democrats this midterms, CNN’s data analyst Harry Enten thinks he sure tapped the wrong person to be the next White House chief of staff.
The stat-savvy politico was wowed that the president picked anti-immigration hardliner Stephen Miller for the post fresh on the heels of the GOP losing a huge share of Latino voters in last week’s election.
“Gosh, how tone deaf is this White House? You get the results from last week, and then you make Stephen Miller chief of staff,” Enten said on Monday’s episode of “NewsCentral.” “What are they? They are in another planet. They’re in another universe that we’re talking about.”
“I mean, just look at these shifts,” he said, pulling up a chart on “who Latinos trust more on immigration” that showed Trump three points up on Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024 while Democrats now land at +21.
Enten highlighted numbers from a selection of districts with large Latino communities that spanned from Texas to New Jersey as he added, “We saw it across the political map no matter what state, no matter what region you were in.”
“What the heck is going on out there?” Enten asked of Miller’s appointment.
As White House deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security adviser during Trump’s second term, Miller has been behind many of the most aggressive policies shaping the administration’s crackdown on immigrants.
Before Trump even took office, Miller oversaw a team drafting executive orders aimed at ending birthright citizenship and designating of drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations.
In the past two years, he’s also pushed for the dramatic ramp up in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol operations, daily arrest quotas, implementing the Alien Enemies Act to bypass due process, and restricting the ways asylum-seekers and refugees can stay in and enter the U.S.