Thom Tillis, the outgoing Republican senator from North Carolina, on CNN, following the elevation of Stephen Miller to White House Chief of Staff:

The worst of all possible choices. […] Last Tuesday, this past Tuesday, Republicans lost because we lost the narrative on the border, a success that the president should have been heralding, by shutting off the border, ending the open borders policies of Biden. We lost the Hispanic vote in large part because of the mismanagement of that policy, and Homeland Security policy, which are the two majors that Stephen Miller has declared in his time in the White House.

Now we’re talking about putting one of the most partisan, polarizing figures—and not only polarizing in terms of Republicans and Democrats, but even among Republicans. How do we think somebody as divisive of a background as Stephen Miller is going to be the olive branch we need to the new Democratic majorities in Congress to get things done? You know, I’ve criticized a lot of the president’s advisors for bad advice that I think he authorized and created some of the environment on Tuesday. But the president made this decision, and the president needs to rethink it. It is a colossal mistake, and the last thing we need 72 hours after the ass whooping we got on Tuesday.

This is not Tillis’ first time savaging Miller. Back in March, Tillis said:

“He is not worried about substance. He’s more worried about form, but I also think that he has an outsized influence over the operations of the cabinet. And I believe we’ve got qualified cabinet members there that sometimes are doing less than what they want to, because of his direction and his outsized influence. He’s a big problem in this administration. He has been from the beginning,” said Tillis. […]

“It gives me pause that you had people like Stephen Miller calling the shots,” Tillis added. “It was Stephen Miller who said it was the position of the United States that we should go after Greenland. And Stephen Miller, that’s been repeatedly responsible for embarrassments for the President of the United States by acting too quickly speaking, first, and thinking later.”

I wrote then that I’m no fan of Tillis—that remains true today—but he’s right on Miller.

I also wrote then:

Toppling the truly evil Miller would not fix this regime, but it would remove its most virulent source of toxicity.

Instead, Donald Trump has chosen to inject the toxicity directly into his blood-pooling veins.

Buckle up.