Stephen Miller’s “plenary authority” slip reveals a bigger plan: It is raising alarms and shouldn’t be ignored

Stephen Miller is known for being combative with reporters who don’t kowtow to the White House, berating them and speaking over them. However, in a very odd moment during an interview with CNN’s Boris Sanchez, President Trump’s deputy chief of staff frozen in midsentence, stared blankly at the camera and didn’t utter another word.

The two words that he said before he went mum, “plenary authority,” set off an internet storm speculating that he had made a Freudian slip about what the real intentions of the Trump administration plans, absolute power.

What is “plenary authority”?

The expression “plenary authority” is a legal term, the more popular expression is “plenary power,” which basically means limitless power.

Sanchez was inquiring whether the Trump administration would abide by a court ruling that temporarily blocked the deployment of National Guard troops to Portland, Oregon for a second time in two days.

Miller explained that the decision was being appealed and said, “under Title 10 of the U.S. Code, the president has plenary authority,” then paused for a second before trying to start again, only getting the word “has” out and he went silent.

Sanchez repeatedly tried to get Miller’s attention and asked “Hey, Stephen can you hear me?” He finally gave up and said that there must be some technical glitch.

When the two returned from the commercial break Miller continued with what he was saying but left the “plenary” out of his spiel saying that “the president has the authority, anytime he believes federal resources are insufficient, to federalize the National Guard to carry out a mission necessary for public safety.”

Project 2025 push for absolute executive power

This isn’t the first time that Miller has used the expression “plenary authority.” In late August, when President Trump was attempting to fire Federal Reserve board member Lisa Cook, Miller told the press that “the President’s authority as the head of the executive branch to terminate executive branch employees is a plenary authority that is fundamental to our constitutional order.”

While a president can fire a Fed board member for “cause,” in the case of Cook, Trump’s is dubious at best. He claims that she committed mortgage fraud by misrepresenting a property she was buying in mortgage documents, something she has denied, and no criminal complaint has been filed.

While people are highlighting Miller’s most recent use of “plenary authority,” this is part of the Project 2025 playbook, which Trump said he knew nothing about during the campaign.

However, since coming to office, he has appointed several of the people that worked on it including Russell Vought, its primary architect, who is the director of the Office of Management and Budget. In a Truth Social post Trump acknowledged Vought’s attachment to the right-wing blueprint for taking every advantage possible to enact extremist policies and make deep cuts to the federal government during Trump’s second administration.

Trump explained that he was going to meet with “Russ Vought, he of PROJECT 2025 Fame” on the second day of the government shutdown “to determine which of the many Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut, and whether or not those cuts will be temporary or permanent.”

“I can’t believe the Radical Left Democrats gave me this unprecedented opportunity,” he added.

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