"Plenary authority," 2 words that should terrify us

Stephen Miller is off the rails, and Trump loves that

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It should have been the biggest story in America this week. It wasn’t a gaffe, and it wasn’t a technical glitch. It was Stephen Miller—Donald Trump’s longtime political aide—saying out loud what authoritarians usually keep to themselves.

In a live CNN interview about Trump’s plan to deploy the National Guard in Portland despite a federal court order forbidding it, Miller said this:

“Under Title 10 of the U.S. Code, the president has plenary authority. Has—”

And then he stopped.

He didn’t freeze because of a bad connection. He was still blinking, listening, waiting. The far likelier explanation is that someone in his earpiece told him to stop talking because he had just revealed something he wasn’t supposed to say.

What “Plenary Authority” Really Means

“Plenary” is one of those words that sounds innocuous, bureaucratic even. In law, it means complete and absolute. “Plenary authority” is power with no limit, unchecked by courts, Congress, or any other institution. It is the kind of power that monarchs claimed by divine right, and that democracies were invented to prevent.

Presidents do not have plenary authority. The American system was designed specifically to divide and constrain power: Congress writes laws, the executive enforces them, and the courts interpret them. When one branch asserts plenary control, it is, by definition, rejecting the constitutional order.

That’s why Miller’s phrase matters. It wasn’t a slip of the tongue. It was a statement of philosophy, a belief that Donald Trump’s power should be total.

The Quiet Collaboration of Television

What came next was almost as disturbing as Miller’s words. Instead of challenging him, CNN’s anchor claimed there was a “technical issue,” cut to commercial, and when the interview resumed, the segment had been reset. The phrase “plenary authority” was never mentioned again. The clip that CNN later uploaded was edited, and the line was scrubbed out entirely.

That’s not journalism. That’s protection.

Moments like this show how easily the press can become a stabilizing force for authoritarian power rather than a check on it. By pretending that fascistic rhetoric is merely a “technical issue,” mainstream outlets reinforce the illusion of normalcy. They help launder extremism into everyday discourse.

Miller’s words were not just the ramblings of an overzealous adviser. They were an open expression of how this administration conceives of authority: not as something bounded by law, but as something inherent in the person of the president.

Echoes from History

There is nothing new about this pattern. In 1933, Adolf Hitler used the language of legality to destroy the very system that empowered him. After the Reichstag fire, he introduced what was called the Enabling Act, granting the chancellor “full powers” to restore order. It was justified as a temporary emergency measure. In practice, it suspended the rule of law indefinitely.

The term “full powers” was the German equivalent of “plenary authority.” Both rest on the same premise: that crisis requires concentration of power, and that institutions must yield to the will of one man.

This is how authoritarianism spreads, not through coups or tanks in the streets, but through legal vocabulary that sounds technical enough to pass unnoticed.

Miller’s comment wasn’t the first sign. Since Trump returned to office, his legal team has repeatedly invoked ideas that once existed only at the fringes of executive power theory: the “unitary executive,” the notion that the president cannot be prosecuted, and the idea that he can ignore court orders in matters of “national security.” “Plenary authority” fits neatly into that architecture of justification.

The American Tradition of Limits

The American experiment was, from the beginning, a rejection of plenary power. The founders, who had lived under a king claiming divine right, designed a government of frustration. No single branch could move without friction. Federalist No. 51 put it bluntly: “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.”

The genius of that design is precisely what authoritarians despise: the inefficiency of democracy. To them, checks and balances look like weakness. Debate looks like delay. Law looks like obstacle.

That worldview has always existed in American politics, but it has rarely been so nakedly expressed on national television.

How Normalization Works

The danger is not just what Miller said, but how little it mattered afterward. The country barely blinked. No wall-to-wall coverage. No congressional outrage. Just another moment lost in the churn of news.

That reaction, or lack of one, is how normalization begins. Each new breach of democratic language feels less remarkable than the last. Each quiet media edit, each shrug from the public, lowers the collective sensitivity to authoritarian drift.

By the time the president starts acting on the logic of plenary authority, by ignoring court orders or deploying troops domestically, the groundwork will already have been laid.

Legalism as a Path to Tyranny

One of the great myths about authoritarian regimes is that they arise outside the law. In reality, they thrive through it. Dictatorships don’t always begin with open defiance of constitutions; they begin with reinterpretation. The law is reimagined to serve the leader, not restrain him.

In that sense, Miller’s comment was more than a verbal slip. It was a blueprint. To claim “plenary authority” is to claim that the rule of law itself bends to presidential will. Once that idea is accepted, everything else—censorship, purges, domestic military use—can be justified as “legal.”

Why This Moment Matters

It is tempting to dismiss this as rhetorical excess. But rhetoric is how power prepares its ground. When an administration begins testing how much authoritarian language the public will tolerate, it is already measuring the boundaries of what it can later attempt.

And when the media participates by editing, sanitizing, or ignoring such statements, it signals that those boundaries are pliable.

Miller’s sentence should have been a five-alarm fire for every journalist, lawyer, and citizen who believes in constitutional government. Instead, it flickered and disappeared.

That is precisely how democracy erodes, not with dramatic acts, but with quiet ones. With a sentence that vanishes from a broadcast. With a word that most people don’t understand but that history knows all too well.

The Real Lesson

Stephen Miller didn’t invent the idea of plenary authority. He resurrected it. From the dust of monarchies and the rhetoric of past strongmen, it has returned as a test phrase, a way to see whether Americans still notice the difference between democracy and rule by decree.

So far, the results aren’t encouraging.

When the language of absolute power becomes part of ordinary political discourse, the republic is already in danger. Because by the time “plenary authority” stops sounding strange, it will be too late to argue about what it means.

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