Politics With Michelle Grattan

Every autocrat needs a clan of loyalists, strategists, masterminds – these are the figures behind the scenes pulling the strings.They’re unelected and unaccountable, yet they wield a huge amount of power.This is the role Stephen Miller has played for Donald Trump – he is the architect in chief for the second Trump administration. He has so much power, in fact, he’s reportedly referred to as the "prime minister."So who is Stephen Miller? And why are architects so important in helping a would-be autocrat amass power?As Emma Shortis, a Trump expert and an adjunct senior fellow at RMIT University in Melbourne, explains in episode 2 of The Making of an Autocrat:"[Miller] is the kind of brains behind particularly Trump's hardline stances on immigration and the Trump administration's ability to use the levers of power, and expand the power available to the president.I think what Stephen Miller demonstrates and, and history has demonstrated over and over again is that autocrats cannot rise to power by themselves. The