# Stephen Miller — "will not be questioned" > [!quote] "Our opponents, the media and the whole world will soon see, as we begin to take further actions, that the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned." > — Stephen Miller, CBS Face the Nation, February 12, 2017 ## Context Said five weeks into the first Trump administration by senior policy adviser Stephen Miller, defending the original travel ban after courts had blocked it. Miller was responding to the judiciary's check on the executive order — the "further actions" framing came amid an active constitutional standoff over the ban. ## Why this matters One of the earliest and clearest authoritarian tells of the Trump era: a senior White House official asserting that presidential power "will not be questioned" — by the press, the courts, or "the whole world" — directly in response to judicial review. It is a foundational receipt for the [[Authoritarianism]] thread running through Miller's career, prefiguring the second-term agenda of unreviewable executive authority. Pairs with his later "[[Stephen Miller - domestic extremist organization]]" framing as bookends of the same project. ## Verification - **Transcript:** [CBS Face the Nation, Feb. 12, 2017](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/face-the-nation-transcript-february-12-2017-schumer-flake-miller/); [Democracy Now!](https://www.democracynow.org/2017/2/13/headlines/trump_adviser_stephen_miller_the_powers_of_the_president_will_not_be_questioned). - **Status:** Verbatim, undisputed. ## Related quotes - [[Stephen Miller - domestic extremist organization]] — the second-term escalation of the same unreviewable-power posture. ## Part of collections - [[Might Makes Right Doctrine]]