As President Donald Trump's declining health becomes more and more unavoidable, one top political analyst told The Daily Beast that there is one official most likely to seize power, and it is not one most might expect.
Political analyst and commentator David Rothkopf appeared as a guest on the latest episode of The Daily Beast Podcast, where he presented his argument about the top aide he believes is set to seize power from Trump amid his evident decline. Instead of the obvious candidate, Vice President JD Vance, Rothkopf suggested that it will be one of the president's most controversial and staunchly loyal aides: Stephen Miller.
“This is an 80-year-old guy who is obviously not physically or mentally healthy or up to the job he’s got,” Rothkopf said. “Trump’s schedule is so micromanaged these days, and he does a couple of hours a day, he doesn’t appear on TV, he does fewer of these open press things than he used to do, and it’s because people are sort of easing him away. This happened with Biden, by the way, where they just sort of don’t put you center stage. And it does raise a question, which is: If he declines further, if he is less capable of handling the job, who’s going to handle it for him?”
Rothkopf continued, suggesting that Miller, Trump's deputy chief of staff for policy, would be the one to "handle" things with Trump incapacitated, urging staffer to "Just send those memos to me."
"We have had multiple times in our history — after Eisenhower’s heart attacks, when FDR was in his declining health at the end of his term, when Woodrow Wilson was bedridden after a stroke — where other people did the job of president. And I’ve got to tell you, you look at Donald Trump, you look at the bruises, you look at his behavior, you look at his age, you look at his family history, and we could be heading for one of these periods where somebody other than Trump is actually, behind the scenes, the acting president."
Rothkopf also delved into the things he heard about how cabinet officials and staffers handled matters when former President Ronald Reagan began to decline cognitively while still in office.
"I talked to people like Frank Carlucci was a Defense Department, the Secretary of Defense under Reagan, and Colin Powell, who was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and later Secretary of State," Rothkopf explained. "And they said that after Reagan entered his decline, they had rules after 5 p.m., they didn't ask a question. They said they would try to resolve the question among themselves, and it would get passed on. And, you know, his role as president grew more diminished. They would run more things by Nancy Reagan."
He added: "Same thing happened during the Nixon administration when, as a result of Watergate, he started drinking more heavily, and there was even one instance during the Nixon administration when there was a report of an incoming Russian missile attack. Al Haig, who was acting as the chief of staff at the time, didn't call Nixon. He called [Secretary of State Henry] Kissinger. He said, what do we do with this?"
