Expert Says This 1 Name Could Emerge As Shadow President While Trump Declines

David Rothkopf, a global affairs columnist for The Daily Beast who served in the Clinton administration, predicted that White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller could secretly become the acting president if President Donald Trump continues to decline. (Watch the video below.)

“If he is less capable of handling the job, who’s gonna handle it for him?” Rothkopf asked of Trump on an episode of “The Daily Beast Podcast” posted Monday. “Is Stephen Miller gonna say, ‘OK, we’ll say the president’s fine, just send those memos to me, I’ll handle it.’”

“That has happened before,” Rothkopf said, citing Joe Biden and Ronald Reagan as presidents who had behind-the-scenes intervention.

Rothkopf then listed what he believed were signs of decline from the “basket case of a president.”

He continued, “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.”

Podcast host Joanna Coles asked him if that role should fall to Vice President JD Vance.

“Theoretically, it should be,” Rothkopf answered, noting a 25th Amendment scenario in which Trump is declared unfit for office.

“But of course that’s not how power works in the White House,” he said. “Power flows from the president, from the people closest to the president, from the people who control his schedule, from the people who send out his statements.”

Rothkopf added, “I think you may have a slow decline and you may just have more memos on more decisions going to Stephen Miller or going to somebody else who’s sitting outside the Oval Office.”

Miller is known as one of the architects of Trump’s harsh immigration policies and has lately stoked conservative fear by falsely claiming that progressives winning elections of late were communists.