Jake Tapper asked Kristi Noem about the tape of the killing of Renee Good.

Tapper tried to pin down Stephen Miller about whether the U.S. would rule out using military force to “take Greenland” and whether there might be elections in Venezuela. Miller’s view: might makes right.

Gal Beckerman wrote in The Atlantic:

If you want to know a political leader’s governing philosophy, you could cut through a lot of bluster by just asking them who their guy is: John Locke or Thomas Hobbes? Anyone who’s taken Poli Sci 101 will understand what this means. The 17th-century philosophers each offered a picture of human nature in its rawest form, and they came to different conclusions. Locke, whose ideas were central to the birth of modern democracy, thought that people were capable of reason and moral judgment. Hobbes, on the other hand, believed that we were vicious creatures who needed to be protected from ourselves by a powerful king. Whether a leader is Lockean or Hobbesian really does set the table for the kind of government they want.

One way to understand the head-spinning nature of being an American over the past couple of decades is that this debate—one that history seemed to have settled in Locke’s favor—is alive again. Barack Obama was a Lockean through and through—insisting, repeatedly, that if citizens were just given accurate information and a fair hearing, they would converge on something like the common good. Then came Donald Trump, Hobbesian extraordinaire, who has often portrayed life under anyone’s leadership but his own much as Hobbes describes the state of nature: “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” (Nasty is even one of Trump’s favorite words.)

Comments this week from Stephen Miller, the influential deputy chief of staff often cast as the president’s “brain,” only reinforced this impression. Miller might have been Hobbes in a skinny tie as he confidently articulated what he understood to be the “iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.” His monologue was like something out of the English philosopher’s 1651 political treatise,Leviathan: “We live in a world, in the real world,” he said, “that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.”

Miller’s might-makes-right declaration came after Trump’s decision to overthrow the president of Venezuela, and in anticipation of the United States possibly acquiring Greenland from Denmark, perhaps by any means necessary (a notion that Miller’s wife found fit to turn into a meme). The will to dominate, seize other countries’ resources because you can, and generally bully those that can’t fight back is nothing to worry about, Miller reassured Americans: This is the natural state of things. This is how it all works. Power does what it wants. The rest is commentary and toothless United Nations resolutions—or, as he put it, “international niceties.”