Former Green Beret colonel Chris Miller was one of the first American soldiers on the ground in Afghanistan after 9/11. He was outgoing president Donald Trump’s acting secretary of defence on January 6, 2021, when he ignored the “histrionic” pleadings of Democrat elders like Nancy Pelosi – hypocritically, as he saw it – to send armed troops faster to remove “a rowdy mob traipsing through the Capitol taking selfies”, as he described it later.

He’s a military contributor to the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a slightly hair-raising 900-page manifesto to turn a future Trump administration from an angry protest vote into a counter-revolution against a tide of big government and wokeism that hardcore conservatives believe has swept through American society.