Longtime Trump adviser Stephen Miller appeared on Fox News Sunday this weekend, and observers could be forgiven for being unable to tell the difference between him and a perpetually silence-inducing stand-up comic. He consistently and explicitly found absolutely no issue with his boss’s own history of “controversial” (to put it lightly) statements targeting people on the basis of their race, but he of course found deeply rooted, oh-so-terrible issues with a few women of color serving in Congress who Trump said this weekend are not “capable of loving our Country.” Miller added his own outlandish claim that these women supposedly “want to tear down the structure of our country.” In other words, the Trump camp has got nothing but egomaniacal, apocalyptic fearmongering.
He even wildly and haughtily claimed that New York’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez sounding an alarm about the treatment of undocumented immigrants detained by the Trump administration “minimizes the death of six million of my Jewish brothers and sisters” and “minimizes their suffering.” He seemed utterly ignorant of the fact that so do his own policies, since significant numbers of Jewish asylum seekers arrived at U.S. shores fleeing Nazi persecution and were turned back, only to be murdered.
Stephen Miller, Senior White House Policy Adviser on Fox News Sunday for an Exclusive interview with Chris Wallace tells Chris “I am profoundly outraged by the comments from Ocasio-Cortez…” #FNS #FoxNews pic.twitter.com/nvkkeCRRtt
— FoxNewsSunday (@FoxNewsSunday) July 21, 2019
Amazingly, Miller’s hard-headedness even led him into a shouting match with host Chris Wallace after he tried to insist that one, targeting mass groups of immigrants is supposedly justified because of a few “hardened criminals” who happen to be associated with immigration and two, that — somehow! — questioning whether the first black president in American history is really an American citizen isn’t “playing the race card.”
He first told host Chris Wallace:
‘I think the term racist has become a label that is too often deployed by the Left in this country simply to try to silence and punish and depress people they disagree with, speech that they don’t want to hear. The reality is that this president has been a president for all Americans.’
Firstly — no. Racism is defined in part as “antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one’s own race is superior,” and it’s not exactly some kind of mental gymnastic to see Trump denouncing Mexican immigrant populations as full of “rapists and drug dealers” while completely ignoring the same issues in white American society as racist.
Check it out:
Stephen Miller, Senior White House Policy Adviser talks to Chris about President Trump’s history of controversial statements #FNS #Exclusive #FoxNews pic.twitter.com/4dvHsdKSJB
— FoxNewsSunday (@FoxNewsSunday) July 21, 2019
That’s not where it ended though. Wallace had to remind the antsy, rambling Miller that among other things:
‘There were never race questions about John McCain. There were questions about whether he was born in the Panama Canal or not. There was never a race question about John McCain.’
Miller added:
‘I fundamentally disagree with the view that if you criticize somebody and they happen to be of a different color skin that that makes it a racial criticism.’
No one holds that view. The view — rather, the observation! — is that Trump incessantly singling out people on the basis of their race itself is, wait for it, racism. We’re never exactly going to get anywhere with Miller though. As Wallace noted, Miller’s one of the guys behind policy pushes like Trump’s ban on Muslim immigration, which he spent some time getting established in a form palatable to the conservative bloc on the U.S. Supreme Court — and nonsensical displays like this help explain why he’s still in Trump’s orbit after record-high senior staff turnover.
Featured Image via screenshot
