Making his first major television interview in months, White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller found himself grilled relentlessly by Fox News anchor Chris Wallace on Sunday over President Trump’s repeated racist taunts of Democratic congresswomen of color.
Miller, the chief architect of the Trump administration’s hardline anti-immigration policies, appeared on Fox News Sunday and immediately defended both the president’s week-long racist tirade against the so-called Squad and a Trump rally crowd’s “Send Her Back!” chant.
After saying the audience members behind the chant were like other “patriotic members” who are “tired of being beat up” by left-leaning members of Congress, Miller went on to claim that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY)—a member of the Squad—had “profoundly outraged” him as an American Jew by calling border detention centers “concentration camps.”
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Wallace, meanwhile, noted that both before and after his election, the president has been even more critical of America than the four progressive congresswomen, highlighting a series of comments in which Trump said the country has a “lot of killers” and that “nobody respects” the United States.
“Why is what those congresswomen have said, in general, any worse than what you just heard Donald Trump say—President Obama is ignorant, this country is killers, on and on?” Wallace asked the White House aide.
Miller insisted the difference was that Trump wanted to “strengthen America’s core values” with his remarks while the Squad believed the country should turn “into Venezuela,” prompting the Fox News anchor to push back and point out we “are not talking about constitutional rights” but Trump’s own sharp criticisms of the United States.
Wallace then went on to confront Miller on the overarching theme of the president targeting the congresswomen.
“Nobody has any problem with what the president’s policies have been, it’s when he goes into stoking racial fears,” the Fox host declared. “I’ve never called any of his tweets racist, but there’s no question that he is stoking racial divisions.”
Miller contended that the “core element of the president’s philosophy is ‘America First’” before pivoting to Ocasio-Cortez, accusing her of saying undocumented immigrants are “more American than Americans.”
AOC, however, has never actually said this. The New York lawmaker has noted that immigrants historically commit fewer crimes than native-born Americans, She's also said that asylum-seeking refugees "are acting more American than any person who seeks to keep them out ever will be."
