MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan took the mainstream media to task on Monday night for going out of its way to “normalize” former Trump White House senior adviser Stephen Miller, saying the “repugnant” far-right ideologue should potentially “be prosecuted” and definitely “be shunned.”
Despite former President Donald Trump’s ignominious exit from the White House, capped by an insurrectionist riot incited by the outgoing president, a number of Trump administration officials have been welcomed into the world of media punditry with open arms.
Ex-Trump economic chief Larry Kudlow has scored a Fox Business show, while former White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany is now a Fox News analyst.
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But Hasan, filling in as guest host on All In with Chris Hayes, took specific issue with the current image rehabilitation of Miller, the architect of Trump’s draconian and restrictive “zero-tolerance” immigration policy.
“There is no shortage of odious people who gained power thanks to Donald Trump,” the MSNBC host said. “But if you had to pick just one who should be pushed out of public life, who should hang his head in shame and never be heard from or taken seriously ever again, it would have to be Stephen Miller.”
Calling Miller the person most responsible for “stealing children at the border” and “taking them from their parents’ arms,” Hasan laid out Miller’s history of “demonizing” immigrants and sharing “white nationalist propaganda.” He’s “probably the most repugnant individual to serve in the Trump White House,” Hasan said.
“Yet we’re now seeing the normalization of Stephen Miller,” the host continued. “And not just on Fox News, where he gleefully trolls the new administration about the situation at the border.”
The political news outlet Politico, Hasan noted, has not only written up Miller’s new anti-Biden legal group but also quoted him in its influential Playbook newsletter “like a pundit whose sage thoughts on immigration we should take very, very seriously.”
“Look, the media have a tendency to treat anyone who has held a prominent government position as worthy of respect after they leave office,” he added. “But that’s not right. Stephen Miller does not deserve to be normalized. Some would say he deserves to be prosecuted. At the very minimum, he deserves to be shunned.”
Hasan then brought on journalist and Daily Beast columnist Jean Guerrero, author of the book Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda, who sounded the alarm over the mainstreaming of white supremacy and Miller’s radical ideas.
“We’re helping people like Stephen Miller launder incredibly dangerous conspiracy theories about white genocide that have motivated acts of extreme white terrorism like we saw in El Paso, where 23 people were killed,” she said.
