White House senior policy adviser and epic hack Stephen Miller has the personal attributes of being extremely arrogant and, at the same time, not very bright.
Miller was confronted by Fox News Sunday’s Chris Wallace about Trump’s racist tweets last weekend, and the subsequent racist reaction by supporters at a North Carolina rally.
In response, Miller tried to follow a strategy by White House advisers and other Republicans to divert condemnation of Trump’s racist attacks against four Democratic congresswomen into talking points about how patriotic the president is, and how much the congresswomen—Reps. Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley—hate the United States.
It’s a tough sell, but Trump’s sycophants never have that far to go to convince the MAGA base that what they’re seeing and hearing isn’t really what they’re seeing and hearing.
The problem with Miller is that he isn’t very good at his job.
Miller first tried to address the accusation that Trump is a racist.
“I think the term ‘racist’ has become a label too often deployed by the left, [and] Democrats in this country simply to try to silence and punish and suppress people they disagree with, speech they don’t want to hear,” Miller said, as Politico noted.
Again, the speech the “left” and “Democrats” don’t want to hear is the sitting president telling four congresswomen—all U.S. citizens—to go back to their own countries.
Miller then falsely claimed that Trump “was clear” that he had disagreed with the rallygoers who chanted, “Send her back!” in reference to Omar. Trump initially claimed on Thursday that he disagreed with the chant, but the next day, he called the chanters “incredible people” and “incredible patriots.”
Trump’s senior adviser tried to hammer the patriotism point home: “But the core issue is that all of the people in that audience and millions of patriotic Americans all across this country are tired of being beat up, condescended to, looked down upon, talked down to, by members of Congress on the left and in Washington, DC, and their allies in many corridors of the media.
Miller then smeared Omar before moving on to attack Ocasio-Cortez.
“And perhaps the most shocking of all,” Miller said, “were the comments made by Representative Ocasio-Cortez saying that our border agents are running concentration camps, and therefore, they are Nazis, and therefore everyone in that audience, and you and me, and everyone who supports our Border Patrol are by extension Nazi sympathizers. We support Nazis if we support border agents.”
Miller said that as an American Jew, he was “profoundly outraged,” and Ocasio-Cortez’s comments were a “historical smear” and “sinful.”
Wallace pointed out the hypocrisy in claims that criticism of government policy is un-American, given that Trump constantly whines and complains, and attacked former President Barack Obama on numerous occasions.
Each time Miller was confronted with this type of hypocrisy, he said he wanted to “drill down on it” or get to the “heart of the debate.” But there really wasn’t much to that debate, other than the fact that both Miller and Trump are unapologetic bigots who plan to carry their racist policies and divisive rhetoric into the 2020 election.
“There’s a fundamental distinction between people who think that we need to lean into and strengthen America’s core values, whether it be our constitutional values, the rule of law, the principles of Western civilization, or people who think that we basically need to turn America into Venezuela,” he said.
The president, Miller argued, “ran a campaign that can be summarized in two words: America first. There’s a huge difference between America first and an ideology that runs down America.”
Trump’s many attacks against Obama are different, he claimed, because Trump is trying to move the country closer to the “America first ideal.” Ocasio-Cortez’s comments, meanwhile, are “fundamentally anti-American” because she’s talking about poor immigrants, mostly from Central America. Got it.
Here’s more of Miller’s racist logic, which boils down to the belief that white people love America, while people of color want to destroy it:
“Throughout this interview, Chris, you’re continuing to conflate Donald Trump’s criticisms of President Obama versus AOC’s deep and systemic criticisms of the country itself. And so let me just cut to the heart of the issue. These four congresswomen detest America as it exists, as it is currently constructed.
“They want to tear down the structure of our country. They want it to be a socialist, open-borders country. If you, as Donald Trump says, want to destroy America with open borders, you cannot say you love your country. If you attack border agents the way that Ocasio-Cortez has, it means you have a deep-seated hatred of the nation as it exists.
“That’s why you want to erase its borders, fundamentally transform the country, and in the process, it doesn’t matter if American citizens lose their jobs, lose their homes, lose their livelihoods, lose their health coverage, and lose their very lives.
“There’s a gigantic, enormous distinction between Donald Trump saying, ‘I’m going to get on the world stage and put America first in every single thing we do,’ versus the view that says, ‘America should never come first, and American citizens should never come first, which is their view, and that’s what we’re going to take to the ballot box.”
Good luck with that.