Stephen Miller Just Went on Fox News to Discuss Trump’s National Emergency. It Went Poorly.

Long on excuses, short of examples.

Ron Sachs/ZUMA

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White House senior adviser Stephen Miller went on Fox News Sunday and tried to defend Trump’s declaration of a national emergency to secure funding for his border wall. He did not do a very good job.

In a contentious back and forth with anchor Chris Wallace, Miller tried to make the case that what Trump had done wasn’t all that unusual in the grand scheme of things. But when Wallace offered up a list of facts in the form of 59 other instances of president’s declaring national emergencies for actual emergencies, including 9/11, Miller couldn’t come up with one concrete example to match Trump’s:

“You and I both know that presidents for years have engaged in one military adventure after another, not to mention the fact that we do operations to destroy drug fields in foreign lands in Afghanistan or Colombia, and we can’t even deal with the criminal cartels operating on our border?” Miller argued.

Which, of course, is inadvertently suggesting that what Trump is doing is tantamount to policy-level thrill-seeking. All in all, Miller’s appearance was perhaps his worst since…whatever this was.

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“Lying.” “Disgusting.” “Scum.” “Slime.” “Corrupt.” “Enemy of the people.” Donald Trump has always made clear what he thinks of journalists. And it’s plain now that his administration intends to do everything it can to stop journalists from reporting things it doesn’t like—which is most things that are true.

We’ll say it loud and clear: At Mother Jones, no one gets to tell us what to publish or not publish, because no one owns our fiercely independent newsroom. But that also means we need to directly raise the resources it takes to keep our journalism alive. There’s only one way for that to happen, and it’s readers like you stepping up. Please do your part and help us reach our $150,000 membership goal by May 31.

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