February 17, 2019

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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