Stephen Miller, President Donald Trump’s White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy, has offered a predictably right-leaning list of things he’s thankful for this Thanksgiving.
Welcoming in the holiday season with an appearance on Fox News’s Jesse Watters Primetime Tuesday evening, the president’s senior adviser veered from warning that Democrats’ rhetoric was endangering the lives of ICE agents to cracking a mean-spirited weight joke about Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker.
Taking a lead from his boss, who had mocked the Democrat by calling him “a big fat slob” during an eccentric address at the annual turkey pardon in the Rose Garden earlier in the day, Miller noted that the reprieved birds had been named Waddle and Gobble.
“When I heard the name of the turkey, Waddle, that’s Governor Pritzker,” the immigration hardliner sniggered. “We all need to lose some weight, as the president said.”
Circling back to an earlier question from Watters, Miller said: “You asked me what I’m thankful for this Thanksgiving.
“I praise God every day that Donald Trump is our president and we’ve gone from 30 percent inflation, 20 million illegals, unlimited refugees, violent crime in our cities to security in our cities, no illegals, no more refugees, and finally a country that puts American citizens first.”
While inflation in the United States was high under Trump’s predecessor, Joe Biden, as a consequence of the Covid-19 pandemic, year-on-year inflation peaked just below 10 percent in mid-2022. And, while the Democrat did record cumulative inflation of 21 percent over the course of his presidency, neither figure comes close to Miller’s assessment.
His claims about undocumented migrants and that the country was overrun with “unlimited refugees” as well as the effectiveness of Trump’s decision to send federal forces into Democrat-run cities such as Washington, D.C., Chicago, and Los Angeles this year have been hotly debated nationwide.
Public support for ICE’s masked raids on minority communities has meanwhile collapsed to just a 34 percent rate, according to a recent poll, and the controversy arising from the agency’s activities has now washed up on the White House Lawn, after it emerged this week that a relative of Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt has been arrested and detained.
Elsewhere in his interview with Miller, Watters asked him what his “MO” is on Thanksgiving and whether he typically “helped” or “hindered” his family.
“I would be incapable of helping,” he answered. “If I attempted to help it would be interpreted widely as an act of sabotage… They say when men fold a sweater wrong, you never have to fold a sweater again.
“The safest play is to watch TV and stay out of the way as best you can. My service is saying how delicious the gravy is, how great the turkey is, how wonderful the cranberry sauce is. That’s how I give back: compliments.”
His wife, Katie Miller, was a communications director to Trump’s first vice president, Mike Pence, and is now a successful podcaster, most recently interviewing House Speaker Mike Johnson on her show this week.
The Louisiana Republican offered his own thoughts on Thanksgiving during his appearance, remaining extremely on-message when he told the host: “It’s a uniquely American holiday. People don’t think about that. We’re blessed to be in this nation to live under this flag and to have these freedoms and liberty and opportunity and security and to recognize especially on that day.
“You know, freedom is not inherited in the bloodstream as [Ronald] Reagan said. So you’ve got to fight for it and protect it and pass it along to the next generation. Thanksgiving is a great opportunity to do that.”
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