Stephen Miller hits Sunday show to defend Trump against racism charges

Top White House aide Stephen Miller defended President Trump against charges of racism Sunday after Fox News’ Chris Wallace invoked several of Trump’s previous controversial statements.

Wallace played clips of Trump promoting “birther” conspiracy theory, describing Mexican immigrants as “rapists” and calling for a ban on all Muslims entering the United States.

{mosads}In response, Miller dismissed “racist” as “a label that has been too often deployed by the left [and] Democrats in this country to try to silence and punish and suppress people they disagree with.”

Like former White House aide Mercedes Schlapp, Miller cited low African American unemployment as evidence Trump was a “president for all Americans” and denied the “birther” theory was motivated by racism, saying the same questions were asked of Obama’s 2008 opponent, the late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who was born in the Panama Canal Zone.

When Wallace pushed back on the comparison, Miller simply said he “fundamentally disagree[s] with the view that if you criticize somebody and they happen to be a different color skin, that makes it a race issue.”

“If you want to have a colorblind society … it means you can criticize immigration policy, you can criticize people’s views, you can question where they’re born and not have it be seen as racial,” Miller added.

Later in the segment, Miller and Wallace sparred on Trump’s response to a chant of “send her back” that erupted at a Wednesday campaign rally in reference to Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.). Trump has since said he was “not happy” with the chant but allowed it to continue and has defended the rally attendees as people who “love their country.”

The chant came three days after a series of tweets in which Trump called on Omar and three other minority congresswomen—Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.)—to “go back” to other countries. All four are U.S. citizens and only Omar was born abroad.