It was an odd TV moment: Stephen Miller, President Trump’s deputy chief of staff, was answering a CNN anchor’s question from the White House lawn on Monday when he stopped midsentence, falling silent and blinking at the camera.
“Stephen. Stephen. Hey, Stephen, can you hear me?” the anchor, Boris Sanchez, asked from his studio in Washington, before the network cut to a commercial break.
A few minutes later, Mr. Miller was back onscreen, and the interview resumed; Mr. Sanchez apologized and told viewers that “some wires got crossed.” CNN said a technical mishap had occurred.
But by that point, the internet was doing what the internet does.
“Wow, Stephen Miller absolutely did not have a glitch on live TV,” declared one TikTok user whose video about the exchange had been liked more than 135,000 times as of Wednesday, adding that it seemed Mr. Miller had said something that he “was not supposed to say.”
“Clearly someone hit the panic button in his earpiece,” wrote a user on X, in a post that has recorded about 1.7 million views.
At issue, it seemed, was the phrase uttered by Mr. Miller immediately before he abruptly stopped speaking. Responding to Mr. Sanchez’s question about the legality of deploying National Guard soldiers to Portland, Ore., Mr. Miller cited a federal law under which, he said, “the president has plenary authority.”
Plenary authority is a legal term that effectively means limitless power. The Trump administration has invoked the term at least once before, in a legal argument as to why the president should be allowed to rapidly deport Venezuelan migrants under the Alien Enemies Act; a federal appeals court ruled against the administration in that case last month.
Mr. Miller did not use the term again once the CNN interview resumed. After Mr. Sanchez repeated his question, Mr. Miller asserted that “the president has the authority anytime he believes federal resources are insufficient to federalize the National Guard to carry out a mission necessary for public safety.” He and Mr. Sanchez went back and forth over whether the conditions in Portland justified such an extraordinary deployment of domestic soldiers.
The White House did not immediately comment.
Political tensions have intensified around the situation in Oregon, with many Democrats and local officials objecting to the use of the National Guard. Online skeptics wondered if Mr. Miller had caught himself after accidentally revealing an underlying rationale behind Mr. Trump’s aggressive expansion of executive power. As an X user put it, “Stephen Miller said the quiet part out loud.”
A CNN spokeswoman on Wednesday provided a more mundane explanation.
Guests who appear remotely on television programs wear earpieces to hear the audio from the anchor who is interviewing them. CNN said that because of a technical error, an audio feed from a different CNN channel began playing in Mr. Miller’s ear. He could no longer hear Mr. Sanchez.
The problem was fixed during the commercial break, and Mr. Miller appeared unbothered by the interruption. Later, on X, he promoted clips from the interview and reposted praise from Benny Johnson, a right-wing podcaster who said that Mr. Miller had “absolutely eviscerated CNN.”
Michael M. Grynbaum writes about the intersection of media, politics and culture. He has been a media correspondent at The Times since 2016.
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