Trump Makes Revealing Comment on Stephen Miller’s ‘Truest Feelings’

Donald Trump made a revealing comment about Stephen Miller during a press conference Wednesday, suggesting his “truest feelings” on immigration and crime aren’t fit for public consumption.

While speaking from the White House alongside FBI Director Kash Patel, Trump began by commending Miller, an architect of his hardline approach to those two policy areas, for something he is known to appreciate in his advocates: how they come across on television.

“I want to thank Stephen Miller… I love watching him on television,” Trump said of the frequent Fox News guest, who has ranted about the Democratic Party being a “domestic extremist organization” and migrants causing traffic jams.

“I would love to have him come up and explain his true feelings. Maybe not his truest feelings. That might be going a little bit too far,” Trump admitted, drawing some laughs. “But Stephen, thank you for doing an unbelievable job. And the people of this country love you, I tell you, and they love what you say about crime and stopping crime.”

The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment.

The Trump administration has been deliberating invoking the Insurrection Act, with Miller at the forefront of discussions. Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Miller’s comments about crime and immigration go hand-in-hand, and stretch back years. In 2019, the Southern Poverty Law Center reported on emails from Miller during his time as an aide to former Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions in 2015 and 2016 in which he favorably cited anti-immigration website VDARE and white nationalist magazine American Renaissance. The former pushes the racist “great replacement” theory, while the Anti-Defamation League calls the latter a “white supremacist journal.”

In one Aug. 2015 email to Breitbart News, for instance, Miller supported a complete ban on immigration “like Coolidge did.” In 1924, President Calvin Coolidge signed into law an act that not only banned Asian immigrants but also limited immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe.

Miller’s emails weren’t a concern for Trump at the time of their publication. “Stephen is not going anywhere,” a senior White House official told the Daily Beast after the emails were made public. “The president has his back.” That sentiment was echoed by six other senior administration officials shortly afterward.

Six years later, Miller is now the White House Deputy Chief of Staff, and his position in the administration is even more integral. Miller is reportedly leading discussions about how and when Trump could invoke the Insurrection Act as the administration works to deploy National Guard troops to cities in Democratic-led states.

Protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations, Miller insisted, amount to “an all-out campaign of insurrection against the sovereignty of the United States, because the Democrat Party and those who are committing violence in this country do not believe in the legitimacy of the sovereign territory of the United States, and they don’t want any of these illegal aliens to go home.”

After Trump’s press conference admission about Miller, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a frequent critic of both men, responded with a political cartoon of Miller instructing an ICE agent to deport the Statue of Liberty.