As part of the Trump administration’s Sunday talk-show blitz trying to deescalate the Ukraine whistle-blower crisis, White House adviser and senior xenophobe Stephen Miller spoke with Fox News’ Chris Wallace about how the president, once again, is not the bad guy in a scandal in which he was caught doing bad things. This time around, as Trump faces an impeachment inquiry for pressuring Ukraine to investigate the business dealings of Hunter Biden (then attempting to cover up the exchange), Miller went on Fox News Sunday to inform the public that the president is the only option for real democracy in America.
“Do you want a democracy in this country or do you want a deep state?” Miller asked and answered. “It’s a binary choice for the American people.” He may have forgotten the word “false” in there before “binary.”
Miller also attacked the intelligence officer who reported Trump’s behavior, lamenting that the term “whistle-blower” has been appointed to them. To Miller, it’s an “honorific that this individual most certainly does not deserve. A partisan hit job does not make you a whistle-blower just because you go through the Whistle-blower Protection Act.” Of course, by protocol, that’s exactly what this individual is, as confirmed in Thursday’s testimony from the acting director of national intelligence, Joseph Maguire, who stated that the whistle-blower acted “by the book and followed the law.”
During the Fox News Sunday interview, Miller also offered a galaxy-brain take on Trump’s role in the developing scandal, claiming that the president is the real whistle-blower in the crisis. “The president of the United States is the whistle-blower and this individual is a saboteur trying to undermine a democratically elected government,” Miller said. It’s a perspective that does contain some truth, although one might need to zoom out much further than Miller intends for the comparison to be helpful. If Trump is a whistle-blower, then he’s telling on himself, revealing just how corrupt a presidency can get when all legal and ethical concerns are dropped at the expense of personal gain.
