If White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt is the Trump administration’s face to the American public, Stephen Miller is its teeth.
The White House deputy chief of staff is a man with a well-established reputation for refusing to suffer fools gladly — particularly fools on the CNN payroll.
And he proved it again on Friday in an interview with the liberal network’s Pamela Brown, and her unwillingness to describe illegal aliens for what they are.
Check it out here.
.@StephenM roasts @PamelaBrownCNN for using fluffy terminology to describe criminal illegal immigrants: “When we use language that’s designed to obscure the truth, that’s not good faith. An illegal alien is an illegal alien. They’re not an ‘undocumented migrant.’” pic.twitter.com/80dVgCSeT1
— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) May 30, 2025
Brown, who anchors “The Situation Room” with CNN veteran Wolf Blitzer, was asking about the case of 54-year-old Ramon Morales Reyes, an illegal alien from Mexico who was arrested May 22 on suspicion of writing a letter threatening to assassinate President Donald Trump in retaliation for his deportation policies.
According to a Department of Homeland Security news release announcing his arrest, Reyes has a criminal history in the U.S. that includes “felony hit and run, criminal damage to property and disorderly conduct with a domestic abuse modifier.”
However, CNN reported Thursday that investigators now think Reyes was framed in the Trump threat.
A suspect in a robbery and assault case — in which Reyes was the victim — might have engineered the letter to be sent in Reyes’ name in hopes of having him deported before he could testify, according to CNN.
If that’s true, it’s a compelling story — and one Americans need to hear. But it doesn’t change the fact that Reyes is in the U.S. illegally.
It also doesn’t change the fact that establishment media figures like Brown have spent years chiseling away at the English language by substituting politically correct euphemisms like “undocumented migrant” for solid, descriptive and true words like “illegal alien.”
The fact that they have done so on multiple fronts — aping the liberal terminology that calls the mutiliation of teenagers “gender-affirming care,” for instance, or refers to the destruction of babies in the womb as “reproductive rights” — is one of the chief reasons American trust in legacy media outlets is at an all-time low.
It’s not an accident that a Gallup poll released in February found trust in the media at its lowest point in the five decades the firm has been studying it, according to The Hill.
Do you trust the mainstream media?
And Miller demonstrated how much that shoddy, politically opportunistic language matters. It wasn’t the subject of Brown’s question that was so bad — if a guy’s being framed, a guy’s being framed. It was the fact that she used the egregious terminology “undocumented migrant” to pose it.
“When we use language that’s designed to obscure the truth, that’s not good faith,” Miller said. “An illegal alien is an illegal alien. They’re not an undocumented migrant.
“I don’t know the details of the assassination threat. All I can say is, based on what you are telling me, there’s an illegal alien, living in our country, who’s making menacing threats.
“Regardless of the facts or circumstances, we don’t want ’em here.
“We’re going to get to the bottom of it, and I will gladly come back on when I have more information to share with you.”
The Reyes question wasn’t the only contentious moment during the interview, the reliably liberal website Raw Story reported. Miller “steamrolled” Brown on a host of issues, as Raw Story put it.
And there comes a time when steamrolling reporters is exactly what needs to be done.
As press secretary, Leavitt has proven herself more than up to the task of dealing with the overwhelmingly liberal Washington correspondents corps on a daily basis. But there are moments when Miller’s brass-knuckles logic and absolute refusal to give quarter are what the Trump White House needs to punch its message through the media bias fog.
(CNN’s Jake Tapper, currently enjoying a round of faux respectability for finally reporting on the coverup of President Joe Biden’s mental decline, a coverup Tapper himself was part of, is one of the many media figures who’s felt Miller’s bite.)
And as the country saw again on Friday, when Miller gets his teeth into an issue, he doesn’t let it go until he draws blood.
Maybe that’s going to sink in for establishment media personalities one of these days. Pamela Brown might be able to clue them in.
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