Stephen Miller, the Trump White House staffer, has been in the news of late as various reports have called him the mastermind of the recent purge of Trump administration Homeland Security personnel. Miller is known for his hardline stance on immigration.
On Tuesday Joe Scarborough, the host of MSNBC’s Morning Joe , said that he was once asked by the president to lay off of public criticism of Miller.
Per Splinter News , at some point early on in the Trump presidency, Scarborough once received a phone call from Trump asking him to leave Miller alone.
“You’re not being nice to this poor young kid, you’re killing him every day,” the president told Scarborough, the host said.
Miller is currently 33-years-old.
It’s the sort of thing the president has reportedly been known to say. Following the revelations related to the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr. and his alleged role in the infamous Trump Tower meeting, Trump referred to his son, a father of five who was in his late 30s at the time, as “a good boy,” per The Washington Examiner .
Scarborough and his co-host/fiancee, Mika Brzezinski, were close with Trump at the time of the 2016 campaign and during the early days of his presidency, but Trump later fell out with them. On Twitter , the president tweeted in mid-2017 that Brzezinski was “bleeding badly from a facelift” when they had visited the president’s Mar-a-Lago estate for a holiday party.
The Morning Joe host added in the segment that the call about Miller was one of the only times he’s heard Trump directly defend a staffer and that it was the last time he and Trump had spoken.
Joe Scarborough: Trump Yelled at Me Once For Criticizing ‘Poor Young Kid’ Stephen Miller https://t.co/bdNee0V32h pic.twitter.com/JMvqrpmWte
— Beggars can’t be leaders (@Thewanharian) April 9, 2019
Miller, a former staffer to Representative Michele Bachmann and former Senator Jeff Sessions, joined Trump during the 2016 campaign and has been one of the few White House staffers to remain throughout the presidency. Miller is reportedly seen as the architect of both the family separation policy and the current movement to get rid of current heads of various security-related agencies, including the recent pulling of the nominee to head ICE.
The staffer, who came from a Jewish family from Santa Monica, California, has been denounced both by his childhood rabbi (per The Washington Post ) and by an uncle.
“Stephen actually enjoys seeing those pictures at the border,” an outside White House adviser said of Miller last summer, per Vanity Fair. “He’s a twisted guy, the way he was raised and picked on. There’s always been a way he’s gone about this. He’s Waffen-SS.”