Fox’s Chris Wallace grills Stephen Miller over whistleblower in disastrous interview for Trump
Every Sunday morning Donald Trump sends his minions to the TV news talk shows to defend the previous week’s worth of outrages.
We all knew that this week they would be facing perhaps the most difficult sets of questions thus far in the administration’s history, but who could have predicted that some of the most relentlessly probing and critical questioning would be taking place on the airwaves of Fox News, the normally singularly most friendly forum for the Trump functionaries to spew their spin.
White House Advisor Stephen Miller — the man who wants to make America white again through his advocacy of immigration policies thus far largely deemed illegal by the courts and immoral by the majority of Americans opposed to separating families and putting children in cages — faced an unexpectedly harsh interrogation by Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace over the scandal surrounding Trump’s efforts to once again solicit foreign assistance in finding damaging information on his political opponents to aid his election campaign.
Wallace — one of the few Fox News hosts considered an actual journalist rather than a paid Trump cheerleader regurgitating the White House talking points as facts rather than partisan opinion — challenged the angry and defensive Miller in an interview marked by the right-wing advisor’s constant evasion of direct questions in favor of spewing the same Trump company line that the world has already seen after the White House accidentally sent a copy of their talking points to congressional Democrats.
Aaron Rupar of Vox News watched the interview and posted clips of Chris Wallace’s most persistent attempts to get a straight answer from Miller when he asked questions about the Ukraine scandal and the Trump administration’s actions surrounding it. It’s worth watching each video clip to get a sense of how a real journalist tries to get at the facts when an interview subject tries as hard as possible to stick to their canned partisan responses in the face of all truth and reason.
"This is an exercise in obfuscation" — Stephen Miller has no response when Chris Wallace presses him about why Trump went against his own Pentagon & State Department and withheld Ukrainian aid pic.twitter.com/kP6ht7LwSJ
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 29, 2019
Wow. Wallace fit in a couple final owns even as he wrapped up the interview. What an embarrassing performance by Miller. pic.twitter.com/UCSrQFIblJ
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 29, 2019
The evasion and presentation of an alternate reality that Stephen Miller exemplifies in his interview with Wallace presage the performances we are likely to see when Trump administration officials are hauled before Congressional committees to testify about the perversion of presidential power involved in the Ukraine scandal in the weeks to come.
Bravo to Chris Wallace for upholding journalistic standards even in the most hostile environment for any sort of truth concerning Donald Trump and his cohorts. His relentless efforts to elicit answers to his actual questions and his vocal refusal to accept Miller’s misdirections as acceptable responses prove that even Fox News can’t ignore the importance of this latest scandal and that at least a few of its anchors are unwilling to merely parrot Trump’s denials in the face of legitimate accusations of criminal behavior.
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Original reporting by Aaron Rupar at Vox via Twitter.
