NPR Doesn't Seem Much Inclined to Call Stephen Miller What He Is

Outlets have been slow to call the racists in the Trump administration what they are. But when you’re lagging behind the always middle-of-the-road Associated Press in joining the pack, you’ve got a problem.

On NPR’s Morning Edition today, the show included a segment about Trump henchman Stephen Miller, which didn’t once stopping to mention that he’s a white nationalist.

The segment opened up innocuously enough, with host David Greene playing a clip of Miller on Fox News defending Trump’s threat to close the U.S.-Mexico border, saying, emphasis mine, “You cannot conceive of a nation without a strong, secure border. It is fundamental and essential to the idea of sovereignty and national survival to have control over who enters and doesn’t enter the country.”

A perfect segue into Miller’s white nationalist agenda to preserve the nation as the home for white immigrants above others, right? Wrong.

Instead, Greene asked writer McKay Coppins, who interviewed Miller last year for a piece in the Atlantic, how “shadowy” Miller’s influence is on the president, and what Miller is really like.

“He comes across on television like this almost kind of self-conscious super villain,” Coppins said. “It’s clear to me…that he enjoys, almost delights, in the provocation.”

Greene went on to ask Coppins about Miller’s history of aggressive “provocation.” Coppins said Jared and Ivanka Kushner are to the left of Miller on immigration, leading the president to constantly turn to Miller for advice that aligns more with his base.

But any exploration of the notion that Miller’s immigration hardliner strategies are rooted in a racist motivation to preserve a majority-white population of a country that was founded upon the acceptance of immigrants, but now turns its back on them when they’re people of color? Nowhere to be found.

Greene also didn’t actually mention any of what Miller has reportedly been responsible for within the Trump administration, either—most recently, the ousting of multiple high-ranking officials for not wanting to implement immigration policies as racist and xenophobic as he favors, including measures like shutting down the border and re-implementing zero-tolerance family separations.

And that’s not even including the policies that he’s had—or reportedly pushed for—a hand in implementing, like Trump’s Muslim ban, ending the Diversity Visa Lottery program, DACA, and TPS, denaturalizing U.S. citizens who supposedly “lied” on their applications, and cutting legal immigration by half over the next 10 years. (We’ve reached out to NPR for comment and will update if we hear back.)

Keep fighting the good fight, NPR.