Adviser: Critics ‘detest’ nation
Miller says Trump’s 2016 remarks don’t compare to Dems’
BERKELEY HEIGHTS, N.J. — A top White House adviser said Sunday that there was a “huge difference” between Donald Trump’s criticisms of America during the 2016 presidential campaign and the critiques by four Democratic congresswomen of color with whom Trump is feuding.
Stephen Miller told “Fox News Sunday” that Trump’s words were part of a political campaign to put America first and were not intended to sow discord, while the first-term lawmakers are bent on expressing “anti-american sentiment.”
There is no comparison between agitating for stricter enforcement of immigration laws and better trade deals, Miller said, and threatening to undermine the American way of life, as he asserted the lawmakers want to do.
“They detest America as it exists,” he said.
Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-MD., told ABC’S “This Week” that the congresswomen “love their country and they work very hard and they want to move us toward that more perfect union that our Founding Fathers talked about.”
The four first-term lawmakers — Democratic Reps. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Alexandria Ocasio-cortez of New York, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan — have said they’re fighting to help make America live up to its promise.
Three of the four lawmakers sit on the House Oversight and Reform Committee, which Cummings chairs.
“When you disagree with the president, suddenly … you’re a bad person. Our allegiance is not to the president. Our allegiance is to the Constitution of the United States of America and to the American people,” Cummings said.
Ocasio-cortez tweeted at the president Sunday, saying she and her colleagues fight for such things and living wages and basic human rights while Trump “hurt immigrant kids” and put charter school advocate Betsy Devos in charge of federal education policy.
Trump fired back at the four congresswomen on Sunday, tweeting from his central New Jersey home, “I don’t believe the four Congresswomen are capable of loving our Country.”
The president ignited a firestorm of debate a week ago with a tweet in which he said, “Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”
Omar is a naturalized citizen who fled Somalia with her family when she was a child. The other three congresswomen were born in the United States.