Greg Sargent: Trump's First Big Fiasco Triggers Stephen Miller's Rage--Take Note Dems

[Dennis Donovan]

Greg Sargent - (archived: https://archive.ph/0RLFq ) Trump’s First Big Fiasco Triggers Stephen Miller’s Rage—Take Note Dems

January 29, 2025

PAY ATTENTION!
Trump’s First Big Fiasco Triggers Stephen Miller’s Rage—Take Note Dems
The Democrats finally started to find their legs after Trump’s spending freeze. The key lesson? Making sheer political noise about something does make a difference.

Admitting failure is anathema to the authoritarian leader, who is perpetually in danger of being diminished by those who are resentful of his glory—which is why White House adviser Stephen Miller is frantically searching for scapegoats to blame for the unfolding disaster around President Donald Trump’s massive freeze on federal spending. “Welcome to the first dumb media hoax of 2025,” Miller angrily tweeted on Tuesday night. “Leftwing media outright lied, and some people fell for the hoax.”

What Miller is actually angry about is that the media covered this fiasco aggressively and fairly. Miller insists that the press glossed over the funding pause’s supposed exemption for “aid and benefit programs.” But this is rank misdirection: The funding freeze, which is likely illegal, was indeed confusingly drafted and recklessly rolled out. This is in part what prompted the national outcry over the huge swath of programs that it threatened, Medicaid benefits included—and the media coverage that angered Miller.

All of which carries a lesson for Democrats: This is what it looks like when the opposition stirs and uses its power in a unified way to make a lot of what you might call sheer political noise. That can help set the media agenda, throw Trump and his allies on the defensive, and deliver defeats to Trump that deflate his cultish aura of invincibility.

“This has been a red-alert moment for weeks—but now no one can deny it,” Senator Chris Murphy, the Connecticut Democrat who has argued for an emergency footing against Trump, told me. “For my colleagues that didn’t want to cry wolf, the wolf is literally chomping at our leg right now.”

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