Today’s quote comes to us from Donald Trump’s senior adviser, Stephen Miller, who made mincemeat of the snide, obnoxious New York Times Reporter, Glenn Thrush.
Miller had just announced President Trump’s position on immigration, and was taking questions.
He called on Thrush, who demanded statistics to show that low skilled immigrants took jobs from American citizens. Miller cited studies to support this premise, but then Thrush started demanding specific statistics from the studies – i.e. it wasn’t good enough for Miller to cite the studies’ conclusions, he had to quote the actual data from memory as well.
Miller tried to respond, but Thrush literally would not let him talk. He broke in on Miller over and over again…until Miller shut him up with this:
First of all, if you look at the premise, Glenn, of bringing in low-skilled labor, it’s based on the idea that there’s a labor shortage for lower skilled jobs. There isn’t. The number of people living in the United States in the working ages who aren’t working today is at a record high. One in four Americans or almost one in four Americans between the ages of 25 and 54 aren’t even employed…..The reality is that if you just (use) common sense, and yes, I will use common sense, the reason why some companies want to bring in more unskilled labor is because they know that it drives down wages and reduces labor costs. Our question is as a government is, to whom is our duty. Our duty is to U.S. citizens and U.S. workers to promote rising wages for them. If low-skilled immigration was an unalloyed good for the economy, then why have we been growing at 1.5 percent for the last 17 years at a time of unprecedented new low wage arrivals. They just — the facts speak for themselves. At some point, we’re accountable to reality.
Stephen Miller wins Quote Of The Day honors for withstanding Glenn Thrush’s obnoxious, childish behavior, and then handing Thrush’s ass to him with an intelligent, common-sense response.
Want to see the exchange in its entirety – including the part where Mr. Miller asks Thrush how he would like it if these workers were displacing people at the New York Times (which almost won Quote Of The Day honors instead the one I settled on)? OK, here it is:
Wow.
It couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.
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UPDATE: I didn’t see this until later, but Miller blew away the even more obnoxious Jim Acosta, from (surprise, surprise) CNN.
See/hear it for yourself:
Miller’s last sentence reminds me of a favorite saying I heard somewhere.
“You can ignore reality, but you can’t ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.”