By Ben Zeisloft January 29, 2025 at 5:47pm
When CNN anchor Jake Tapper and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller sparred on air Tuesday about President Donald Trump’s freeze on certain federal spending, the top official caught the cable host in an embarrassing attempt at a rhetorical trap.
Miller noted to Tapper that the federal workforce is overwhelmingly left-wing, an obstacle that could inhibit Trump in his work to decrease spending, eliminate wokeness, and achieve other objectives for which he was elected.
But when he gave an example of a federal agency with an entrenched liberal bias, Tapper shot back the claim that he was trying to “demonize” those who voted for now-former Vice President Kamala Harris, causing Miller to laugh off the claim.
“We looked at USAID, as an example,” Miller told Tapper, reporting that “Ninety-eight percent of the workforce either donated to Kamala Harris or another left-wing candidate.”
“But now you’re demonizing an entire workforce as having …” Tapper began, leading Miller to interject.
“Wait, whoa whoa whoa whoa,” he said. “Did you just say that saying someone voted for Kamala Harris is demonizing them?”
Tapper tried explaining that Miller said “there’s a bias” in the federal workforce, but Miller said through incredulous laughter that Tapper had “used the word demonizing.”
“You just said that I’m demonizing somebody by saying they voted for Kamala Harris,” Miller continued.
Tapper then tried to pivot the discussion.
“Let’s get back on track,” the anchor said.
“I am on track. Let me stay on track,” Miller answered, continuing to make the point that the two million federal government employees are “overwhelmingly left-of-center.”
When Tapper tried to cut him off again, Miller said “I’ve got to finish the sentence” before further developing his point.
What we witnessed was an apparent breach in journalistic ethics, and a rather clumsy one at that.
Tapper desperately tried to negatively frame Miller’s legitimate and well-known point, that federal employees are demonstrably more left-wing than the broader public, and claimed Miller was trying to demonize half the country.
Miller then rightly laughed off that jab, and Tapper quickly tried to pivot.
CNN anchors seem not to have noticed that America’s media environment has entered a new era.
The people are sick of pundits and politicians shouting at each other over the airwaves and using lazy arguments to plaster one another with pejoratives, which is why they are tuning out from channels like CNN in massive numbers.
Miller seemed to want an actual conversation about the spending freeze, and Tapper seemed to want an attempt to portray an ideological rival as insincerely as possible.
Miller was not having it, and neither is America.
Ben Zeisloft is the editor of The Republic Sentinel, a conservative news outlet owned and operated by Christians. He is a former staff reporter for The Daily Wire and has written for The Spectator, Campus Reform, and other conservative news outlets. Ben graduated from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School with concentrations in business economics and marketing.
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