The wife of the architect of Donald Trump’s mass deportation policy made an embarrassing blunder while attempting to defend Melania Trump’s command of English.
Katie Miller, a conservative podcaster who is married to top Trump aide Stephen Miller, was apparently trying to argue that the first lady, a former model from Slovenia, is the “good” type of immigrant, unlike Democratic Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar, who fled Somalia’s civil war as a child.
“Melanie Trump loves her country and has devoted her life to serving it,” Miller wrote in a post on X. “You can’t say the same for Ilhan Omar who openly hates America and laughs off the theft of a billion dollars by her own Somali people.”
Her replies were quickly flooded with users asking, “Who’s Melanie?”
Miller had been responding to a post from progressive influencer Alex Cole saying, “Ilhan Omar speaks MUCH better English than Melania. Just sayin.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to Miller for comment.
Earlier this month, President Trump renewed his long-running attacks on Omar, who spent four years in a refugee camp in Kenya before being granted asylum and moving to the U.S., later becoming a citizen in 2000 at age 17.
During a Cabinet meeting on Dec. 3, the president began ranting about Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Omar, whom he called “incompetent” and “terrible,” and complaining about Somali immigrants in the state.
The tirade came after news broke that some members of Minnesota’s Somali diaspora had allegedly defrauded the state by billing for social services that were never provided.
“Ilhan Omar is garbage. Her friends are garbage. These aren’t people that work. These are people that say, ‘Let’s go, come on, let’s make this place great.’ These are people that do nothing but complain,” he said.
Less than a week later, he took the stage at a rally in Pennsylvania and announced a “permanent pause” on migration from “hellholes” like Somalia, and once again raged against Omar until the crowd began chanting, “Send her back!”
“Trump’s obsession with me is beyond weird. He needs serious help,” the lawmaker responded on social media. “Since he has no economic policies to tout, he’s resorting to regurgitating bigoted lies instead. He continues to be a national embarrassment.”
The president has a long history of attacking immigrants, despite having four children with two different women who came to the U.S. as immigrants from Eastern Europe: the late Ivana Trump, with whom the president shared Don Jr., Eric, and Ivanka, and Melania, mother of 19-year-old Barron Trump.
Melania Trump, 55, came to the U.S. in 1996 and was working as a model when she met Trump in 1998. She also started a jewelry brand in 2009.
As first lady, she has been largely missing in action, surfacing briefly for traditional White House duties like welcoming the official Christmas tree, and to support a bill banning deepfake porn.
Lately she’s also taken upon herself to push artificial intelligence on students as head of the “Presidential AI Challenge,” though President Trump admitted at a White House ball Thursday that he had no idea what policy initiatives his wife was working on.
Much of her time appears to be spent on her personal business ventures, including promoting a meme coin and launching a production company to back a $40 million documentary about her life being produced by Amazon MGM Studios.
