Top Trump White House aide Stephen Miller on Friday elicited disgust after he said that a beloved Christmas television special reminded him of his own personal animus toward immigrants.
Miller, often seen as the architect of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation policy, revealed in a post on X that he and his children had just watched “Christmas with The Martins and The Sinatras,” a one-off 1967 TV holiday special that featured singers Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra.
Miller then quickly pivoted from that to once again bash immigrants who come to the US.
“Imagine watching that,” Miller wrote, “and thinking America needed infinity migrants from the third world.”
As Rolling Stone politics reporter Nikki McCann Ramírez pointed out in response, both Martin and Sinatra both had parents who were first-generation Italian immigrants.
“Dean Martin was born Dino Paul Crocetti and gave himself a stage name because of braindead xenophobes like Stephen,” McCann Ramírez observed. “Sinatra was also a child of Italian immigrants. Imagine watching them and thinking immigrants didn’t build the culture you fetishize today.”
A similar point was made by civil rights attorney Sherrilyn Ifill in a post on Bluesky.
“Imagine watching Sinatra, son of Dolly and Antonini born in Genoa and Sicily, respectively,” she wrote, “and Martin, son of Gaetano and Angela, born in Montesilvano, Italy and Ohio respectively... and crusading against the value of children of immigrants to the US.”
Journalist and author Jeff Yang added some historical context to Miller’s remarks by noting that Italian immigrants in the early and middle decades of the 20th century faced many of the same stereotypes that Miller and his political allies ascribe to immigrants from Latin America.
“A reminder,” Yang wrote, while also posting old cartoons that featured racist depictions of Italians, “that Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra’s parents emigrated here during a period when Italians were considered to be a genetically inferior and criminal-minded underclass that Stephen Miller’s racist predecessors said should be excluded from America.”
Yang added that Frank Sinatra’s mother “ran an underground free abortion clinic, chained herself to a fence to fight for women’s suffrage, and was an extremely influential organizer for the Democratic Party.”
Princeton University historian Kevin Kruse promoted Yang’s thread that demonstrated Miller’s apparent ignorance of Dean and Sinatra’s family histories, and said it showed the Trump adviser is “a horrible racist in the sense that he is actually not that good at being racist.”
Tim Wise, a senior fellow at the African American Policy Forum, managed to find an upside to Miller’s holiday-themed anti-immigrant rant.
“The one silver lining in all this sickness is that one day your children will despise you as much as most of America already does,” he commented.
Film producer Franklin Leonard was even more succinct in his response to Miller.
“Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra would hate Stephen Miller and his politics,” he wrote.