Stephen Miller watched an old Christmas special with his children over the holidays—then logged into social media to rant about immigrants.
The top White House aide, 40, had a bizarre takeaway from watching The Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra Family Christmas Show, an iconic holiday special that first aired in 1967.
“Watched the Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra Family Christmas with my kids,” Miller wrote in an X post on Friday. “Imagine watching that and thinking America needed infinity migrants from the third world.”
The beloved Christmas show features the legendary singers-slash-actors performing a medley of holiday hits, including “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” and “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” The two stars, who were both children of Italian immigrants, were then joined by their respective families in a heartwarming show full of laughter and dancing.
But Miller, the architect of the Trump administration’s hardline immigration agenda, appeared to be too busy thinking about the stars’ family histories to focus on any of the fun.
Sinatra’s parents moved to America from Sicily in the 1890s, a period when the southern Italian city was deeply impoverished. Martin’s father immigrated to the U.S. in the early 1900s from Abruzzo, a poor region in central Italy at the time.
The U.S. didn’t exactly welcome Italian immigrants with open arms. Historian Jennifer Guglielmo wrote that Italians were viewed as “racially suspect,” while the American press described them as “swarthy” and “kinky-haired,” and people on the streets hurled insults like “white n-----.”
“Do you spend a single waking moment not seething over how much you hate immigrants?” political scientist Richard Hanania asked Miller in reply to his tweet.
“They were both the children of impoverished immigrants, you infinitely repulsive little racist ghoul,” Emmy-winning writer/comedian Brian Stack added.
The White House did not immediately return a request for comment on Friday.
Sinatra was particularly outspoken against “race- and color-haters,” whom he blasted in a 1991 op-ed for the Los Angeles Times titled “The Haters and Bigots Will Be Judged: Some words from a ‘saloon singer’ to those who still haven’t figured out the whole point of America.”
“As for the others, those cross-burning bigots to whom mental slavery is alive and well, I don’t envy their trials in the next world, where their thoughts and words and actions will be judged by a jury of One,” the iconic crooner wrote.
“Who in the name of God are these people anyway, the ones who elevate themselves above others? America is an immigrant country,” Sinatra continued. “Maybe not you and me, but those whose love made our lives possible, or their parents or grandparents,” he went on. “America was founded by these people, who were fed up with other countries. Those weren’t tourists on the Mayflower—they were your families and mine, following dreams that turned out to be possible dreams.”
