'I literally gasped': Stephen Miller's wife's racist joke blows away legal analyst

A social media post by the wife of Donald Trump adviser Stephen Miller took center stage on MS NOW on Friday morning as part of a discussion over a controversial Supreme Court ruling on Thursday.

On “Morning Joe,” the panel was discussing the majority opinion from Justice Sam Alito, who wrote that he saw nothing racist in Trump’s outrageous comments about Somali and Haitian immigrants, which earned the conservative jurist a lecture from Justice Elena Kagan in her dissent.

As the segment was wrapping up, co-host Jontahn Lemire asked legal analyst Lisa Rubin about Katie Miller inserting herself into the national conversation with her remark on X.

“Lisa, I'm going to go to the Rev [Al Sharpton] with a question, but before I do, Katie Miller, the wife of Stephen Miller, who is the architect of this policy, tell our viewers her response.”

“Yeah, I mean this was racist going in and it was racist coming out,” Rubin replied, “Because Katie Miller yesterday wrote that his was a ‘great day for the dogs and cats of Springfield.’”

“When I read that at my desk, I literally gasped so loudly that half the reporters in my line of the newsroom looked around to see what I was reacting to,” she recalled.

“A reminder, of course, it was Springfield, Ohio — that was the conspiracy theory ahead of the 2024 election, that Haitians were attacking the pets of that hometown,” Lemire offered before adding, “Stephen Miller did a victory lap yesterday. Other voices on the right, Megan Kelly in particular, said some pretty loathsome racist things you know, about this celebration, celebrating this decision.”

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Former National Park rangers are organizing a national pushback against an order from President Donald Trump that has stripped dozens of historical exhibits from federal land, launching a public education campaign just as the country prepares to mark its 250th anniversary.

The effort traces back to Elizabeth Kerwin, a former exhibit planner at West Virginia's Harpers Ferry National Historic Park, who spent years building a memorial highlighting hundreds of enslaved people connected to the site, best known for John Brown's 1859 raid on a federal armory, reported NPR.

"Instead, the old stone building that was set to house Kerwin's exhibit has sat empty," NPR reported. "The door, locked. Its windows boarded up. The only indicator of what might have been is a green sign at the top of the entryway. 'African-American History,' it says. The would-be exhibit is one of dozens that were scrubbed from federal land by the Trump administration as the nation prepared to honor the 250th anniversary of the United States."

The exhibit is one of dozens removed nationwide after Trump signed an executive order calling for "restoring truth and sanity to American history," which accused critics of pushing a "distorted narrative" that recasts the nation's legacy as "inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed."

In response, Kerwin and other former park employees formed a group called Resistance Rangers, part of a broader coalition known as America 433+. On Juneteenth, they held their first public teach-in at Harpers Ferry, distributing banned pamphlets and discontinued educational booklets to park visitors.

"It's really disturbing to see that there's two educational booklets for children from different Black history sites that are no longer being printed," said Cathy Fulkerson, a 69-year-old visitor from New Hampshire who attended the event.

The National Parks Conservation Association has sued the Department of the Interior over the order, and a federal judge ruled the government must halt further removals and restore exhibits already taken down. U.S. District Judge Angel Kelley ordered 52 items reinstated at more than 30 federal sites by the week of June 22, ahead of the July 4 anniversary. The judge wrote that "history cannot be faithfully told while excluding the experiences of communities" central to the nation's story.

Affected exhibits span topics including climate change at Glacier National Park, the Selma to Montgomery voting rights march, and accounts of slave rebellions and Indigenous massacres.

It remains unclear whether Kerwin's unopened exhibit will be restored under the ruling. Regardless, the Resistance Rangers say they won't wait for officials to act. The group plans a national protest this Saturday, gathering signatures for a "declaration of interdependence" supporting safety, dignity, and equal access to opportunity.

For Kerwin, the mission is personal — she hopes her work preserves a fuller national memory for her 13-year-old son and others like him. "They are America," she said of the previously unnamed enslaved people her research uncovered.

President Donald Trump's crowd-size anxiety exploded back into view when his Great American State Fair kickoff event drew a strikingly thin turnout.

The 80-year-old president claimed 45,000 people showed up on the National Mall to watch Lee Greenwood and the FBI director's girlfriend perform, but media accounts estimated about 1,000 attendees – fewer than some outdoor movie screenings – had actually turned out, and The New Republic's Greg Sargent said on his "Daily Blast" podcast that Trump can't handle that kind of disappointment.

"Donald Trump isn’t calling for people to show up at this thing on July 4 solely because he wants adulation and big crowds, right?" Sargent said. "Although of course he does want those things, and it drives him absolutely insane when he doesn’t get them and when others get larger crowds. This is just a fact of Trump’s tortured psyche – we know this."

Fox News heavily hyped the state fair's kickoff and placed Trump front and center in the celebration, but Gertz noted the conservative network barely covered the event after the poor attendance became clear.

"It’s been as sparse as the crowd," Gertz said. "For all of the lead-up that they had, on the day of the event, the morning after was extremely quiet. They’ve spent very little time discussing any of this. Which I think tracks with their effort to shield viewers from understanding how unpopular the president is. If you can only get like a thousand people to come to this rally, then he must be in pretty sad straits."

Trump's response to the turnout reminded Gertz of one-time White House press secretary Sean Spicer telling reporters that his 2017 inauguration was the largest crowd in history, when it was obvious that Barack Obama had a much higher turnout.

"It’s the sort of thing that drives Trump crazy," Gertz said. "He can’t stand that he had such a small audience, and I think, as the clip you played shows, he’s voicing that a little bit. I think we can expect some sort of push to try to get more people to show up for the big July 4 event that’s planned."

"Though I have to be honest with you, Washington, D.C. on July 4 is not a pleasant place to be," he added, "and they are predicting an extreme heat wave late next week. So we’ll see how all of this goes. But it doesn’t seem likely to turn out well."

Jimmy Fallon spent a second straight night ribbing President Donald Trump's new Great American State Fair on Thursday, saving his sharpest jab for a petting zoo bit aimed squarely at the president's cognitive fitness.

The "Tonight Show" host took aim at the fair, which opened to the public on Thursday on the National Mall as part of America's 250th anniversary celebrations, rattling off a list of fictional attractions inspired by Trump.

"The fair has everything," Fallon said, according to Mediaite. "There's a giant Ferris wheel, there's a carousel. They even have a Trump approval rating roller coaster, which has the biggest drop in history."

He kept going with a swipe at the president's physician, joking that organizers had also "hired Trump's doctor to guess what you want your weight to be. '150?' 'Sure.'"

Fallon told the audience that fairgoers could visit "a petting zoo with some of the animals Trump named during his last cognitive test." Imitating the president, he deadpanned: "Horse, duck, stripey horse."

The joke landed against a backdrop of Trump's own repeated boasting about his performance on cognitive screenings, including the MoCA dementia assessment.

During a May 1 rally at The Villages, solidly GOP-leaning retirement enclave in central Florida, Trump abandoned his One Big Beautiful Bill sales pitch to revisit the tests.

"I don't think Obama could pass it. Biden? Give me a break," he told the crowd, describing how he was asked to name animals. "You know, the first question's very easy. It's a lion, a giraffe, a bear, and a shark. They say, 'Which one is the bear?' And everybody says ohhh– 30 questions. Very standard, very standard test, but very tough around those last 10 questions."

Trump also told the audience that one doctor had described him as "a mad genius."

The president's mental fitness has drawn formal scrutiny on Capitol Hill.

On April 14, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) introduced legislation to create a 17-member commission empowered to assess whether a sitting president is fit to discharge the duties of the office under the 25th Amendment. The bill was offered with 50 Democratic co-sponsors but faces no path to a vote in the Republican-controlled House.