Trump aide Stephen Miller's grandmom dies of Covid-19, White House says it's 'categorically false'
Stephen Miller, one of the advisers to President Donald Trump along with Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, is known for his ideological alignment with the Republican commander-in-chief. The 34-year-old is known for far-right and anti-immigration stances but the coronavirus pandemic has left his family angry with him and the administration that he is serving. The White House has tried to distance itself from the controversy.
On July 4, David Glosser, who happens to be the brother of Miller’s mother, announced on Facebook that their mother Ruth Glosser, 97, has died of Covid-19. Unlike his nephew, Glosser is a vocal critic of Trump and has even slammed Miller for his anti-immigrant policies. A retired neurophysicist, Glosser alleged that Trump’s initial “lack of response” to the pandemic led to the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans who could have survived. In an interview with Mother Jones, Glosser said: “With the death of my mother, I’m angry and outraged at [Miller] directly and the administration he has devoted his energy to supporting.” He also gave the media outlet a copy of her mother’s death certificate that mentions ‘respiratory arrest’ due to ‘Covid-19’ killed her.
White House denies Glosser's claim
The White House refused to buy Glosser’s version and one of his spokespersons told Mother Jones in a statement: “This is categorically false, and a disgusting use of so-called journalism when the family deserves privacy to mourn the loss of a loved one. His grandmother did not pass away from Covid. She was diagnosed with Covid in March and passed away in July so that timeline does not add up at all. His grandmother died peacefully in her sleep from old age. I would hope that you would choose not to go down this road.”
The spokesperson remained unfazed even when told that Ruth Glosser’s death certificate also showed Covid-19 to be the reason for her death, reiterating: “Again, this is categorically false. She had a mile [sic] case of Covid-19 in March. She was never hospitalized and made a full and quick recovery.”
This response, however, failed to deter Glosser to again wrote in an email: “Keeping the tragic facts about Covid deaths of our countrymen and women, young and old, from the American public serves no purpose other than to obscure the need for a coherent national, scientifically based, public health response to save others from this disease. My mother led a long, satisfying, productive life of family and community service. She had nothing to be ashamed of, and concealing her cause of death to offer ‘privacy’ to me, our family, her hundreds of relatives and friends, does nothing to assuage our regret at her loss.”
More than four million people have been affected by the virus in the US with the death toll crossing 144,000, the highest in the world.
Miller has played a part in the Trump administration’s controversial response to the Covid-19 pandemic. He was credited for helping write Trump’s Oval Office address made on March 11 in which he called the coronavirus a “foreign virus” and downplayed the damage that it caused then or set to cause. In that speech, he praised his administration’s actions against the growing pandemic and suspended traveling from Europe to the US, a move that was controversial. Miller was also accused of using the pandemic to promote anti-immigration measures.
Glosser told Mother Jones that he was not surprised to see Miller having a role in the Trump administration’s failure in dealing with the pandemic. He said his nephew had little ability to demonstrate empathy and conceded that his late mother was very disturbed when Trump became the president and was torn between her love for her grandchildren and horror at the role Miller played in the president’s allegedly racist policies.
The Glosser family had once fled from the Czarist persecution in what is today’s Belarus to the US and in 2018, David Glosser wrote a piece in Politico in which he slammed Miller as a “Immigration Hypocrite”.