Pence Staffer Says Elaine Chao Is a Better Immigrant Than Ilhan Omar

There’s a key difference between Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao and Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), according to Darin Miller, the deputy press secretary for Vice President Mike Pence: Chao is a good immigrant who “worked hard and assimilated,” but Omar “seems content to criticize America at every turn.” That’s the gist of an email I received yesterday from Miller, shortly after publishing this roundup of some of the worst responses to President Donald Trump’s racist weekend tweetstorm.

Miller emailed me to say that he thought I had misconstrued the comments that Pence’s chief of staff, Marc Short, made to Fox News on Monday. In that interview, Short said that Trump can’t have “racist motives” because he appointed Chao—the former secretary of labor during the George W. Bush era and wife of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.)—as the secretary of transportation.