White House lauds Trump's 'Final Solution' as Stephen Miller named to top job

A White House spokeswoman praised President Donald Trump as “working towards a final solution” on Iran hours before he made Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller his chief of staff.

Anna Kelly, the White House principal deputy press secretary, made the remark Friday morning during an interview on LiveNOW from FOX.

The phrase “Final Solution” was a euphemism Nazi Germany’s leaders used for the mass murder of Europe’s Jews, according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust, the museum says.

That afternoon, Trump announced in a Truth Social post that Miller “will become the Chief of Staff starting Monday.” Susie Wiles, the current chief of staff, “will be moving over to the Trump Political Operation,” Trump wrote.

Kelly had attached the Nazis’ name for the Holocaust to Trump’s Iran policy on the same day Trump gave the White House’s top staff job to an aide whose critics have repeatedly compared him to Nazis.

The comment came in answer to a question about how Republicans could win back voters after Tuesday’s midterm elections.

“How exactly is President Trump looking to essentially convince voters that they should turn back over to the Republican Party?” LiveNOW from FOX’s Josh Breslow asked. He added that Vice President JD Vance had said some Republicans “voted Democrat because of things like the war with Iran.”

“He’s acknowledged that perhaps the Iran war had an impact on the results, and I think the president deserves a tremendous amount of credit,” Kelly replied. “He is truly the most courageous president in my lifetime.”

“That’s something that he continues to address and is working towards a final solution because, as he says, Iran can never have a nuclear weapon to threaten our homelands,” Kelly said moments later, apparently unaware of the gravity of the phrase.

Kelly’s phrase echoed a charge Miller’s critics have made repeatedly, and by one former official’s rule, words that fit an existing charge are the kind that stick.

Former New York City Public Advocate Mark Green wrote in a 2010 Observer column that a gaffe hurts most when it fits “a prior negative narrative.”

“He has been called a Nazi, a neo-Nazi, a white supremacist …,” The Atlantic reported of Miller in January.

Critics compared Miller’s speech at right-wing activist Charlie Kirk’s memorial service in September 2025 to a 1932 speech by Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels, Raw Story reported.

In June, after Miller posted “Change the voters, change the country” on X, journalist Mehdi Hasan called it “straight up Nazi rhetoric,” according to Raw Story.

“The lazy and clearly false hit on him is to call him these disgusting names,” White House Communications Director Steven Cheung told The Atlantic about the Nazi accusations. Miller declined to comment for that story.

Miller’s own family would likely have been killed in that genocide had it stayed in Europe, according to his uncle. David Glosser wrote in a 2018 Politico Magazine essay that the family “likely would have been murdered by the Nazis” if its patriarch had waited to leave Europe instead of arriving at Ellis Island in 1903.

Trump’s first administration condemned Iran’s supreme leader for using the same phrase in 2020.

In May 2020, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s website published a poster that used the phrase “final solution” about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Radio Farda reported.

“The leader of the world’s top sponsor of terrorism and anti-Semitism … now has invoked the Nazi call for the Final Solution,” then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in response, according to the International Crisis Group.

As principal deputy press secretary, Kelly speaks for the same president whose secretary of state condemned that phrase six years ago.

“I’ll just say this president loves this country,” Kelly said as the interview ended.