Trump's Senior Adviser Turns His Combative Style On Reporter: SEE

SANTA MONICA, CA – Stephen Miller, White House adviser and speech writer, got into an argument with CNN reporter Jim Acosta over President Trump's immigration policy Wednesday during a press briefing. Miller apologized to Acosta just seven minutes after the exchange had ended.

The senior White House aide lobbed insults at a member of the White House press corps, which prompted Acosta to note that he'd just been called "ignorant" on television, according to Politico.

Some highlights of the altercation between the White House adviser and the reporter:

CNN Reporter Jim Acosta:

"The Statue of Liberty says 'Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.' It doesn’t say anything about speaking English or being able to be a computer programmer. Aren’t you trying to change what it means to be an immigrant coming into this country if you’re telling them you have to speak English? Can’t people learn how to speak English when they get here?"

White House adviser Stephen Miller:
"Right now, it’s a requirement that to be naturalized you have to speak English. So the notion that speaking English wouldn’t be a part of our immigration systems would be very ahistorical. Secondly, I don’t want to get off on a whole thing about history here, but the Statue of Liberty is a symbol of liberty lighting the world. It’s a symbol of American liberty lighting the world. The poem that you’re referring to was added later. It’s not actually a part of the original Statue of Liberty."

Miller goes on defending his position, responding to Acosta with: “Jim, I can honestly say I am shocked at your statement that you think that only people from Great Britain and Australia would know English. Actually, it reveals your cosmopolitan bias to a shocking degree."

Again, Miller continues to question Acosta, saying: “Jim, that is one of the most outrageous, insulting, ignorant and foolish things you’ve ever said...the notion that you think that this is a racist bill is so wrong and so insulting."

Acosta insisted that he never said the legislation was racist.

Miller also happens to be a product of Santa Monica High, the Los Angeles Times reported.

The ultra-conservative Miller, 31, seems an unlikely product of Santa Monica, a city known as a bastion of leftist liberalism that locals sometimes jokingly call the People's Republic of Santa Monica.

But it was the liberal environment at Santa Monica High that shaped Miller's political view. Miller didn't like the school's Spanish-language announcements or the festivals of minority cultures on campus. He saw it as the decline of the American educational system, according to the Times.

This didn't earn Miller many friends, but Miller saw it as a challenge to overcome to express his true beliefs.

"These challenges were some of the toughest I faced in life,” Miller told the Times in an interview. "When we think of nonconformity, we tend to imagine kids in the ’60s rebelling against 'the system.' This was my system. My establishment was a dogmatic educational system that often uniformly expressed a single point of view."

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