It was an odd TV moment: Stephen Miller, President Trump’s deputy chief of staff, was answering a CNN anchor’s question from the White House lawn on Monday when he stopped midsentence, falling silent and blinking at the camera.

“Stephen. Stephen. Hey, Stephen, can you hear me?” the anchor, Boris Sanchez, asked from his studio in Washington, before the network cut to a commercial break.

A few minutes later, Mr. Miller was back onscreen, and the interview resumed; Mr. Sanchez apologized and told viewers that “some wires got crossed.” CNN said a technical mishap had occurred.

But by that point, the internet was doing what the internet does.

“Wow, Stephen Miller absolutely did not have a glitch on live TV,” declared one TikTok user whose video about the exchange had been liked more than 135,000 times as of Wednesday, adding that it seemed Mr. Miller had said something that he “was not supposed to say.”

“Clearly someone hit the panic button in his earpiece,” wrote a user on X, in a post that has recorded about 1.7 million views.