‘Wow’: Stunned TV Hosts Reacted in Real Time to Trump
“That was something else.”
For a few visceral minutes on Tuesday, television’s partisan lines dissolved as dumbfounded anchors reacted on-air — some in clearly personal ways — to Mr. Trump’s fiery remarks, in which he seemed to cast equal blame on white supremacists
and the demonstrators who marched against them during the weekend’s deadly clash in Charlottesville, Va.
On Fox News, normally a redoubt of Trump support, the 5 p.m. co-hosts of “The Specialists” shook their heads, with the anchor Guy Benson saying
that Mr. Trump “lost me” when he insisted that some “very fine people” participated in the white supremacist rally.
But she also offered a partial defense, saying of Mr. Trump, “He made some points that were factually right.”
Mr. Krauthammer retorted, “What Trump did today was a moral disgrace,” and said
that the president had broken from his predecessors who recognized the history of civil rights
Other Americans learned of the events through online sites more sympathetic to Mr.
Trump — including Breitbart News, which heralded the news conference as a triumph.
“To anybody out there watching today who is confused and thinks, ‘I thought
that the Klan and neo-Nazis and white supremacists, I thought there was no debate about this thing among civilized people’ — there isn’t a debate about it,” he said.