Fox’s John Roberts Lauds Trump’s ‘Cheeky’ Pearl Harbor Dig: ‘People Are Applauding Him’

Fox News anchor John Roberts laughed out loud when recounting President Donald Trump’s Pearl Harbor crack to Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi in the Oval Office on Thursday.

Speaking to White House correspondent Jacqui Heinrich, Roberts began, “Jacqui, bring me back to the exchange that President Trump had in the Oval Office with Japanese Prime Minister Takaichi.”

“When a Japanese reporter asked, ‘Well, why didn’t you inform your allies, including Japan, that you were going to attack Iran?’ The president had a rather cheeky response that I think a lot of people are applauding him for,” Roberts said with a chuckle.

During the exchange, Trump quipped about Japan’s surprise kamikaze attack on the U.S. naval base in Oahu, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941:

TRUMP: One thing, you don’t want to signal too much. When we went in, we went in very hard and did not tell anybody about it because we wanted the surprise. Who knows better about surprise than Japan? Why did you not tell me about Pearl Harbor? Okay, right? He is asking me — now you believe in surprise, I think, much more so than us, and we had to surprise them, and we did. And because of that surprise we knocked out in the first two days, probably knocked out 50% of — and much more than we anticipated. So if I go and tell everybody about it, it’s no longer a surprise, right?

Heinrich responded to Roberts, saying, “You are getting reaction pretty much down partisan lines, if you look on X there are Democrats melting down about it and say it wasn’t appropriate. There are a lot of Republicans who think that this was classic Trump. Just sort of a different way of diplomacy, and he talks in a different and often more effective way than people who come the regular diplomatic route.”

Heinrich continued, “I was watching the prime minister’s face, and she was visibly uncomfortable in the moment.”

Watch the clip above via Fox News.

New: The Mediaite One-Sheet "Newsletter of Newsletters"
Your daily summary and analysis of what the many, many media newsletters are saying and reporting. Subscribe now!