Nicolle Wallace and her panel Friday trashed President Donald Trump for his comments that he doesn’t blame Kim Jong Un for the death of Otto Warmbier.
Trump claimed he was “misinterpreted” in tweets this afternoon, but his tweets only said that he holds North Korea responsible, not Kim Jong Un specifically––the crux of the issue and what Warmbier’s parents took issue with in their statement today.
Wallace was stunned by his tweets “basically disputing the account of a family that lost everything.”
She asked why Mike Pompeo and John Bolton aren’t emphasizing to Trump that he’s talking about a murderous dictator––before asking why that would need to be something they’d have to tell him in the first place.
PoliticsNation host Al Sharpton called the comments “atrocious on its face” and New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg said, “There is no individual American to whom he will be loyal and to whom he will stick up for” (citing the case of Jamal Khashoggi as well).
Former US attorney Joyce Vance noted how Trump keeps saying nice things about dictators that “he would never spare” for political rivals like Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Former VP chief of staff Ron Klain called it “the art of the squeal” while former DOJ spokesman Matt Miller said this:
“I felt so sorry for the Warmbier family watching the president’s
words. They obviously suffered the most unspeakable tragedy that any parent can suffer and to have the leader of their own government add to their pain by making excuses for the dictator who is responsible for that loss must be just really beyond the pale… There are two ways to compromise Donald Trump. One is to spend a lot of money at his hotels and his resorts, and the other is to flatter his ego. And foreign government leaders, foreign dictators especially, have figured this out. He’s an easy mark. And so whether it’s by telling him he won the election on his own and not because of Russian interference like Vladimir Putin did, whether it’s throwing a big party for him in Saudi Arabia and plastering his image on the side of a building like the Saudis did, or whether it’s sending him beautiful letters and telling him how great he is like Kim did, what it means is at the end, the president will take your side even over a grieving American family and it is a ream tragedy.”
You can watch above, via MSNBC.
[image via screengrab]