‘They’re Just Fools!’ Bill O’Reilly Unloads on Press for Bashing Trump Over Plane Switch

Bill O’Reilly went off on the “fools” upset by President Donald Trump swapping planes and using members of the press as unknowing decoys after receiving an Iranian threat while in Turkey for a NATO summit.

O’Reilly joined NewsNation’s Katie Pavlich on Wednesday evening and dismissed a collection of critics outraged over the actions by the president and his team.

The Washington Post was first to report on the plane switch, which occurred in Turkey after an Iranian threat against Trump’s life. The president switched planes and flew to London in a separate military plane while the press pool was left on Air Force One, unaware of what was happening.

O’Reilly said he wasn’t sure how credible the threat was, admitting it sounded a little “half-baked,” but he argued the president’s team made the only logical choice they could.

He said:

To me, it looks half-baked, but, I don’t know, I didn’t get the briefings. So what are you going to do? What’s your decision? You have to protect the president of the United States. You have to. Now, by protecting the president, you can’t tell all the press, hey, we got a red alert here, somebody’s trying to kill him. That’s not what you do. So I feel bad for anybody on that plane who might have been in harm’s way. I don’t believe they were in harm’s way because I don’t believe that this threat, from what I understand, reached that level. This was a cautionary move, which anybody would do. But you can’t be saying to the press, “Hey, the president’s not gonna be on because the plane may blow up.” I mean, come on, these people are fools. And the people that you just…they’re just fools. They don’t know how it works. They don’t care how it works. All they wanna do is bash Trump all day, every day.

Pavlich agreed, telling people in the press to “stop whining.”

“There were cabinet officials who stayed on the plane in addition to the press pool,” she said. “So, as you said, that’s the way it works. That’s the job you sign up for. And whenever you travel with the president, especially this president, you do put yourself at risk, and that’s part of the gig. So I think they should stop whining about it if they want to continue that line of work.”

Watch above via NewsNation.

Jason Cohen contributed to this report.

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