Trump White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt spewed stunningly vile hatred about Democrats that went unchallenged and unremarked-upon by Fox News anchors who saw nothing deplorable at all in her rant.
Queens Assemblyman and New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani (D-NY) sat for a 25-minute interview this week with Fox News anchor Martha MacCallum that earned praise and sparked outrage from Mamdani’s critics.
On Thursday afternoon’s edition of Fox News Channel’s America Reports, Leavitt responded to the interview by accusing the Democratic base of being “Hamas terrorists, illegal aliens, and violent criminals.”
She made the charge twice — drawing only silence and a cheerful change of subject from anchors Sandra Smith and John Roberts:
WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY KAROLINE LEAVITT: Well, that’s a classic case of, I don’t want to answer the question because I know it’s wildly unpopular.And the Democrat Party, this interview proved that the Democrat party’s main constituency are made up of Hamas terrorists, illegal aliens, and violent criminals.(SILENCE FROM JOHN ROBERTS AND SANDRA SMITH)That is who the Democrat Party is catering to.Not the Trump administration and not the White House and not The Republican Party, who is standing up for law abiding Americans, not just across the country, but around the world.And that’s why President Trump worked so hard to end this conflict in the Middle East. It was President Trump who brought
home the last living hostage out of Gaza, Edan Alexander, who has since been reunited with his family in New Jersey.It’s President Trump, who is actually pushing for peace. And I would like to add, where are all of the Free Palestine protesters? It’s president Trump who freed Palestine, literally, and they are now very much quiet, because why? They can’t stand President Trump.And that is the basis of the Democrat Party today. They don’t stand for anything except for catering to their far left base, which as I said, includes anti-Semites, includes Hamas terrorists, illegal aliens, and violent criminals who they want to let off freely to roam in American streets.JOHN ROBERTS: Uh, Karoline, let me get back to the shutdown if I could —
Conspicuously absent was any hint of outrage or even request for clarification over a barrage of slurs far worse than when Hillary Clinton accurately described some Trump fans as “deplorables” — “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it.”
Setting aside that Clinton probably underestimated when she said “half,” conservatives adopted the talking point that she had insulted “half of the country” — a wild inaccuracy. Only 26 percent of voting-age Americans voted for Trump, which means she accurately insulted about an eighth of the country.
But the mainstream media also adopted that talking point, and recycled it over and over again, every time a Democrat accurately and negatively
Nowhere was the “Deplorables Effect” outrage more palpable than on Fox News, where anchors, hosts, and guests consistently jump on any hint of criticism aimed at Trump supporters as a country-splitting smear.
It may seem predictable, then, that Leavitt’s vile and baseless smear would fly by this pair, but Fox News also prides itself on a wall of separation between “hard news” and whatever the rest of it is. That’s kind of the whole point of having Mamdani on to begin with.
In order to behave as credible journalists, they would have had to, at a minimum, treat the attack the same way they would from a Democratic press secretary. Would Jen Psaki have bathed in silence if she had called Trump’s main constituency some Mad-Libs jumble of resistance talking points — “racist mushroom-worshipping pedophile-loving adjudicated rapist-humpers,” for example?
Unlikely. But they could have earned some respect by at least raising an eyebrow and asking literally any followup.
Watch above via Fox News Channel’s America Reports.