‘Appalling’: Reporters Call Out Trump for Reveling in ‘Beautiful Sight’ of MSNBC’s Ali Velshi Being Shot With Rubber Bullet

Reed RichardsonSep 22nd, 2020, 10:20 pm
 

At a Pennsylvania campaign rally, President Donald Trump went on an extended rant where he gleefully recalled the “beautiful sight” of an MSNBC reporter getting shot in the leg by a rubber bullet and reveled in images of riot police ignoring reporters’ press credentials and violently tossing them to the ground.

Speaking in Moon Township on Tuesday, Trump repeated a virulently anti-press diatribe from last Friday, where he had singled out MSNBC reporter Ali Velshi for mockery after he was knocked down by a law enforcement projectile while reporting on the ground from Minneapolis in late May. During the broadcast when Velshi was shot, there was no evidence of violence from protestors before the police opened fire and swept through the crowd, as the MSNBC reporter noted in a tweet to the president.

“Remember that beautiful sight?” Trump said again in Pennsylvania, before misidentifying Velshi’s network. “The street was a mess. That idiot reporter from CNN got hit on the knee with a canister of tear gas. and he went down. ‘

“‘I’ve been hit, I’ve been hit!'” Trump said, mocking Velshi “The one with the shaved head, maybe I will do that one day. I’ll give it up. Gut he went down and he didn’t like it. He was hit.”

“‘Police brutality!’ Remember that?” Trump added, making up the cries from MSNBC reporter.

Trump returned to his theme of basking in displays of physical force against the press moments later, when recounting how National Guard troops tossed to the ground reporters who were covering the protests in Minneapolis.

“They grabbed them, they grabbed them, they grabbed them. They were grabbing them left and right,” Trump happily recounted. “Sometimes they grabbed one guy — ‘I’m a reporter! I’m a reporter!’ — get out of here. They throw him aside like he was little bag of popcorn.”

“I mean honestly, when he watch the crap that we’ve all had to take so long,” Trump added, clearly referencing his hatred of the press, which he has previously indicated was worth targeting for violence and routinely labeled an “enemy of the people.”

“You don’t want to do that,” Trump claimed, “but when you see it, it’s actually see a beautiful sight. It’s a beautiful sight.”

The prospect of the President of the United States so openly and enthusiastically endorsing police violence against journalists while dismissing their Constitutionally protected role in our democracy prompted both disgust and condemnation from reporters on Twitter.

Watch the video above, via C-Span 3.

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