Fox & Friends Amplifies — And Fails to Fact Check — Trump’s False Claim That Democrats Want to Execute Babies
Former President Donald Trump returned to lying about the Democratic party’s position that he claims is in favor of killing babies after they are born. It’s a dangerous falsehood, but Fox & Friends aired the clip and nary once explained to viewers how it was entirely wrong.
At 7 a.m, Trump posted a four-minute video explaining his abortion policy entering the 2024 general election, which effectively reasserted his states’ rights position, which would allow for legal abortion in some states and a six-week ban in others, like Florida.
Reporting for Fox & Friends, Fox News Digital correspondent Brooke Singman introduced a clip of the president saying:
All legal scholars, both sides wanted and in fact demanded be ended row the way they wanted it ended. It must be remembered that the Democrats of the radical ones are in this position because they support abortion up to and even beyond, the ninth month. The concept of having had abortion and delayed a months and even execution after birth. And that’s exactly what it is. The baby is born. The baby is executed after birth is unacceptable, and almost everyone agrees with that. My view is now that we have abortion where everybody wanted it. From a legal standpoint, the states will determine by vote or legislation or perhaps both, and whatever they decide must be the law of the land.
Coming out of the clip, however, not one of the four Fox & Friends co-hosts had the courage to point out how the comments Trump just made on their top-rated airwaves were factually incorrect. Of course, no elected official is in favor of executing babies after they are born. That is not abortion; that is homicide and, thankfully, illegal in all fifty states.
Lawrence Jones did come closest, saying “I think it’s very important because Gretchen Whitmer couldn’t even answer the question last week when she was on another program about when should abortion be illegal? And the president has said at nine months, the baby is a baby, and there are some Democrats that are still in favor of abortion at that point.”
Late-term abortions are controversial, but they are also extremely rare and most often are only used in tragic instances of the risk to the mother’s life or non-term baby. It’s certainly a fair item to debate, though in the right context of how rarely occurs. However, to not push back on Trump’s dangerous lie that Democrats want to kill babies? That’s irresponsible and not befitting of any cable news program, opinion-based or news.
Trump made this dangerous claim in a social media post in the last month before the 2020 election
In both instances, Trump is almost certainly referring to remarks that former Virginia Governor Ralph Northam made a year ago describing the live birth of an infant (not an abortion) that could not survive on its own outside the womb and the medical care decisions that would be made in that case (not a decision on whether or not to “execute the baby.”) Many Republicans misconstrued this clip to seize on the false narrative that Democrats are killing babies after they are born. Again, that is simply false.
Trump made similar comments in January 2020, during a first-ever presidential appearance at the anti-abortion rights March for Life. Trump said, “Then we had the case of the Democrat governor in the state of Virginia, the Commonwealth of Virginia, and we love the Commonwealth of Virginia, but what is going on in Virginia? What is going on? The governor stated that he would execute a baby after birth.”
During the last State of the Union address of this term, Trump also claimed that a Democratic governor “stated he would execute a baby after birth,” which, frankly, is a lie. The false promotion of the political wedge issue of “Democrats want infanticide” has not yet been deterred by numerous articles and reports that show it to be false.
Watch above via Fox News.
This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.
