Morning Joe Rips Trump’s ‘Shameless’ Walkback: If You Believed Him Yesterday, ‘Kinda Feel Bad For You’
On MSNBC’s Morning Joe, co-host Willie Geist was joined by NBC News National Political Reporter Heidi Przybyla in the top seats filling in for Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski. The lead story, of course, was President Donald Trump‘s statement on Tuesday walking back and correcting his remarks on the previous day in a joint presser with Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
Geist introduced the story, and pointed out that although the corrective statement was over 24 hours after the initial press conference, President Trump made no effort to in the interim to alter, correct, or redirect the highly criticized moments either by Twitter or during interviews he gave in that time.
Geist then turned to Przybyla, focusing on the President’s word change in his statement on Tuesday.
“The president’s statement yesterday that this was a misstatement, that it was a word problem sort of ignores everything else that happened on the stage in that press conference. It ignores the fact he didn’t say anything about it for 24 hours, even as he saw the coverage of what was happening,” he said. “If you believed what he said yesterday, this was a question of a misplaced word, kind of feel bad for you.”
“Wow. Willie, do you remember when we were in grade school, and you messed up on a word, and you took out the lumpy whiteout and whited it over? You can’t do that here,” Przybyla said. “Because it’s not just one word. It was the entire context of what he said.”
She then elaborated on what that context was.
“It was the trashing of institutions. It was also saying that Putin had a great idea to potentially combine our investigation and have Bob Mueller go to Russia to give them information on what his investigation is all about.”
That’s a great point that hasn’t come up too much.
She continued, saying “I think anybody who watched the president’s news conference which was essentially the entire world, would know that you can’t just hit delete on a single word and change the entire tone and context of that news conference.”
Geist then turned to Princeton professor and MSNBC contributor Eddie S. Glaude Jr., who characterized the president’s remarks as “shameless.”
“I like to use this analogy, you know since President Trump is a golfer,” he said. “Instead of trying to get a mulligan, he just moved his ball in full view to a better lie.”
Watch the clip above, courtesy of MSNBC.
[Featured image via screengrab]
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