Stelter Rips Trump Over Briefing Clash: ‘Racist to Look at an Asian-American White House Correspondent’ and Say ‘Ask China’

CNN’s Brian Stelter slammed President Donald Trump Monday over his contentious exchange with CBS News’ Weijia Jiang and said it had “racial overtones.”

“It is racist to look at an Asian-American White House correspondent and say, ‘ask China,'” he said. “This isn’t happening in a vacuum. This is part of a pattern of behavior from the president that goes back many years. He doesn’t have the benefit of the doubt that someone might have if for the first time in their life, they made a comment like that to a reporter. But the president has been rattled by Weijia Jiang’s questions in the past. He has treated her and other female reporters differently in the past. And he’s also had this pattern of reacting to minority journalists in a very specific and different way, Wolf.”

CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, who was at the briefing and got in a brief skirmish with the president after his clash with Jiang, at which point he ended the briefing, told Wolf Blitzer POTUS ended it early because “he did not like the follow-up questions he was getting” on the subject.

“t’s not clear why the president would not have just answered those questions, if he was confident in what his answer was,” she added.

Stelter pointed to the president’s tweetstorm in the past day and remarked, “It doesn’t seem anyone in the Republican Senate, anyone in the Republican leadership, is willing to stand up and say, ‘behave like a president, behave like a leader.'”

You can watch above, via CNN.