Fox News’s Stuart Varney and Rachel Campos-Duffy went head-to-head over former President Donald Trump’s increasingly violent rhetoric. Fox is more interesting now because the network writ large is behind DeSantis – and it’s obvious – but Trump still has his defenders, Hannity and Campos Duffy, are just two.
But it got very heated today when Campos-Duffy simply refused to criticize Trump’s increasingly violent rhetoric. Mediaite [1] brings us the transcript:
Varney began with some serious aggression:
“Trump also posted… an image on social media. This is the one with the baseball bat. Okay. I’m not gonna show it because it’s been deleted. Does the country support Trump wielding a baseball bat threatening mayhem and calling Alvin Bragg an animal? Is that what we want to see in a presidential candidate?”
Campos-Duffy made the single most unreasonable answer, essentially pardoning all Trump behavior because this is just who he is (True, and that’s the problem): “Those are things we expect to see from Donald Trump. This has already been baked in the cake.”
Varney did what you’re supposed to do when you get a non-answer, asking the same question again, saying, “is this what people want to hear?” meaning the threats against prosecutors. Campos-Duffy again dodged:
“The people went to that rally, what they wanted to hear about was this two-tier justice system. And he has become a symbol of that. And I think there’s a lot of conservatives out there who see, you know, whether it’s January 6th versus the 2020 rioters, how differently they were treated. Raiding Trump’s home and his kid’s bedroom. But Hunter Biden’s not.”
Name a crime of which Hunter Biden is accused.
It then got a little silly:
VARNEY: “How do you think independents in this country will react?”
CAMPOS-DUFFY: “I don’t think he’s trying to win independents right now.”
VARNEY: “He can’t win the election without independents!”
CAMPOS-DUFFY: “But you have to win the race you’re in right now. Right now he’s in a primary. You see it all the time, Stuart. You know that people pivot once they get into the general and versus the primary — right now, he’s trying to do something else.”
Yeah. Except, unlike some policy positions, people remember violent rhetoric and get turned off for good, especially “independents,” whom Trump cannot win without.
Varney fought back, wanting to know how Trump could justify all this violent rhetoric and how can it not turn people off:
“I’ll return to my original question. How do you think Americans feel about a presidential candidate wielding a baseball bat prior to a possible indictment and calling his judicial opponent, an animal. Now, how do you think we feel?”
Campos-Duffy gave a defense as ridiculous as Trump, indeed one befitting Trump: “Listen, if you wanna line up all the things that Donald Trump has done that aren’t, you know, the way other people do it. I agree.”
In other words, she has nothing and spat out a word salad, much like Trump, and then she did the “Yeah I am, but what are you” type of argument. With a GIANT lie:
“I mean, there’s a lot of things that people don’t like about him. But at the same time, there’s a lot of people that like the strength that he shows and think that he is the one person who can take on what I think is a real deterioration in our country.”
Trump represents the deterioration of the country, away from principles and toward attacks and hateful polarization. Trump hates everyone that doesn’t support him, and thus neither do his supporters. And then the false comparison with an utter lie pulled out of thin air. This is the GOP playbook, accuse Democrats of what they’re doing. Just substitute China for Russia.
“Do I care that Donald Trump, you know, paid off some hooker?… I don’t love it. But you know what bothers me more? China paying off our president. Our current president. So I’m just saying, let’s just look at things in fairness.”
Fck you. “Fairness” begins with telling the truth.
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[email protected], @JasonMiciak, SUBSTACK: PEOPLE WILL DIE, TRUMP’S CALL TO ARMS WILL GET PEOPLE KILLED. [2]