This is almost too good to be believed. The kid gloves for the Trump surrogates have finally come off with the television media. I just witnessed a WWE style cage team match on “Hardball”, where former GOP congresscritter Jack Kingston, a Trump senior advisor just got caught up in a three way tag team body slam. Chris Matthews immediately took him to task about the fact that Trump had yet to come out and affirm that he believed that Obama was American born. Kingston blathered on, parroting Giuliani from last night, and then asserted that Clinton had started the birther movement, he had actually “seen” an interoffice Clinton memo that called for surrogates to question Obama’s origin and legitimacy. When pressed by Matthews, he went fuzzy on details, but promised to provide Matthews with a copy.
But Kingston made the mistake of pissing off Joy Reid, who jumped on him like a kid jumping on a floating $1 bill on the street. She hammered him on the blatant racism, assured him that people do care, and pulled up the Politifacts page that debunked his “Clinton claim” as false. Kingston kept smiling, but he was sweating, he responded lamely to Joy Reid, calling her statistics into question. This was not his best move, Katie Tur immediately jumped in and slid in her shiv. She spent 90 seconds telling him exact things Trump supporters had come up to her and said on the subject when she was on the trail. Matthews couldn’t end the segment early enough for Jack Kingston.
Fortunately this is no longer an outlier. The network hosts have lost their tolerance for the Trump surrogates, their spin and obfuscation, and their total inability to give even the most simple question a straight answer without turning the subject back to either Hillary Clinton, the Clinton Foundation or Barack Obama. And best of all, they’re no longer taking it. They are starting to interrupt them, call them out for misstating facts, fact checking them because they are so predictable in their responses, and dragging them kicking and screaming back on topic.
Erin Burnett on CNN gave Scottie Nell Hughes a very rough time on a panel discussion a couple of days ago, and multiple members of the panel jumped her shit as well. Thomas Roberts on MSNBC interrupted and disassembled Boris Epshteyn on the air and sent him sniveling home to mother. The saddest of the lot is Steve Cortes. For reasons I will never know or fathom, Cortes keeps showing up with Joy Reid on MSNBC, even though she makes 170 lbs of ground round out of him every time he sticks his head out. As near as I can tell, Paris Dennard has disappeared since he brought up Trump renting an office to Jesse Jackson when he was running for President as a sign of Trumps commitment to civil rights and African Americans, and Joy Reid responded by having Jesse Jackson on the phone when they came back from break, where he promptly chastised Dennard on the difference between a simple real estate transaction and a commitment to civil rights.
If this trend continues, it is good news for all of us. The networks are no longer going to continue to let Trump surrogates just parrot the campaign talking points even when they don’t match the issue at hand, or the questions being asked. And unlike the Clinton surrogates, who are willing to admit missteps and stay on point with cogent answers, once the Trump surrogates are stripped bare, they have nowhere else to go. My personal feelings? If your surrogates can’t effectively manage some simple damage control, that just means more damage control for the campaign to handle.
Thanks as always for reading!