Donald Trump shut down a Fox News reporter who claimed that anti-ICE protests are spreading across the country.
The president fielded questions from the press as he entered the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., for a performance of Les Misérables on Wednesday evening.
As the president and first lady Melania Trump enjoyed the musical, based on Victor Hugo’s 1862 epic novel, riots continued in Los Angeles in response to the Trump administration’s immigration raids on the city.
Before he took his seat, Fox News reporter Gillian Turner posed a question to the tuxedoed commander-in-chief. “Mr. President, if this turns into another summer of unrest, what are you prepared to do, sir?”
“About what?” he asked bluntly, broadcast live on Special Report With Bret Baier.
Turner said that the “protests have spread now to 16 cities,” prompting Trump to deliver a curt response, despite the journalist hailing from his favorite network.
“Well, that’s what you’re saying. Do I believe you? I don’t think so,” Trump snapped back.
An estimate from NBC News states that protests, of varying sizes, have erupted in at least 25 cities across the continental United States. The BBC counted at least 14, while Associated Press came up with a similar figure.
More protests are yet to come, as activists across the country are plotting to rally on Saturday as part of the “No Kings” movement. The plans coincide with Trump’s massive military parade-cum-birthday celebration.
During their barbed to-and-fro, Turner told the president that the figure she cited comes from the “Fox News Brain Room,” the network’s internal fact-checking operation.
During the 2020 Dominion Voting Systems scandal, internal Fox News emails revealed that the network, via its Brain Room, knew pro-Trump conspiracy theories about the election were false. Yet just two weeks after Joe Biden was declared the winner, Fox host Jeanine Pirro continued to promote those debunked claims.
This led to the network having to pay $787 million to settle a defamation case brought by Dominion. Pirro is now the interim United States attorney for the District of Columbia.
Trump ignored the “Brain Room” comment and falsely claimed that the Los Angeles police asked him to deploy the National Guard to quell protests.
“I can tell you, what we have, what we have a situation in Los Angeles that was caused by gross incompetence. They didn’t have the police to handle it,” he said. “The police were asking us to come in.” He later claimed that many of the protesters, “radical left lunatics,” are “probably paid” professionals.
There are more than 4,000 Guard troops and 700 Marines deployed to the Californian city. The state’s governor, Gavin Newsom, has said he didn’t ask for them.
“This brazen abuse of power by a sitting president inflamed a combustible situation, putting our people, our officers, and even our National Guard at risk,” he said on Tuesday.
Meanwhile, the state is suing the Trump administration.
Trump has had a prior run-in with Gillian Turner, too. In January 2019, the first-term president fired off one of his trademark tweets to blast Turner and another Fox News reporter for criticizing his faltering border wall negotiations.
“Never thought I’d say this but I think @johnrobertsFox and @JillianTurner @FoxNews have even less understanding of the Wall negotiations than the folks at FAKE NEWS CNN & NBC!” he tweeted, in part.
However, he accidentally tagged a random California teenager named Jillian Turner instead of the Washington-based journalist. The president deleted his tweet and tried again, tagging the correct target, but the teenager said she was “kinda p—ed” over the fumble.
That wasn’t the first time Turner—the journalist, not the random teen—clashed with Trump. She criticised him for his response to the terrorist attack in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017.
James Alex Fields Jr. deliberately drove his car into a crowd of people peacefully protesting against the white supremacist Unite the Right rally, killing one person and injuring 35.
Trump was slow to condemn the white nationalist protesters, saying they included “some very fine people,” and asking: “What about the alt-left that came charging at, as you say, at the alt-right? Do they have any semblance of guilt?”
Turner responded on Fox News Sunday, saying it was a “miscalculation” from the president. “I think President Trump made a calculated, strategic decision about how he was going to approach what had happened and what his response was going to be like. Unfortunately, it is misguided. I think it was a miscalculation,” she said.
Turner has also ripped her own colleagues for fawning over Trump as if he were “family.”
The post Trump Scoffs at Fox News Reporter Saying Protests Are Spreading: ‘I Don’t Think So’ appeared first on The Daily Beast.
