Reacting to President Donald Trump’s openly racist and xenophobic call for Democratic congresswomen of color to “go back” to the countries “they came” from, the crew of CNN morning show New Day called out their Fox News counterparts Monday morning for laughing off Trump’s tirade and describing it as “very comedic.”
Moments after Trump fired off a series of tweets taking aim at the group of freshmen progressive lawmakers known as The Squad, the hosts of Fox & Friends covered the president’s comments on air. And while co-host Griff Jenkins read off the president’s racist tweetstorm, the crew giggled and laughed before host Jedediah Bila added, “Someone is feeling very comedic today.”
Leading off Monday morning’s program by hitting the president’s comments and the relative lack of silence from Republican lawmakers, co-anchor Alisyn Camerota—a one-time Fox & Friends host herself—brought up the moment, noting that for “many Republicans, Fox TV and Fox & Friends is their sole source of information.”
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“OK? It just is,” she continued. “That’s where they like to hear their own views reflected back at them. And so I think the folks on Fox & Friends were responding to this racist tweet in real-time. I think they were reading it when it came out. And their reaction sets the tone for how then Republicans, not just lawmakers but just regular people, try to process it.”
After playing the clip of Bila brushing off the president’s racism as nothing more than a joke, Camerota deadpanned: “All fun and games.”
Writer and producer Maysod Zayid, meanwhile, pointed out that she is actually a comedian and that “racism is not funny—it’s violent.”
“It made me think, will they laugh if we get rounded up?” Zayid declared. “How far away from that are we? As someone who is Muslim, as someone who like Rashida [Tlaib] comes from Palestinian heritage. As someone who, like Jedediah, who was on that TV, is brown and is constantly being yelled at to go back to their own country. Will they be chuckling? Will they think it’s funny?”
Co-anchor John Berman, meanwhile, highlighted that Fox News host Tucker Carlson has been pushing racist and xenophobic tropes on his program and Trump himself “ran on American carnage.”
As for Bila, this isn’t the first time she’s excused the president’s bigotry as good-natured humor. Back in February, following Trump making a “Trail of Tears” genocide joke directed at Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Bila placed the blame solely on Warren while wondering aloud if the president’s “kind of sarcasm” helps him with voters.
