Not for the first time, a CNN panel erupted into a heated exchange between participants on whether Donald Trump is a racist.
The bitter war of words came on Monday night’s edition of NewsNight with Abby Phillip after Scott Jennings, a former GOP strategist, said it was “perfectly fine to acknowledge” some people are “genetically predisposed to violence.”
“All he is commenting on is the violent murderers who are in the country,” Jennings added of Trump’s suggestion earlier in the day that migrants who commit murder in the U.S. do so because “it’s in their genes.” “It’s simply not true what is being said about him today.”
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The former president’s racial prejudices prompted in a similarly raucous free-for-all during the show’s Sept. 10 broadcast, when former Trump adviser David Urban and Democratic strategist Keith Boykin had it out over whether the Republican candidate was in a “dead heat” with his support at the time because of his appeal among racist white people.
Responding to Jennings on Monday’s show, fellow panelist Michael Eric Dyson, a liberal academic, said Trump is “generating nativist language to appeal to the genetic basis of behavior” and that this represents “a classic definition of what we mean by white supremacy.”
The discussion remained relatively civil as former RNC spokesperson Madison Gesiotto came to Trump’s defense, before swiftly escalating after she asked columnist and Rabbi Jay Michaelson if he was happy with allowing “13,000 murderers” into the country.
Above the resulting din, host Phillips weighed in to pull Gesiotto up on the fact that those figures, spanning several decades, offer a “wildly misleading” view of the true level of crime committed by migrants, which is significantly lower than among those born in the U.S.
The shouting exchange continued, with Gesiotto arguing the data still shows “a lot of rapists and murderers have gotten here” and Michaelson shooting back that this is nevertheless “at a lower rate than natural born citizens.”
Later on, Phillips fact-checked Gesiotto again on her claim that migrants who have been convicted of serious and violent crimes are somehow “still roaming the country,” with Gesiotto continuing to speak over her as she did.
As the chaos rolled on, Michaelson eventually appeared to offer something of an olive branch to Jennings, saying, “You could make a non-racist argument for immigration control and I’d be receptive to hearing it,” to which Jennings shot back: “And you could make an honest argument about what you’re saying!”
