First, there was “locker room talk.” Now we have “football game chants.”
The morning after a Trump rally crowd broke out into a “Send Her Back!” chant aimed at Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) on Wednesday night, the president’s favorite morning show brought on one of his favorite Fox hosts to spin the viciously racist and xenophobic moment.
Taking a seat on Fox & Friends’ curvy couch in front of a live studio audience Thursday morning, Jesse Watters was asked by co-host Steve Doocy for his take on the rally.
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After bragging about the “record numbers” of the crowd and how there were “lines out around the block,” Watters claimed that Trump had to “create a contrast” with the so-called “Squad”—the group of Democratic congresswomen of color that the president has targeted with racist taunts—because they’re “hot” right now.
“Were you surprised by that?” Brian Kilmeade asked.
“No, I was not,” Watters replied. “I mean, they telegraphed it. It was like Kamala [Harris] swinging a punch at Joe [Biden], you could see that coming a mile away.”
Adding that the president ran down the “wicked political rap sheet” of Omar and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), the Watters’ World host groused that the media isn’t reporting on what Trump said about the Squad before brushing off the racist crowd chants that dominated news coverage of the event.
“Now I don’t know about you guys, but have you guys ever been to a football game?” Watters said. “They chant some pretty bad stuff at a football game. Politics is a tough sport.”
He continued: “Some Republicans chanted some things. Some Democrats framed Trump for treason. I think you guys see the difference.”
The hosts, meanwhile, did not push back, instead playing another set of clips from Trump’s rally.
Watters’ defense of the chant came hours after his The Five co-host Greg Gutfeld took issue with a pundit describing the chants as “pure mob insanity” led by the president. “Apparently, you’ve never been to a sporting event,” Gutfeld remarked.
This new pro-Trump spin also comes on the heels of Fox & Friends weekend host Jedediah Bila laughing off the president’s racist tweets that kicked off this whole controversy, dismissing the racism of Trump’s remarks as having just been “very comedic.”
And Watters’ excuse for the racist chants is curiously reminiscent of Trumpworld’s downplaying of the Access Hollywood tape, which featured Trump boasting that he could grab women “by the pussy.”
At that time, Trump and his supporters quickly settled on describing his comments as merely “locker room talk.”
