Fox News anchor John Roberts on Monday tried to compare Donald Trump’s reference to his political enemies as “vermin” with rhetoric from Democrats, citing Hillary Clinton’s seven-year-old remark about some of Trump’s supporters belonging in a “basket of deplorables.”
During a segment with Fox senior political analyst Juan Williams that touched on the United Auto Workers securing higher wages as a result of their strike, Williams urged President Joe Biden to capitalize on the support he showed for the workers.
“He wants them to remember that come election time. That’s basic politics,” Williams said on America Reports. “It’s even more to his advantage when he points out, as he did, that Trump was on the other side.”
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Williams went on to ask why the president, in his view, is seemingly not doing enough to contrast himself with his predecessor on a bigger topic: democracy.
“This is, to me, part of a larger conversation not taking place in Washington… where people are saying President Biden needs to become more aggressive, needs to get out there, assume that Donald Trump is the Republican nominee next year, and start talking about not only whether or not he was with the unions in Detroit, but whether or not he’s pro-democracy,” Williams said.
“Trump this weekend was calling his opponents ‘vermin’ and confusing whether or not President Obama was still in office, and he’s 77 years old,” Williams said. “Why isn’t Biden making the case now?”
Trump’s reference to “vermin” parallels the dehumanizing language of dictators Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, historians have noted.
Yet Roberts replied by framing such problematic rhetoric about political enemies as not exclusive to the former president.
“Well, Hillary Clinton called her opponents deplorable at one point, so there’s language on both sides,” Roberts claimed, bringing up a comment that was said during the Obama administration.
At a September 2016 campaign event, the former secretary of state said that “half” of Trump’s supporters could be described that way—a jab that she acknowledged at the time was “grossly generalistic.”
By contrast, Trump’s choice of words over the weekend was defended to the hilt by campaign flack Steven Cheung. Those who took issue with it have “Trump Derangement Syndrome” and “their entire existence will be crushed when President Trump returns to the White House,” Cheung said in a statement.
Trump’s comments over the weekend came just days after another Fox News anchor, Harris Faulkner, whined about Clinton’s comparison of Trump and Hitler in reference to the authoritarian-seeming plans the former president reportedly has in the works if he wins a second term.
