Fox News host Harris Faulkner managed to embarrass herself within the first few minutes of her live phone interview with former President Donald Trump on Monday morning. And not just because she allowed him to repeat nearly verbatim the racist rants against immigrants that launched his 2016 campaign.
The pair hadn’t been talking for long when Faulkner got very excited, telling Trump to stop talking for two seconds.
“This has just happened now and I want to double check this with our producers,” she said. Dramatically removing her glasses, she reported:“The DHS secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, has resigned, Mr. President.”
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“Well, I’m not surprised,” Trump replied quickly as an increasingly distracted Faulkner put her finger to her ear. “It’s a big victory for our country.”
“Hold on, let me stop, let me stop, let me listen to my team one more time,” the host said. “Forgive me, that has not happened. And I apologize.”
“OK, cross off that victory,” Trump, who had just the night before called for Mayorkas to resign, said with a small laugh.
Of course, that was hardly the greatest journalistic failing of Faulkner’s live interview with the former president. Moments later, when he falsely declared, “We won the election, as far as I’m concerned,” she offered up zero pushback, instead pivoting to an entirely different topic.
Trump pushes the big lie live on Fox News, gets no pushback from Harris Faulkner pic.twitter.com/WOLjsy8WXG
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 22, 2021
In a statement, a spokesperson for Fox News told The Daily Beast, “The error stemmed from an audio issue in a virtual working environment. We corrected the mistake and continued on with the interview.”
