John Roberts has absolutely had it with White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany.
Fox News’ chief White House correspondent could not contain his outrage and contempt on Thursday following a contentious back-and-forth with McEnany in which she ludicrously claimed that President Donald Trump has “condemned white supremacy more than any other president in modern history.”
“The press secretary would not, in a definitive and unambiguous and non-deflecting way, say that the president condemns white supremacism in all its forms and any group that espouses it,” Roberts told Fox host Melissa Francis following the briefing.
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“And this is not something that I just made up!” he added, citing Republican Senators Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, and Tim Scott, all of whom have called on Trump to “correct” his comments from Tuesday night’s debate in which he told one right-wing extremist group to “stand back and stand by.”
Asked by Roberts to “denounce” white supremacy as the spokesperson for the president, McEnany would only say that Trump has done so in the past, calling his record on the issue “unmistakable.”
After laying out the facts, Roberts got visibly angry as he said, “For all of you on Twitter who are hammering me for asking that question, I don’t care! Because it’s a question that needs to be asked and clearly the president’s Republican colleagues a mile away from here are looking for an answer for it too.”
“So stop deflecting, stop blaming the media!” he concluded. “I’m tired of it!”
Immediately following Roberts’ report, Fox News pundit Bill Bennett said, “I’m sorry he’s angry, but he’s just wrong,” claiming that Trump sufficiently condemned white supremacy during the debate when he replied to Chris Wallace’s question with the word “sure.”
“It seems to me that no matter how Kayleigh answers that question, there is a predictable response that comes,” Francis added. “If she said what she said, then somebody says, why didn’t you denounce it again? If she did denounce it again and say we said it in the past, I’ll say it again, then the question is, well why didn’t you just do it sooner? Why didn’t the president do it at the time?”
“I feel like we have had this specific conversation so many times,” the host continued. “And it’s so easy to predict what the response in the media is going to be. They have decided he is a racist. So just go with that. Why are we still treading this territory?”
