Jesse Watters shifted his flattery of Donald Trump into overdrive Friday, gushing over the former president as being “more patriotic” than literally anyone else and insisting that he can’t be racist since he dated a Black woman over twenty years ago.
Spurred by President Joe Biden calling out Watters’ network and “loser” Trump during his first campaign speech of the year, the Fox News host appeared particularly irritable.
“[Biden] ran his first campaign on Charlottesville,” Watters said on The Five, referring to the white supremacist rally at the University of Virginia during Trump’s first year in office. After a clash with counter-protesters led to a woman’s death, the then-president said that there were “very fine people on both sides.”
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“The second campaign is now on January 6. He actually thinks Donald Trump wants to be a dictator,” Watters continued, not bothering to mention that Trump has not only refused to rule out breaking the law as president but admitted he would be a dictator—only on his first day. (The following night, Watters tried to argue he was just joking.)
“So the first campaign he ran on was a hoax,” Watters said, echoing colleague Greg Gutfeld’s shift in position. “The second one—this is now a joke. You can’t actually be from the party that literally started a racist insurrection and accuse the other party of the same thing.”
Trump should “run on July 4” because “no one is more patriotic” than him, Watters asserted, citing real estate developments carried out by the Trump Organization—the same one that was fined $1.6 million for illegally avoiding taxes and which was ordered dissolved last year after a judge ruled that Trump and others in it were liable for “persistent and repeated fraud.”
Watters also took issue with those who apply the “racist” label to Trump, who fueled his 2016 campaign in part on birtherism.
“The racism thing has to stop, Jessica,” he told his liberal colleague, Jessica Tarlov. “Donald Trump dated Black women. Has Joe Biden ever dated a Black woman? Donald Trump was palling around with Don King when your guy was palling around with segregationists.”
Watters appeared to be referring to model Kara Young, who has a Black mother and white father. She and Trump dated for two years in the late 1990s.
