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TV Anchors and Hosts React to Trump's White Power Love

As President Trump went bat shit crazy talking about how the Klan, neo-Nazis and white supremacists weren't the only one to blame for problems in Charlottesville, TV Anchors and hosts were flat out bowled over by what the President of Unites Sates was saying. 

“What I just saw gave me the wrong kind of chills,” a visibly stunned Chuck Todd said on MSNBC. “Honestly, I’m a bit shaken by what I just heard.”

Unable to disguise her disgust, the Fox News host Kat Timpf said: “I’m still in the phase where I’m wondering if it was actually real life. I have too much eye makeup on to start crying right now.”

And on CNN, as the network cut away from President Trump’s extraordinary 23-minute news conference at Trump Tower, the anchor Jake Tapper could not contain his astonishment.

“Wow,” he said. “That was something else.”

The NY Times writes that for a few visceral minutes on Tuesday, television’s partisan lines dissolved as dumbfounded anchors reacted on-air — some in clearly personal ways — to Trump’s fiery remarks, in which he seemed to cast equal blame on white supremacists and the demonstrators who marched against them during the weekend’s deadly clash in Charlottesville, Va.

On Fox News, normally a redoubt of Trump support, the 5 p.m. co-hosts of “The Specialists” shook their heads, with the anchor Guy Benson saying that Mr. Trump “lost me” when he insisted that some “very fine people” participated in the white supremacist rally.

“They were chanting things like, ‘Jews will not replace us,’”  Benson said. “There’s nothing good about that.”

His co-host, Timpf, a libertarian pundit who contributes to National Review Online, exhaled deeply. “It was one of the biggest messes that I’ve ever seen,” she said. “I can’t believe it happened.”

Disbelief also dominated the early reaction on MSNBC and CNN, where Tapper ended his afternoon show by directly addressing viewers.

“To anybody out there watching today who is confused and thinks, ‘I thought that the Klan and neo-Nazis and white supremacists, I thought there was no debate about this thing among civilized people’ — there isn’t a debate about it,” he said.

Like many of Trump’s dramatic moments, Tuesday’s impromptu question-and-answer session unspooled on cable television. But as the president’s exchanges grew testier, ABC and CBS cut into regular programming to carry the news conference, adding millions of households to the audience.

Later, the network evening newscasts ran long, unexpurgated clips of Trump’s appearance, rather than the usual short clips. CBS devoted its entire half-hour “Evening News” to the president’s comments and the aftermath of the weekend’s rioting.

Trump might be doing a really shitty job of unifying the country, but he's getting better at bringing the media together. 


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