President Donald Trump’s politics truly show the worst in people. After one of his supporters violently physically harassed a BBC cameraman at his Monday night rally in El Paso, Texas, BBC America’s bureau chief Paul Danahar shared that he’d requested that the Trump administration provide a “full review” of the security arrangements for members of the press at Trump rallies.
He explained:
‘I’ve written to [White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders] asking for a full review of security arrangements for the media after last night’s attack on our BBC cameraman at the President’s rally. Access into the media area was unsupervised. No one in law enforcement intervened before, during, or after the attack.’
The most specific apparent identification of the attacker available is that they’re a Trump supporter, since they were wearing one of the president’s red “Make America Great Again” campaign hats. An apparent fellow Trump supporter who was sporting a similar hat had to physically pull them away from members of the media, and the Trump campaign claims the offender was eventually removed from the rally.
Watch below:
This is the shameful moment when my cameraman Ron Skeans was attacked by @realdDonaldTrump supporter in El Paso – after the President repeatedly goaded the crowd over supposed media bias. Happily Ron is fine #TrumpElPaso pic.twitter.com/F3pv04fRBg
— Gary O’Donoghue (@BBCBlindGazza) February 12, 2019
After the incident, Trump made a show of stopping to see if the journalist was okay, but quickly launched right back into his familiar diatribes.
You’d hope that the Trump administration would take the issue seriously, especially since they were so quick to try and throw CNN’s Jim Acosta out of the White House for supposedly being too physically rough with a White House intern.
However, the reality of the situation is that Acosta never made any kind of move on the intern in the first place, and at no point since then — including after the incident at his Monday rally — has the president ceased his attacks on the very legitimacy of the mainstream media. During the El Paso event itself — as he’s done before during rallies — he specifically called out the members of the media who were in the venue with him, physically pointing them out — and we’re supposed to be surprised that one of his supporters took his words to heart? It’s really not that big of a jump or unclear what’s going on.
As recently as Monday morning, hours before his rally, Trump parroted a line from Fox News’ Jesse Watters to the world, tweeting the over-the-top claim:
‘“Fact checkers have become Fake News.” @JesseBWatters So True!’
No, in fact, it’s not true.
Fact checkers have determined that Trump has lied thousands and thousands of times since taking office. He’s lied so much that at The Washington Post, fact checkers came up with a new category to cover the lies that, wildly enough, Trump repeated at least 20 times and counting. In the final weeks before the midterm elections, Trump lied an average of 30 times a day — and as the next elections get closer, that average will no doubt return if not be swamped since the president will be intensifying his campaign trail push.
Trump faces an ever-growing field of 2020 Democratic presidential contenders, which he’s responded to so far by — you guessed it — lies, lies, and more lies.
Featured Image via YouTube screenshot
