While covering a protest outside the White House this week, Fox News correspondent Leland Vittert ended up having to abandon a live broadcast he was delivering when anti-Fox protesters confronted his crew. Vittert seems to have been absolutely fine, but the protesters began chanting “Fuck Fox News!”, and as he ducked away from them and the demonstrators began to occupy most of the frame of the live feed in which he’d previously been standing, Fox News cut away to a reporter in Atlanta, where protests were also unfolding around the same time.
Vittert noted to the in-studio Fox hosts that the gathering had “some media critics out here as well” shortly before demonstrators began chanting the anti-Fox News slogan. Check out the scene below:
Live outside the White House, Fox's Leland Vittert is driven off the air by protesters swarming him and chanting "fuck Fox News." pic.twitter.com/G103vV00NY
— Bobby Lewis (@revrrlewis) May 30, 2020
There’s other video footage that has emerged of an angry, larger crowd that is apparently chasing Vittert and his crew away from the demonstration entirely, all while chanting the “Fuck Fox News” slogan.
A reporter just got chased out of #dcprotest. Demonstrators saying he was Fox News. I didn’t recognize him. pic.twitter.com/LpGFC4Cq68
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) May 30, 2020
President Donald Trump himself has weighed in on the protests that unfolded outside the White House, although he didn’t specifically mention Vittert’s confrontation with demonstrators who seemed angry about his network’s tendency towards promoting right-wing propaganda. What Trump did do, however, wad glibly threaten violence against the demonstrators, many of whom, like in other cities around the country, were entirely peaceful.
Trump posted on Twitter, in reference to the Secret Service’s handling of the demonstrators:
‘[Whenever] someone got too frisky or out of line, they would quickly come down on them, hard – didn’t know what hit them. The front line was replaced with fresh agents, like magic. Big crowd, professionally organized, but nobody came close to breaching the fence. If they had they would have been greeted with the most vicious dogs, and most ominous weapons, I have ever seen.’
Trump sounds like he is treating this entire situation like some kind of violent game. He even added that members of the Secret Service were supposedly in on the game mentality, tweeting that “Many Secret Service agents just waiting for action.”
The protests, in D.C. and elsewhere, have erupted following the police murder of George Floyd, a black man in Minneapolis, Minnesota, which itself has ended up an epicenter of many of the demonstrations. Lately, some of those demonstrations have been co-opted by outside agitators — an increasingly large portion of the people arrested for violence in the Minneapolis area have apparently been from out-of-state — and while local authorities deal with those issues, Trump has again turned to ridiculous rhetoric.
He tweeted:
‘Mayor Jacob Frey of Minneapolis will never be mistaken for the late, great General Douglas McArthur or great fighter General George Patton. How come all of these places that defend so poorly are run by Liberal Democrats? Get tough and fight (and arrest the bad ones). STRENGTH!’
Mayor Jacob Frey of Minneapolis will never be mistaken for the late, great General Douglas McArthur or great fighter General George Patton. How come all of these places that defend so poorly are run by Liberal Democrats? Get tough and fight (and arrest the bad ones). STRENGTH!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 30, 2020
Why on earth would Frey want to be mistaken for a military general? Is that Trump’s ideal of good political leadership in the United States — state-sponsored violence? While the U.S. deals with real issues, this authoritarian incompetence is what the U.S. is left with inside the White House.
