Chris Matthews held back on neither Donald Trump nor his supporters
Chris Matthews did not mince words today. He hit Donald Trump justifiably in the jugular for his attempt to smear the President over the attack in San Bernardino California.
“Let me finish tonight with Donald Trump’s suggestion that President Obama is behaving defensively regarding Islamic terrorism,” said Chris Matthews. “That as Trump put it today, ‘There is something wrong with him that we don’t know about. There is something wrong with him that we don’t know about.’ Well here we go again, back into that indictment Trump has been nursing for years, that the President somehow got to where he is, the White House, as part of a deep and dark conspiracy. One that brought him secretly to this country from overseas, that got him credit for graduating from various schools up to and including Harvard Law School even though no one Trump assures us at any of those schools can remember Obama.”
Chris Matthews then continued as he dissected Trump’s continued birtherism.
“Well, this is Trump’s trump card. It is his ethnic taunt to the worst of the Obama haters. It is his willingness to argue that the President isn’t really one of us. That he is on the contrary a mysterious interloper who snuck into our country, assumed an identity that wasn’t his, and smuggled himself all the way to the American presidency never once being the person he claims to be. Well this is the original Trump sin back again. This is the trumped up libel that our front running candidate is willing to sell whenever he finds an audience as he did today willing to swallow it only because they hate Obama personally, hate his progressive politics, hate most of all his open tolerant world view. I have from the beginning seen Trump as a mixed bag. But this birtherism which he exhumed today is the bad he carries with him, refuses to dump, and is so willing to sell.
Matthews then went after Trumps’ supporters.
“For those who applauded him today, cheered at his insinuation that the President hides himself as a defender of Islamist terrorism, I can only say this,” Chris Matthews said. “You should be ashamed. None of us should applaud this 21st century McCarthyism, this cheap insinuation against a fellow American backed up by nothing but hate.”
This is what journalists are supposed to do. Kudos to Chris Matthews.