Joy-Ann Reid deserves an award for being real, speaking truth to Trump’s surrogates, & squashing myths, something that some journalist were late to adopt.
Joy-Ann Reid let Steven Cortes have it on Trump’s birthirism and more
Joy-Ann Reid did not allow Steven Cortes, a Trump surrogate to spin ‘the Donald’s’ attempt to conclude the false birther issue by blaming Clinton and claiming victory. Cortes attempted to blur the lines as to whether Trump’s birther stance was racial. Reid pounced.
Joy-Ann point by point neutered Cortes. She pointed out that Republican rallies made sure early on to stress President Obama’s middle name, Hussein, to insinuate an otherness. Reid asked an important question. Why is it that even as Trump directly went after Latinos and immigrants, blacks hold him so much more in contempt.
“It is primarily because of the humiliation, the attempt to humiliate the first black president is one of the main charges African Americans have against the Republican Party, have against the TEA Party,” Reid said. “Donald Trump embodied that and used it to rise. Ben Carson wouldn’t have even been a thought as a presidential candidate had he not tried to embarrass the President at the prayer breakfast.”
Joy-Ann was not done.
“Part of the Putinism that you are seeing on the Right,” she said. “What do they say? They say we think Vladimir Putin is a better leader because he loves his country more than Barack Obama love his. That was said as recently as today. And so you have Republicans making the case that President Obama doesn’t love the country he is president of. And this is all part and parcel of the birthirism Donald Trump rode to fame and to the presidential nomination.”
Cortes said that Trump has never made birthirism a part of his campaign. “People understand him,” Reid said. “If you are black you hear it.”
“People understand him,” Reid said. “If you are black you hear it.”
Later in the discussion Cortes tried to claim Mark Penn, Clintons 2008 political strategist, floated the idea of Obama’s Americanism. Katy Tur’s response was perfect.
“How does that negate five years of Donald Trump beating the drum on the President not being born in the U.S.,” Tur asked. “How are those two things equal. How is one person in a memo who got fired after that, how is that equal to a Republican nominee going out for five years and questioning the otherness of the president and also insinuating multiple times, and most recently at the Orlando Massacre that he was somehow sympathetic to terrorists. I don’t see how those two things are equal.”
Chris Matthews asked Steven Cortes if he had any evidence Hillary Clinton ever questioned Obama’s birthplace. Cortes admitted he did not.
Joy-Ann Reid near the end of the discussion pointed out another demeaning racially implied attack on the President by Trump. He wanted President Obama to show his college records because he wanted to understand how he got into Harvard. When Cortes was asked to explain Trump’s behavior he said he did not see the interview where Trump did that.
It is important that the media is not conned again. Trump is playing a game here. He wants the closure of his birthirism cloaked in the possibility that Hillary Clinton and her team played the same game. That would make them then equally offensive, a draw in public opinion. Katy Tur’s response squashed that. Unfortunately, the timid press in other venues will likely let the Trump team’s insinuation get traction by not given the journalistic pushback provided by Joy-Ann Reid and Katy Tur.