On Friday night, President Trump began the Fourth of July weekend with a 42-minute speech celebrating American history, our Founding documents, and patriotism at Mount Rushmore. Naturally, CNN and MSNBC chose to declare it “a culture war bonfire,” “a love letter to white supremacy,” “divisive,” and laden with “racist dog whistles.”
MRC analysts examined CNN and MSNBC’s Friday and Saturday coverage pertaining to the President’s speech, subjecting ourselves to the most farcical and yet hateful spin we could find. The video below provides but a small sampling of their drivel.
Most of the journalists complaining about the speech were disturbed by the President’s lambasting of those who had torn down statues in recent weeks. As usual, talking heads were quick to suggest that Trump was defending Confederate monuments specifically -- despite his making no mention of either the former Confederacy or any of its members.
And of course, they were reluctant to admit that numerous statues of abolitionists and civil rights leaders had also been torn down by the insatiable mobs.
Journalists were up in arms about the President’s speech hours before it even began. That afternoon, CNN reporter and progressive wet blanket Layla Santiago complained that the event would take place “in front of a monument of two slave owners and on land wrestled away from Native Americans.”
Meanwhile, MSNBC’s Ari Melber warned that, according to unnamed Trump “advisors,” the speech would “dig into a racial culture war.”
Things only got worse after the President spoke. The following day, MSNBC’s PoliticsNation host Al Sharpton sneered that the President’s remarks were a “love letter to white supremacy.”
During the 5:00 p.m. ET hour of CNN Newsroom that afternoon, host Ana Cabrera reported:
There was a lot about history, about God, and “our great country,” much of it very ominous… Some are calling his speech jaw-dropping, a culture war bonfire.
CNN White House correspondent Jeremy Diamond added that “many people” viewed Trump’s appeals to “history” and “heritage” as “racist dog whistles.” Diamond — presumably one of those “many people” — did not clarify whether he felt all history was racist, or if it was just the history that Donald Trump liked.
Perhaps Diamond was harmed by the fact that CNN refused to let the President’s speech stand on its own, declining to carry a single second of it live. MSNBC wasn’t much better, carrying only 11 percent of Trump’s 42-minute-and-15-second remarks.
