Proving just how juvenile the network can be when it comes to personal insults against Republicans, MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace on Tuesday appeared delighted at Nancy Pelosi’s attacks on Donald Trump’s weight, cheering that “the country has a new straight talker.” Rather than even question whether it’s helpful for bipartisanship to call the President “morbidly obese,” Wallace justified it.
In an interview, Wallace tossed this softball: “What you said is actually something that can be corroborated in the White House’s release of the President’s last physical, which is that his weight does qualify him as being morbidly obese. Is that what you are saying or did you know it would elicit this kind of reaction from the President?”
Given that Trump is known to be thin skinned and not take insults lightly, Pelosi’s reaction strains belief: “No, I had no idea. I didn’t know that he would be so sensitive.” Wallace didn’t press the point. Remember, when Trump says outrageous things, journalists get upset. But when liberals do it about Trump or Republicans or fine. In 2018, Steve Schmidt appeared on Wallace's show to invoke Hitler. Wallace didn’t object.
Pelosi made the comments on CNN, Monday. Wallace opened the Tuesday interview with the House Speaker by praising: “The country has a new straight talker!”
Regarding the reported $3 trillion that Pelosi wants to spend next, Wallace failed to offer any sort of difficult question about spending. Instead, she blandly wondered, “It's my understanding that the HEROES Act has a very uncertain future in the Senate. What's the prospect of its passage there?”
A transcript of the questions can be found below. Click "expand" to read more.
Dateline: White House
5/19/2020
4:23 PM ET
[Clip of Pelosi on CNN calling Trump “morbidly obese.”]
NICOLLE WALLACE: The country has a new straight talker. We showed you that at the top of the show. But it was worth hearing about it again.
…
WALLACE: Joining us now Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi. What you said is actually something that can be corroborated in the White House’s release of the President’s last physical, which is that his weight does qualify him as being morbidly obese. Is that what you are saying or did you know it would elicit this kind of reaction from the President?
NANCY PELOSI: No, I had no idea. I didn’t know that he would be so sensitive.
…
WALLACE: Madam Speaker, I worked in the White House on 9/11 and are you surprised, I mean, the people who are frontline workers in hospitals, in any city that’s a hotspot, they have the same DNA as the same people in towers, they run toward the danger that people like me are in my basement hiding from. Are you surprised as a country we're not grieving collectively for people who lost their lives?
…
WALLACE: I guess I asked you about whether we're missing an opportunity to grieve collectively and to celebrate the frontline heroes, because it's my understanding that the HEROES act has a very uncertain future in the Senate. What's the prospect of its passage there?
…
WALLACE: Madam Speaker, I want to ask you about the way Donald Trump has spent every Friday of the pandemic, he's fired inspectors general at least four agencies, Department of Defense, most recently the Department of State. He fired the ICIG who brought the whistleblower complaint to the House intel committee initially. And he's also fired the Inspector General HHS for the crime in his view of doing a survey, of hospitals and reporting out to the public as HHS's inspector, a lack of PPE. he didn't like that. That was made public. She was gone I think within days. What can you do to protect any inspectors general who are still there and unearth corruption if there was to remove the IG at the State Department, who was investigating personal corruption on the part of Mike Pompeo and arms sales that wasn't approved by Congress.
