On Thursday’s Good Morning America, Fox News Channel’s Bill O’Reilly was the guest and talked about the politicization of the mass shooting in Orlando. “[I] hate to see this war on terror politicized because that's what's going on,” O’Reilly complained after anchor George Stephanopoulos brought up how various politicians have made the shooting a policy issue for their side. The ABC host then asked if Trump’s response to call out ISIS was “working for him right now.” O’Reilly unleashed a rant on what liberal journalists like Stephanopoulos don’t understand about why most Americans oppose strict gun control:
O’REILLY: The terrorism issue, oh, are you kidding me? People are furious. They’re furious! They don't want to hear about gun control. They want ISIS savages confronted. That's what everybody is talking about outside of New York and Georgetown. People are fed up with President Obama not saying who the enemy is and dancing around and outsourcing the fight to the Kurds. Come on! These are savages, they're killing Americans. Go get them.
Here, Stephanopoulos tried to push back against his argument, citing a CBS poll from the day before which showed “more than half of the country disapproves of the way Trump responded to this.” O’Reilly responded that it was Trump’s rhetoric more than his stance on terror that voters disagreed with.
O’REILLY: Because I just said the words, it's style over substance. They don't like his style. Okay, so Trump's style is what holds him back. And I've told Trump that. I've known him for 30 years. Some of your ideas are very good but if you say that's Mexican is bad nobody will listen to anything else. So knock off the personal politics and get into the issues on how you're going to beat these people.
Stephanopoulos then plugged O’Reilly’s new show, and he responded by making another point about why there is such strong opposition to gun control: It's in our country's DNA.
STEPHANOPOULOS: We will be watching. We’re also going to watch your series Legends and Lies.
O’REILLY: Legends and Lies. This Sunday night, 8 o’clock. Fox News Channel. And you want gun control? This is why we have guns. Legends and Lives of patriots. We beat the British because everyone was armed and that has made our difficulty of regulating guns that much harder.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Get the history lesson from Bill O'Reilly on Sunday night.
