During Sunday’s edition of MSNBC Live With Alex Witt, the panel engaged in some serious hyperbole while discussing President Trump’s most recent tweet declaring the press the enemy of the people with two predicting that his “incendiary” rhetoric towards the press will lead to someone in the media to “get injured or possibly killed.”
Guest host David Gura spoke to writer and documentary filmmaker Chris Whipple, who recently wrote a book called The Gatekeepers: How The White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency. Whipple changed the subject away from a Trump tweet surrounding the infamous Trump Tower meeting to another tweet President Trump sent out on Sunday morning describing the media as “very dangerous & sick!”
Whipple described the President’s tweet as “outrageous,” “incendiary,” and “dangerous,” adding: “It’s only a matter of time if he continues before someone will get injured or possibly killed. And I agree with Bret Stephens that if that happens, blood will be on Donald Trump’s hands.”
According to Whipple, not only will the President have blood on his hands but his entire inner circle will also bear responsibility for any hypothetical violence against a member of the media, ruling that “this is also on them.” Whipple stressed that President Trump’s inner circle has a “responsibility to tell Donald Trump that this is outrageous” because “it’s right out of Joseph Stalin’s playbook, someone is going to get killed.”
Panelist and former Hillary Clinton aide Adrienne Elrod agreed with Whipple that the President’s rhetoric about the press will lead to a tragedy, saying “somebody is going to get hurt.” She also complained that President Trump would even think about criticizing LeBron James; whom she described as “one of the biggest icons in United States sports history, one of the most popular figures across the spectrum in the United States of America today.”
As always, the liberal media will never cease to disappoint when it comes to predicting that, when push comes to shove, they make things about themselves.
To see the relevant transcript, click "expand."
MSNBC Live With Alex Witt
08/05/18
09:51 a.m. Eastern
DAVID GURA: Rina Shah, I want to get your perspective on this as well, a rather extraordinary tweet, I think you can admit. Your sense here of what it means for the President, what it means for the Republicans, many of whom are back home in their districts right now campaigning for reelection.
RINA SHAH: Well, I think the focus here is Don Jr. And genuinely when we know now more Americans will agree that when the President says something we should believe to the contrary. Truly Don Trump Jr. is in hot water here and I’m reminded of a quote from one of his e-mails in 2016 that said “if it’s what you say, I love it,” especially later in the summer. Here we are later in the summer two years later and we know what Don Jr. was trying to do. He was essentially trying to plan when this supposed dirt that the Russians could provide, he was trying to plan when it could hurt the Clinton campaign and when it would release and so I think here we have to parse this all out slowly and carefully but the remarkable thing here is that Don Jr. is very, very clearly put the President in trouble and the President is worried. There is factual evidence that lying to Congress, Don Jr. is what he did. We have no yet proof of that but factual evidence could lead to him really heading to some real legal trouble.
GURA: Chris Whipple, when I look at this, when I look at the week that was, what strikes me is just a real intractability, uncontrollability of this, this President. Top of the hour, Kelly O’Donnell out there near Bedminster telling us it’s unlikely the President’s got his lawyer at his arm here to tell him don’t send that tweet, it’s probably not in your best interest to do it. What is this? This artifact, these 280 characters tell you about the ability for the President’s staff to maybe not even control him but advise him. And we certainly saw that relief this week when you saw five distinguished members of his national security team come out and try to deliver a unified message only to have him turn it on its head just a few hours later.
CHRIS WHIPPLE: Well, he’s completely out of control. And I think that obviously all of these tweets this morning are trouble. Don Jr. attacking Lebron, we can talk about that all day. To me, the real story is the tweet he sent this morning once again attacking the press as the enemy of the people, calling journalists sick. It’s outrageous, it’s incendiary and it’s dangerous. It’s only a matter of time if he continues before someone will get injured or possibly killed. And I agree with Bret Stephens, that if that happens, blood will be on Donald Trump’s hands. Not only that but I think this goes to the inner circle around Donald Trump and I mean by that, John Kelly, Ivanka Trump, Hope Stevens if she’s on Air Force One…
GURA: Hope Hicks, yes.
WHIPPLE: These, it is their…this is also on them. It is their responsibility to tell Donald Trump that this is outrageous, it’s right out of Joseph Stalin’s play book, someone is going to get killed and I think that they all have to think about their own responsibility when he does it.
DAVID GURA: Adrienne Elrod, you’ve worked on campaigns, you’ve advised candidates and I just wonder how extraordinary this is that none of this seems to be getting through to the President, whether it’s a column in The New York Times saying what Chris Whipple said there that there could be blood on the President’s hands, that there’s real danger and peril here to the fact there are real risks still of what might happen in the midterms and elections after them, how extraordinary is this that no adviser seems to be able to penetrate the President’s thinking?
ADRIENNE ELROD: You know, it’s very extraordinary and it’s very dangerous and the bottom line is he cannot be controlled. Donald Trump is going to do what Donald Trump wants to do. We’ve seen from the past that any time he’s really panicked about something I think in this case this morning he became very panicked about, you know, what could possibly happen from a legal standpoint to his son Donald Trump Jr. And what he does is he lashes out. He, you know, over the weekend, criticized Lebron James, one of the biggest icons in United States sports history, one of the most popular figures across the spectrum in the United States of America today. You know, he doesn’t care, he just lashes out. It’s very dangerous, this war that he has against the media to the point that Chris just made is beyond reprehensible. Somebody is going to get hurt. Any time he has any sort of concern about the way the media covers him, instead of saying, you know what, maybe I should use this constructively to change my demeanor, instead he lashes out at the press and calls it fake news. So again, he’s out of control. I don’t know if Hope Hicks being back on the plane will somehow create some sort of more level-headed Donald Trump. I don’t think it will but we’re really moving into some dangerous times here.
