DAYLIGHT

‘Fox & Friends’ Host Brian Kilmeade Breaks With Trump on ‘Ridiculous’ Russia Tweet

‘He can’t be saying that going into the Russian summit,’ the host said of Trump’s tweet about ‘U.S. foolishness and stupidity.’

Ahead of his Helsinki summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin, President Donald Trump posted a tweet that was too “ridiculous” even for Fox & Friends.

Responding to Trump’s tweet that blamed “many years of U.S. foolishness and stupidity and now, the Rigged Witch Hunt” for a relationship with Russia that has “NEVER been worse,” host Brian Kilmeade said “That’s by far the most ridiculous tweet of late, and that is insulting to past administrations. He can’t be saying that going into the Russian summit.”

Later, during a segment with Newt Gingrich, Kilmeade said that he generally “likes” the president’s tweets but just didn’t “understand” what Trump was trying to accomplish in this case. “It’s really not our ‘foolishness and stupidity,’” he said. “That might not like the things we’re doing, but would you really say foolishness and stupidity is a correct characterization?”

Laughing, Gingrich responded, “Look, I’m not going to try to rewrite the president’s tweets.”

The Russian foreign ministry took a more direct approach, responding to Trump’s tweet with two words: “We agree.”

As one of the three permanent hosts of Trump’s favorite morning show, Kilmeade is generally a loyal defender of the president. But he has broken with him before on rare occasions.

Last September, Kilmeade dared to criticize the way Trump spoke about NFL players who kneeled for the national anthem to protest police violence. After Trump told a rally crowd that he wanted to hear NFL owners say, “Get that son of a bitch off the field right now, he’s fired,” Kilmeade said, “He made things immeasurably worse by speaking out. And I know what the intention was, but the language used, it was galvanizing in the wrong direction.”

More recently, Kilmeade called Trump’s idea of a military parade a “waste of money.”

And yet every time you think Kilmeade might be joining the #resistance, he turns around and says something like this about the immigrant children separated from their parents at the border: “These aren’t our kids. Show them compassion, but it’s not like he is doing this to the people of Idaho or, uh, or, uh, Texas. These are people from another country.”

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Matt WilsteinSenior Editor

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