MS NOW’s Nicolle Wallace has lashed out at Donald Trump after the president berated yet another female reporter.
The Deadline: White House anchor condemned Trump for his latest attack targeting ABC News’s Rachel Scott, in which he called her “the most obnoxious reporter in the whole place.”
Scott had asked if the White House would release the video of the widely condemned second airstrike on a suspected Venezuelan drug boat.
The incident is the latest in a long line of Trump’s verbal assaults on female journalists, which have included calling CNN’s Kaitlan Collins “stupid and nasty,” asking CBS News’s Nancy Cordes if she was “stupid,” calling the New York Times’s Katie Rogers “ugly, both inside and out,” and shushing and telling a Bloomberg reporter, “quiet, piggy.”
“This is sick s--t. This is sick,” Wallace said. “Anyone in the room is in the room to do a job for their viewers or their readers, but they should go home tonight and think about whether their sisters or their daughters or their moms or their sons or their husbands or their fathers think that there’s something else they should do the next time he calls a female journalist obnoxious, terrible, stupid, nasty, stupid, ugly, terrible, insubordinate, or piggy.
“Donald Trump can’t live without being on TV, and maybe if they said, ‘You know what, we’re going to have some solidarity,’ like they did when he wanted to change the names of oceans,” Wallace added.
“I mean, we’re either going to normalize this, then you’re going to hear all sorts of prominent people calling them all sorts of names. I’m sure, by the time I get off TV, I’ll have a few of those myself, or we’re going to normalize this and usher in an era of unprecedented misogyny, or that press corps is going to act as one and say, no more.”
Trump’s attack on Scott, ABC News’s senior political correspondent, occurred on Monday after the president was pressed on the “double tap” targeting two survivors from an initial strike on an alleged drug boat in the Caribbean, which has been accused of amounting to a war crime.
Scott asked Trump if he would direct Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to release footage of the Sept. 2 attack, after the 79-year-old president said last week he would have “no problem” releasing the video.
“I didn’t say that. You said that, I didn’t say that. This is ABC fake news,” he responded.
Trump, who has long faced questions and concerns about his mental acuity, did in fact tell reporters in the Oval Office on Dec. 3, “Whatever they have, we’d certainly release. No problem,” referring to the second airstrike video.
When Scott reminded Trump of his past comments, he replied, “Whatever Hegseth wants to do is OK with me.”
Scott then sought clarification on whether he was personally committed to releasing the full video, rather than leaving it to Hegseth to decide if the potentially incriminating footage would become public.
Trump then lashed out, “You are the most obnoxious reporter in the whole place. Let me just tell you, you are an obnoxious, actually, a terrible reporter, and it’s always the same with you.”
