Donald Trump thought he was safe inside his Fox News bubble on Thursday when he sat down for an interview with the network’s Harris Faulkner.
But he self-destructed the moment Faulkner called him out for using the racist phrase, “when the looting starts, the shooting starts,” last month in a tweet directed at protesters.
First, Faulkner asked why Trump would use those words in the first place, and then she fact-checked him when he was unable to correctly identify where the phrase originated.
From there, the president devolved into a stream of gibberish in which he tried to explain two different meanings of the racist phrase.
Video:
Faulkner: Why those words?
Trump: So that’s an expression I’ve heard over the years
Faulkner: Do you know where it comes from?
Trump: I think Philadelphia. The mayor of Philadelphia.
Faulkner: It comes from 1967 pic.twitter.com/J8EgoVXcqX— Acyn Torabi (@Acyn) June 11, 2020
The exchange between Trump and Faulkner:
FAULKNER: I’m a black woman. I’m a mom. And, you’ve talked about it, but we haven’t seen you come out and be that consoler in this instance. And the tweets. ‘When the looting starts, the shooting starts.’ Why those words?
TRUMP: So, thats an expression I’ve heard over the years.
FAULKNER: Do you know where it comes from?
TRUMP: I think Philadelphia, the mayor of Philadelphia.
FAULKNER: No, it comes from – 1967, I was about 18 months old at the time. … It was from the chief of police in Miami. He was cracking down, and he meant what he said. And he said I don’t even care if it makes it look like brutality, I’m going to crack down. When the looting starts, the shooting starts. That frightened a lot of people, when you tweeted that.
TRUMP: Well, it also comes from a very tough mayor who might have been police commissioner at the time. But I think mayor of Philadelphia named Frank Rizzo. And he had an expression like that, but I’ve heard it many times. I think it’s been used many times. It means two things, very different things. One is if there’s looting, there’s probably going to be shooting. And that’s not as a threat, that’s really just a fact because that’s what happens. And the other is if there’s looting, there’s going to be shooting. They’re very different meanings.
It’s not easy defending the indefensible
Donald Trump often has difficulty stringing together words during his best moments, but those troubles are made much worse when he’s forced to defend something that is so manifestly indefensible.
The correct answer to Harris Faulkner’s question was, “It was a phrase I should’ve never used, and I apologize to those I hurt by using it.”
But this is Donald Trump, of course, a man who hasn’t uttered a single sincere apology in his life – which is ironic because so many people deserve one from him.
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