Anchor Trace Gallagher did his best to gaslight viewers into thinking Donald Trump is not an authoritarian enemy of democracy. But guest Clay Travis all but declared otherwise.
As you probably know, yesterday was the 80th anniversary of D-Day. President Joe Biden gave a powerful speech at Normandy American Cemetery honoring our troops and tying that day’s fight against tyranny with today’s need to defend democracy and stand with our NATO allies.
As you also probably know, Donald Trump has shockingly disrespected our troops.
The obvious contrast of Biden at Normandy honoring troops and democracy with Trump talking retribution and revenge sent Fox anchor Trace Gallagher and MAGA contributor Clay Travis into paroxysms of venomous spin, with truth very much optional.
Gallgher is supposed to be one of Fox’s “news” correspondents. But he got the propaganda going right at the start by attacking Hillary Clinton:
GALLGHER: Well, twice-failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton catching some heat for appearing to liken a vote this November for President Biden to the D-Day landings, writing on X, quoting here, 80 years ago today thousands of brave Americans fought to protect democracy on the shores of Normandy. This November, all we have to do is vote.
It was a fitting appearance for Travis given that the last time I saw him, he was encouraging potential jurors in Trump’s New York criminal case to sabotage the trial by lying to get on the jury and then refusing to convict. “I want jury nullification,” he said. As far as we can tell, Fox News has no problem with such deliberate undermining of our justice system. Nor his later desire for political prosecutions, but I digress.
Gallagher started by inviting Travis to attack Clinton:” What do you think about about Hillary's comparison there?” Gallagher “asked.”
Other than claiming “the American public doesn’t really like Hillary Clinton,” Travis didn’t have much to say about her. He did, however, immediately started attacking Biden. He called it “a sign of overall Democrat desperation” that Biden gave “basically the exact same speech that Ronald Reagan did in 1984” about D-Day. Travis falsely claimed Biden and the Democrats are “actually getting their ass kicked” and that the speech was a doomed attempt “to get Joe Biden popular again.”
FACT CHECK: The polls show a close election. Also, Donald Trump is not popular. If you thought Gallagher provided the truth to viewers, think again.
Instead, Gallagher asked the other guest, Democrat Philippe Reines, “What do you think about the strategy of Biden constantly going after Trump voters and Trump himself, the MAGA people, and then you see the media kind of attacking him as a wannabe dictator?”
Reines did what every Fox guest should do – he called out the propaganda, though I would have liked more. “I know I'm gonna get cut off real fast when I say this,” he began. “But what we haven't heard you guys say is him [Trump] calling dead Americans buried in these cemeteries ‘losers.’” Not surprisingly, Travis cut him off to say it didn’t happen.
In fact, Fox’s own chief national security correspondent, Jennifer Griffin has validated and added on to the reporting that Trump had called fallen troops “suckers” and “losers.” Gallagher didn’t mention that, either.
Nor did he have a problem with Travis insisting Trump never said there were “very fine people on both sides” of the Charlottesville neo-Nazi demonstration in Charlottesville. Travis later claimed that Trump really said, as Travis put it, “there were very fine people who believed that the statue of Robert E. Lee should come down and that it should not come down. That was very clear from the transcript.”
FACT CHECK: As you can see via PolitiFact’s transcript, Trump said, without qualification, “you had some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides.” While it’s clear Trump was trying to say that the “very fine people” on the white nationalist side were merely protesting against the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue, it’s also true that the protesters were a group of white nationalists. From NPR: “On the night of Aug. 11, 2017, Neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klansmen and other white supremacists marched through the University of Virginia campus bearing torches and terrorizing students with chants of ‘Blood and soil’ and ‘Jews will not replace us.’"
There may have been some there only to protest the removal of the statue but given the torches and chants, it’s nearly impossible to believe they would not have known who they were joining. Don’t tell me that Trump and Travis didn’t know that, either.
Regardless, Reines got to the more important point, the threat to democracy. “I think Joe Biden feels it in his bones that Donald Trump is, in effect, the biggest threat we have to our democracy. And I agree with him. I think many people do and by the way, I think 85 something million people agreed with him in 2020. And that's why Donald Trump lost and that's why I hope and I think he will lose again in about four or five months from now,” Reines said.
Gallagher to the rescue!
GALLAGHER: It's amazing to me, Clay Travis, where you talk about this thing and it goes back to where Donald Trump said, “You know, it's gonna be a bloodbath, talking about the car industry in Mexico if he doesn’t get elected, and everybody turns it into, “See, he said it's gonna be a bloodbath, gonna be a civil war. He never said anything. It's constantly being taken out of context, just like he was yesterday.
It's interesting where you have this assault on democracy, this assault-on-democracy narrative, and by the same people who’re telling you the cars to drive, telling you the masks to wear, telling you the vaccine to take, telling you the stove you can use and yet only one side is assaulting freedoms and democracy.
Unfortunately for the narrative, Travis pretty much proved Reines’ point.
TRAVIS: Well, what I think is amazing is they're saying, you know, if Donald Trump gets elected, he might try to put his political opponents in jail … He should. I think we have got to have some Republicans AGs and also some Republican DAs who actually have the intestinal fortitude to do what Democrats actually do, not what they say Trump will do.
Gallagher said he’d give Reines the last word. But first, Gallagher added that Travis “makes a good point” because Trump has said he will not put people in jail. FACT CHECK: Trump has repeatedly suggested he will do exactly that.
When Reines made that point, guess who really got the last word? Spoiler alert: It wasn’t Reines.
You can watch a Fox contributor endorse political prosecutions below, from the June 7, 2024 The Story.
Travis’ most telling moment in his life was his 2017 opportunity to go on Brooke Baldwin’s show on CNN to give an Angry Right Wing opinion about the then-current brouhaha about ESPN host Jemele Hill calling out Little Trump for his bigotry, racism and obvious advocacy for white supremacism. And what did Travis do with this opportunity? He proudly announced that he only believes in the First Amendment and boobs. When Baldwin immediately stopped him and gave him a chance to think about what he was doing, he repeated the sexist comment and said he was proud of it. At which point Baldwin tossed him off the air, and CNN has never allowed him to return.
Travis currently co-hosts the replacement Angry Right Wing AM radio show for Limbaugh’s, along with fellow Angry Right Winger Buck Sexton. It would seem that Travis is now desperately flinging whatever outrageous comments he can on a regular basis to get attention for the radio show – whether that be to advocate for trial jurors to break the law or whether that be for Little Trump and other Angry Right Wingers to stage revenge prosecutions just because Little Trump is being held accountable for his felonies. Frankly, Travis outburst on the Fox show sounds more like a tantrum than anything else, akin to the ones being thrown by Little Trump himself.
