A GOPer who received a brutal check on live national television as she tried to defend Donald Trump’s much-criticized “poisoning the blood” rhetoric has been slapped down again.
Hours after Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY) took a verbal gut-punch from CNN host Abby Phillip as she tried to blame Trump’s comment — which referred to immigrants and is similar to a quote from Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” — on Democratic polices, MSNBC laced up its gloves and jumped into the ring.
“Imagine being an elected member of Congress and thinking, ‘Maybe I can convince voters to believe that Trump meant ‘Democratic policies’ are ‘pouring into our country,’” wrote Steve Benen, a “The Rachel Maddow Show” producer.
"Note, Trump said 'these people,' despite the fact that Malliotakis said Trump has referred to 'Democratic policies," he wrote.
“He never said immigrants are poisoning, though,” Malliotakis said on CNN late Monday. “He didn't say the words immigrants, I think he was talking about Democratic policies.
That’s when Phillip shot back: ”He was talking about people.”
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In his blog post, Benen backs Phillip with a friendly reminder to Malliotakis and his readers: “Let’s also not forget that on Saturday night, Trump used his social media platform to argue, ‘ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION IS POISONING THE BLOOD OF OUR NATION.’”
The MSNBC producer then slammed Malliotakis for trying to “gaslight a national television audience” and whitewashing Trump rhetoric that for months has been drawing comparisons to Hitler.
“If I were a member of Congress, and my party’s likely presidential nominee started using Hitler-like rhetoric about immigrants, I’d struggle to think of a defense, too,” Benen writes.
But, he concludes, “If the best GOP officials can come up with is, ‘I think he was talking about the Democratic policies,’ the party should just concede that it has no defense at all.”
Watch the video below or at this link.