Don Lemon: It 'Doesn't Help' Trump To Call Out White Supremacy
CNN’s Don Lemon knocked Donald Trump’s failure to explicitly denounce the self-described “skinhead” Coast Guard lieutenant arrested for plotting to commit domestic terrorism, arguing the president was simply worried about his base.
“Why doesn’t he just call out these white supremacists?” colleague Chris Cuomo asked Friday night, calling it “a no-brainer.”
Lemon responded that it “doesn’t help him politically.”
Last week, Christopher Hasson was arrested and accused of stockpiling weapons and creating a hit list of Democrats and prominent journalists, including Lemon and Cuomo.
On Friday, Trump didn’t offer much of a response to Hasson’s alleged actions. The president said he was awaiting a full briefing and called the matter “a shame” and “a very sad thing” while denying that he bore any responsibility through his own verbal attacks on the media.
“It’s sad that our names are on the list,” Cuomo said. “It’s sad to our families.”
“He just doesn’t say the right thing when he doesn’t feel like saying the right thing. Period.”
A Tuesday federal court filing indicated that Hasson had envisioned carrying out a plot “to kill almost every last person on the earth” and using “focused violence” to create a white ethnostate.
Despite the president’s lack of a significant reaction, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders came to his defense Friday, falsely claiming that he hasn’t “at any point has done anything but condemn violence against journalists or anyone else.”
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This article originally appeared on HuffPost.
