‘B——‘: A U.K. news reporter defines Trump’s rhetoric with a single word
If you were watching the election results from the UK, you might have tuned into Channel 4. Watching their coverage was… an experience, to say the least. Boris Johnson (think our version of Donald Trump, complete with the same terrible hair) was there, trying to plug his new book despite being told not to. Stormy Daniels was there, meeting Michael Cohen for what might have been the very first time. And Emily Maitlis was there.
If you don’t know Emily Maitlis, she’s the woman who helped lead Prince Andrew to his downfall. She interviewed him for Newsnight about his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, and the result was a complete and utter car crash from which Andrew’s reputation never recovered. So it’s fair to say she knows s*** when she sees it, and she wasn’t afraid to say so during election night.
The conversation on the night turned to one of the lowest and most revolting parts of Trump’s campaign: the time he claimed that Haitian immigrants were eating people’s cats and dogs. It wasn’t true, of course, but the worst of Trump’s fanbase ran with it. Maitlis had something to say about the racist nonsense. “When Donald Trump talked about the eating cats and dogs, half of America was just thinking ‘This is bats**t, I can’t believe what he’s saying, this is gonna be the end of him.'” she said. Her co-presenter Krishnan Guru-Murthy hastily told her to stop swearing, but Maitlis said, “I don’t know what else, how else, you would describe it.”
Not long after that, Gugu-Murthy said, “I will tell off Emily later because I know she started swearing. It may be the middle of the night in Britain but we’re still a little bit sensitive about that stuff.” Maitlis didn’t return, leading to speculation online from British MAGAs (yeah, don’t ask) that she’d been thrown off the show “in disgrace”. But she hadn’t been, she’d simply left to record something else.
Rightly calling Trump’s immigration rhetoric “bats**t wasn’t the only impressive thing Maitlis did that night. She also called out Boris Johnson for his actions while he was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. “You essentially started importing some of that Trump-like behavior in Britain when you were prime minister,” she told him, calling out his “disregard for institutions, his disregard for the rule of law, his denialism.” Johnson told her that he disagreed with her, but many members of the British public may not.
Thankfully, Johnson is no longer in power. Let’s hope that one day the same will be true of Trump.
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