CLEVELAND — MSNBC’s Hardball host Chris Matthews is our featured Mainstream Media screamer this week for his rant against Republican Donald Trump on the cable network just as the Republican presidential candidate was to publicly unveil Indiana Gov. Mike Pence as his running mate on Saturday.
Matthews said:
“There’ll be trouble and we all know that and we’re all taking precautions for that. We expect to be a lot of protests. Hopefully it’ll limited to peaceful protests, but there will be a lot of action outside the convention hall which will grab the attention of the cameras. It will be a raucous event next week. We know that because Trump is a magnet. He’s a lightning rod, whatever the metaphor is, he causes trouble with other people who see him as the enemy. African-Americans, we saw that at that downtown Chicago rally that he held. We saw it in San Diego with the Hispanic, the Latino population there showing up. Sometimes it seems like he’s out there trying to roil it up to create trouble, but it comes, and all those groups, organized or not, are going to see Cleveland as a chance to express themselves.
“They don’t like being called rapists. If you’re a Latino, you don’t want to be called a rapist. If you’re an African-American, you see this guy as a man who called the President of the United States basically an illegal immigrant, somebody born in Africa who somehow pulled the wool over our eyes and made himself eligible for the presidency. That will not to be forgotten, and so there’s a lot of enemies out there of Donald Trump who will show up in Cleveland. Let’s hope they express themselves with the right way, with the way with words and loud noise and, perhaps, some excitement, but not in a violent way, but we know that that’s going to be a big part of the story here. This convention could be like ’68, the Democratic convention in Chicago.”
Media Research Center Vice President of Research Brent Baker explains our pick: “Matthews is as messed up as usual in his reasoning, justifying violence as a rational response to views with which people disagree. If people turned violent against Matthews every time he said something offensive, he’d have a lot of bruises.”
Rating: Five out of five screams.
Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner’s “Washington Secrets” columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]
