Nicolle Wallace tore into Donald Trump on Monday’s “Deadline: White House” after he verbally attacked yet another female reporter.
Earlier in the day, following a White House roundtable on farm aid, Trump took questions from the press. When ABC News’ Rachel Scott asked the president whether he would release the full video of a controversial September military strike on an alleged drug boat in the Caribbean, Trump blasted the correspondent, calling her “terrible” and “the most obnoxious reporter in the whole place.”
After playing a clip of the exchange, Wallace told her guests she had “hit pause” to make clear that Trump’s actions are unacceptable. She said society should “never normalize” such comments, which she described as “verbal violence” and a “verbal assault on another female journalist.”
This was not Trump’s first outburst against a female reporter, as Wallace noted. The MS NOW host listed several other journalists who have been the target of his ire in recent weeks, including CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, CBS News’ Nancy Cordes, The New York Times’ Katie Rogers, ABC News’ Mary Bruce and Bloomberg News’ Catherine Lucey, to whom he said “Quiet, piggy,” after she attempted to ask a question about convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
“This is sick s—,” Wallace said of the attacks.
However, the “Deadline: White House” host didn’t just aim her criticism at Trump. She urged the journalists’ colleagues to do more to point out the president’s bad behavior.
“Anyone in the room is in the room to do a job for their viewers or their readers,” she explained. “But they should go home tonight and think about whether their sisters or their daughters or their moms or their sons or their husbands or their fathers think that there’s something else they should do the next time he calls a female journalist ‘obnoxious,’ ‘terrible,’ ‘stupid,’ ‘nasty,’ ‘ugly,’ ‘terrible,’ ‘insubordinate’ or ‘piggy.’”
“We’re either going to normalize this, and then you’re going to hear all sorts of prominent people calling women all sorts of names — I’m sure by the time I get off TV, I’ll have a few of those myself — but we’re either going to normalize this and usher in an era of unprecedented misogyny, or that press corps is going to act as one and say no more,” Wallace said.
You can watch Wallace’s full commentary in the clip at the top of the page.
Allison Detzel is an editor/producer for MS NOW.