The Washington Post’s dishonest account of Trump’s Panama City rally

Philip Rucker of the Washington Post is a dishonest anti-Trump partisan. His reporting is some of the Post’s most slanted, and that’s saying a lot.

In this screed masquerading as a news story, Rucker tried to assign responsibility for the El Paso mass shooting to President Trump. In the second paragraph, Rucker wrote:

“How do you stop these people? You can’t,” Trump lamented at a May rally in Panama City Beach, Fla. Someone in the crowd yelled back one idea: “Shoot them.” The audience of thousands cheered and Trump smiled. Shrugging off the suggestion, he quipped, “Only in the Panhandle can you get away with that statement.”

Rich Lowry went back and watched the rally in question. He found that accounts like Rucker’s omit the fact that Trump expressly rejected the notion of using weapons to stop illegal immigrants:

Immediately prior to that moment [when someone yelled “shoot them”] Trump was talking about a migrant caravan heading north and said of border patrol agents, “Don’t forget, we don’t let them and we can’t let them use weapons. Other countries do. We can’t. I would never do that.”

(Emphasis added by me)

In this context, it’s clear, as Lowry says, that Trump’s response to the cry of “shoot them” — “only in the Panhandle you can get away with that statement” — is not meant as approving the statement, but rather was a good-natured way to acknowledge its outrageousness.

In Panama City, Trump said that he would never authorize the use of weapons to stop a caravan of illegal immigrants. Yet, the Washington Post twists the Panama City rally into evidence that Trump incites people to shoot indiscriminately at immigrants who are her legally.

Facts don’t matter to the Washington Post. It will say almost anything to further its campaign of resistance against the U.S. President.

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