Former first son Donald Trump Jr. was not having it when a reporter took at swipe at his father’s immigration policies.
During a live MSNBC interchange on the Republican National Convention floor in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Jacob Soboroff first accused the 45th president of being a “divisive figure.”
“What’s it going to look like in a second term?” the reporter asked Trump Jr.
“I think the media created divisiveness around him,” he responded. “They lied about Russia, Russia collusion. They said he was a traitor. They went after him in every which way possible.”
“If the media actually starts being an honest broker, talking about the things that he did, the prosperity he brought, the peace deals that he signed around the world rather than the disaster that we’re living right now, I think you’d do everyone in the country a big favor,” Trump Jr. added.
Soboroff wasn’t going to let Trump Jr. say those kinds of things on MSNBC’s air about honest reporting and the positive accomplishments of the Trump administration without trying to get some Democrat talking point zingers in there.
“I know immigration’s important to him. I covered the family separation crisis closely. Will we continue to see policies like separating 5,000 children deliberately from their parents?” the correspondent asked.
“You mean the Obama administration,” Trump Jr. began, before Soboroff pulled the mic away.
JUST IN: Donald Trump Jr. calls reporter a “clown” to his face and tells him to “get out of here” at the RNC after the reporter started talking about children in “cages.”
Clown is an understatement.
Reporter: “Will we continue to see policies like separating 5,000 children… pic.twitter.com/emou5jN8m6
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) July 15, 2024
“They didn’t do that sir,” Soboroff said.
“Sure,” Trump Jr. answered.
“Will there be a second family separation policy?” the reporter asked.
“It’s MSDNC, so I expect nothing less from you clowns even today,” Trump Jr. said, referring to a nickname his father often uses for MSNBC. “Even 48 hours later, you couldn’t wait, you couldn’t wait with your lies and with your nonsense, so just get out of here.”
OK, time for a little dose of truth for Soboroff, who wrote a book on the Trump administration’s very brief family separation policy in 2018, calling it an “American tragedy.”
The Washington Post reported that in 2018 then-President Trump had implemented a zero tolerance policy of prosecuting adults who crossed the border illegally, which included separating them from children accompanying them.
The policy was in place from April to June 2018, six weeks, before Trump, following intense public criticism, signed an executive order ending the policy. The Associated Press reported about 2,700 children were impacted by the policy. Soboroff put the figure at 5,000.
Meanwhile, the Biden administration as of last year could not account for 85,000 children released into the U.S., Fox News reported at the time.
That is to say nothing about the tens of thousands of children being trafficking into the U.S., facilitated by Biden’s lax border policies.
Trump Jr. was also correct to say the Obama administration had its own problems with dealing with children at the border
In August 2020 during a Democratic National Convention speech, former first lady Michelle Obama sought to shift blame by saying under the Trump administration Americans “watch in horror as children are torn from their families and thrown into cages.”
The Associated Press fact-checked her writing, “The reference to cages is misleading and a matter that Democrats have persistently distorted.”
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“Trump used facilities that were built during the Obama-Biden administration to house children at the border. They are chain-link enclosures inside border facilities where migrants were temporarily housed, separated by sex and age,” the AP continued.
“At the height of the controversy over Trump’s zero-tolerance policy at the border, photos that circulated online of children in the enclosures generated great anger. But those photos — by The Associated Press — were taken in 2014 and depicted some of the thousands of unaccompanied children held by President Barack Obama,” the news outlet said.
And by the way, “When that fact came to light, some Democrats and activists who had tweeted the photos deleted their tweets. But prominent Democrats have continued to cite cages for children as a distinctive cruelty of Trump,” the AP said.
You can see the cages were built during the Obama administration because the picture below shows then-Gov. Jan Brewer touring a facility in Nogales, Arizona with then-Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson in 2014.
“Those cages that were shown, I think they were very inappropriate, they were built by President Obama’s administration. Not by Trump. I’m the one that stopped it. President Obama had child separation.” –@realDonaldTrump pic.twitter.com/6gN43bgjNT
— Courtney Holland 🇺🇸 (@hollandcourtney) October 23, 2020
Mr. Soboroff, was it a tragedy when the Obama administration incentivized tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors to come to the U.S. and then put them in cages?
Spare me the sanctimony.
Donald Trump Jr.’s right, “Get out of here.”
