One of President Donald Trump’s most prominent defenders in the mainstream media, British broadcaster Piers Morgan, got into a tense exchange with an American conservative commentator on Tuesday after he was accused of sucking up to Trump.
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“You have decided you know better than me what you think is important, and I would say that is not necessarily true,” Morgan told The Bulwark’s Tim Miller in a podcast that appeared on Tuesday. Morgan, who met Trump when in 2008 he appeared on the future president’s reality TV show “The Celebrity Apprentice” (Morgan ultimately won), went on to say that “a lot of the woke issues actually are things of legitimate mass concern. I’ll give you an example: the ongoing furor around trans athletes in women’s sports.”
When Miller asked “Who cares?” to Morgan’s concern, the broadcaster replied that “if you actually go out in the street and ask a thousand people what they think about that, (a) they would care, and (b) they think it’s complete nonsense. And what my liberal friends do — the terrible mistake you make, I’m afraid, when you try to say nobody cares — is you’re missing the fact that they do care. And, you know, it was people like Joe Biden — when he made it clear he thought it was fine for trans women to compete in women’s sport, Americans actually went, ‘This is nonsense,’ which is why he lost.”
Miller responded by saying, “My point is not that nobody cares. My point is that, in the grand scheme of things, you’re covering a news show, having so many segments about the fifth-place performer in a women’s high school swim match.” To illustrate his point, Miller accused Morgan of creating “false balance” between Trump’s policies and Biden’s policies.
“On one hand, Trump got us into a stupid war,” Miller said. “On the other hand, oh my goodness, there was a lacrosse match that had a girl in it, in West Virginia.” When Morgan tried to change the subject, Miller accused him of “walking past my criticism” of how Morgan focused on “crazy liberal s——” while ignoring “crazy, random conservative s——” such as that happening in Miller’s state of Louisiana. Then the two men pivoted to discussing Trump.
Miller pointed out that in November, Morgan wrote a New York Post editorial in which he claimed Trump is “ready to be one of America’s great presidents,” asking if Morgan still believes that. While qualifying his defense by saying that Trump “unfortunately has reverted to type” and compromised his legacy by breaking his promise to not start new wars, he then insisted that Trump could still be remembered as a great president. He also repeatedly insinuated throughout the interview that those who harshly criticize the president have “Trump Derangement Syndrome.”
Miller eventually admitted he was “frustrated” with the conversation.
“My counterpoint to that is: okay, what do you want me to do, be a liar?” Miller asked Morgan. “Shine his turds? Pretend like he’s something that he’s not? I mean, look — the honest truth is, everybody who goes to work for Trump and then has a falling out with him and leaves sounds like me in the end. I mean, [former chief of staff] John Kelly — thought he’s a fascist. [Former Secretary of Defense Jim] Mattis. [Former communicators director Anthony] Scaramucci. We go down the list, they all sound like me, because I’m saying the truth about him.”
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After initially citing the Abraham Accords, which normalized relations between Israel and a variety of Muslim-majority countries (including Bahrain, Sudan, the United Arab Emirates and Morocco) but failed to address the Israel-Palestine conflict, Morgan replaced that policy with praising Trump for shutting down the US southern border.
“You said the thing you wanted to say, Piers,” Miller told Morgan. “The numbers are so great because at the border they came in and got turned around, and that counts as one. What Trump is doing is not only shutting down the border, but also menacing people in cities, in the interior of the country.”
Ultimately Morgan declared that Trump should not be judged until the end of his second term.
“If you had a referendum aspect to your presidential system, fine,” Morgan said. “You don’t, you elect a president for four years, and I think presidents should be judged at the end of four years.”
This is not Morgan’s first flirtation with controversy over his opinionated takes on American politics. For instance in February he defended Trump’s suppression of the Epstein files, which include details about his longtime friendship with the late child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, by saying Trump has not been proved to have done anything criminal and that “a lot of stuff in those files that are clearly fantastic and malicious.”
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