President Donald Trump and outgoing UK Prime Minister Theresa May were able to skate through their brief joint news conference on Tuesday without having to deal with tough questions. But the response top Trump administration officials received on their way to the event was a different story.
The most interesting moment of the Trump-May news conference happened before it began
Fox News’s immediate attempt to spin Ivanka Trump getting booed was telling.
Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
National Security Adviser John Bolton and White House adviser (and first daughter) Ivanka Trump were met with loud boos when they emerged from 10 Downing Street and made their way across a London street to the news conference.
But Fox & Friends host Brian Kilmeade immediately tried to spin the boos, saying, “it’s not for Ivanka — it’s for John Bolton, and he loves it.”
“He pretty much is looked at as somebody, as the tough guy in that administration,” Kilmeade continued. “And he loves that label.”
The moment illustrated how automatic it has become for Fox News presenters to protect Trump and his family. Trump traveled to Britain, where his approval rating is 21 percent, with four of his children — Ivanka, Eric, Don Jr., and Tiffany — even though Ivanka is the only one who works in the White House and Eric and Don Jr. are supposed to be staying out of politics while they run the family business that Trump still owns and profits from.
Despite what Kilmeade would have you believe, there’s no reason to believe that Brits were booing Bolton but not Ivanka Trump. Watch for yourself:
Trump and May didn’t receive warm receptions either when they emerged minutes later to make their way to the news conference.
The presser itself was brief and didn’t contain much news. Trump and May managed to avoid responding to hard-hitting questions, though at one point, Trump struggled to answer a policy-related question about Britain’s National Health Service (NHS).
Trump was more in his element when Fox News reporter John Roberts asked him a softball question that allowed him to talk tough toward Mexico and about undocumented immigration, which he characterized as an “invasion,” echoing conspiracy theories that have inspired acts of mass violence in the United States and abroad.
Fox News’s effort to protect Trump stands in contrast to CNN, which responded to Trump’s comment during the news conference about reports of Brits protesting him being “fake news” by showing footage of hundreds of people protesting him in London earlier in the day. Trump began his diplomatic trip to the UK by urging people to stop doing business with AT&T — the parent company of CNN — because he’s unhappy with CNN’s coverage of him.
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