Leave it to Jim Acosta of CNN to gaslight the White House for asserting that the Democratic Party is now courting blatant anti-Semitism in their ranks.
At the first press briefing in 42 days on Monday, the CNN correspondent got into a jousting match with White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders over recent comments made by President Trump, who accused Democrats of being the anti-Jewish party.
Last week, the president said in response to House Democrats’ drafting a House resolution on hate that failed to condemn Rep. Ilhan Omar’s (D-MN) anti-Semitic statements regarding Israel:
I thought yesterday’s vote by the House was disgraceful, because it’s become, the Democrats have become an anti-Israel party. They’ve become an anti-Jewish party. And I thought that vote was a disgrace and so does everybody else if you get an honest answer. If you get an honest answer from politicians, they thought it was a disgrace. The Democrats have become an anti-Israel party; they’ve become an anti-Jewish party, and that’s too bad.
According to Jim Acosta, President Trump condemning anti-Jewish sentiment so forcefully was “beneath everybody” and asked Sanders if Trump would tone it down.
“Isn’t that kind of rhetoric just sort of beneath everybody?” Acosta asked Sanders, according to Fox News. “Do you think that the president has thought, at all, going into the 2020 campaign that the rhetoric just needs to be lowered? Whether it’s talking about Democrats, the media, immigrants, or should we just plan on hearing the president use the same kind of language that we heard in 2016 and all through the first couple years of this administration?”
Sarah Huckabee Sanders said that the only shame in this scenario belongs to the Democrats for failing to condemn Ilhan Omar’s anti-Semitism.
“Democrats have had a number of opportunities to condemn specific comments and have refused to do that,” Sanders said. “I think that is a great shame. The president has been clear on what his position is, certainly what his support is for the people and the community of Israel.”
Acosta asserted that Trump slamming the Democrats for hating Jews is “patently untrue.”
“Democrats don’t hate Jewish people, that’s just silly,” Acosta said. “It’s not true.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has asserted that Ilhan Omar’s anti-Semitic comments were just a different “use of words.” “The incident that happened, I don’t think our colleague is anti-Semitic,” Pelosi said. “I think she has a different experience in the use of words, doesn’t understand that some of them are fraught with meaning that she didn’t realize.”
When Sanders tried calling on another reporter, Acosta kept firing questions away, reminding the press secretary of when Trump said there were “fine people on both sides” following the Charlottesville protest where a white supremacist domestic terrorist plowed his car into a crowd of people, killing one woman.
“Essentially suggesting that there were very fine people in the Nazis,” Acosta said.
“That’s not at all what the president was stating,” Sanders replied. “The president has been incredibly clear in consistently and repeatedly condemning hatred, bigotry and racism in all of its forms, whether it’s in America or anywhere else. To say otherwise is simply untrue.”