During his Thursday evening show, Fox News’ Sean Hannity convened an all-white panel to talk about Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ denunciation of a black ESPN host from the White House podium.
After introducing the panel — which included Fox News contributor Tomi Lahren, “psychology expert” Gina Louden, and commentator Danielle McLaughlin — Hannity ignored Trump’s recent defense of white supremacists and said he’s sick of liberals calling Trump supporters racist.
“The most amazing thing and I can’t take it anymore, Danielle, I don’t like that conservatives, that the president — this is a lie, and this is a narrative that happens every two years and every four years, ‘Republicans, conservatives, the president are racist, sexist, misogynistic’ — you know what, stop lying about who we are,” Hannity said. “Tomi, we are not racist, nor is the president, nor are the people around him.”
Hannity’s all-white panel went on to discuss whether it was appropriate for Sanders to call ESPN host Jamele Hill’s termination during the White House news briefing. Earlier this week, Hill tweeted that Trump is a “white supremacist who has largely surrounded himself w/ other white supremacists.”
Hannity stopped short of endorsing Sanders’ comments — “I don’t do boycotts or call for firings,” he said — but concluded the segment by asserting that “it looks like conservatives are the ones that are open minded, the ones that believe in freedom.”
In addition to publicly defending white supremacists following their violent rally in Charlottesville last month, Trump has pushed for less federal scrutiny of violent white supremacists and any other extremist group not comprised of Muslims, harsh law enforcement policies that perpetuate the disproportionate incarceration of blacks, the end of a program protecting immigrants who were brought to America as children from deportation, and suggested that mass murdering Muslims suspected of terrorism might be a way to deter future incidents.
Trump’s campaign message to communities of color basically consisted of telling them that their lives are already so bad that he couldn’t possibly make them worse.
From an August 2016 report in the Washington Post:
Standing before a vastly white crowd in Ohio on Monday evening, Donald Trump made a passionate pitch to African American and Hispanic voters, whom he described as living in poverty in neighborhoods that are more dangerous than war zones.
“What do you have to lose?” Trump asked again and again.
Trump has also shown little concern for gender balance or women’s issues. Earlier this week, CNN reported that “[o]f the 42 people President Donald Trump has nominated as US attorneys, the chief federal prosecutors throughout the country, only one is a woman.” The administration recently announced it’s ending an Obama-era rule that would have required businesses to monitor the salaries of employees of different genders, races, and ethnicities in an effort to prevent employment discrimination.
Since taking office, Trump has retweeted posts from openly racist fans of his on numerous occasions. Polling conducted during the campaign found that 40 percent of Trump supporters believed blacks are more “lazy” than whites, 16 percent believed whites are a superior race, and 20 percent disagreed with President Lincoln’s signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed Southern slaves.