Newsbusters
December 2, 2017
Friday’s Morning Joe was still devoting a substantial portion of its news coverage to discussing President Trump’s Wednesday morning retweets of three anti-Muslim videos originally posted by one of the leaders of the far-right UK political party Britain First.
Not happy with just criticizing Trump for drawing attention to a group like Britain First or pointing out that one of the videos that Trump retweeted does not appear to depict a Muslim migrant attacking a Dutch boy (as the accompanying tweet claimed), host Joe Scarborough and MSNBC national affairs analyst John Heilemann instead accused Trump of deliberately trying to “incite hatred” so that his followers would kill or otherwise harm Muslims.
Heilemann was the main person to bring up this line of baseless speculation about Trump’s secret, homicidally racist motives:
It’s like Charlottesville all over again where you’ve got the — in this case you’ve got the British neo-fascists who are cheering Donald Trump. In Charlottesville you had the Daily Stormer and the neo-nazis who were cheering when Trump said that there were good people on both sides of the debate. I just wanna say one thing about this, right? You think about both — in Britain, you think about American servicemen around the world. You think about American Muslims, Muslim-Americans in this country. When Jonathan Swan made this point the other day, I wanna give him credit, that when Trump retweeted these videos, it was not — it was taking this out of the realm of a discussion about, you know, how tough you should be about Islamic terrorism or how tough about extreme vetting or any policy dispute. These — all three of these videos were just designed to incite hatred towards a religious group, and in — by doing that, Trump is inciting hatred and putting people at risk, lives at risk, in Britain, American servicemen as…