Tuesday on CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360,” network legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin said Rep. Ilhan Omar‘s (D-MN) antisemitic statements were “silly” in comparison to President Donald Trump‘s “racist and bigoted tirades.”
Toobin said, “The only reason Donald Trump is a politician at all is because he made up a racist lie about Barack Obama not being born in the United States. That has sort of fallen into the memory bank. That’s why Donald Trump became a political figure. Because he made up this racist lie and used it to become a political figure, and it worked.”
Referencing Omar, former Trump White House attorney Jim Schultz said, “The Democrats twisted themselves on some Antisemitic comments made by members of their caucus. And they twisted themselves trying to deal with that issue. It’s something that needs to be taken head-on, no question about it. I think everybody has to take the president, Congress and others, the leaders of this country, have to understand that there are consequences for what they say, and it’s on both sides. You know, you’re quick to point out that it’s the president, but there are others involved in this kind of political Twitter battle that causes this vitriol. Maybe we’ve got to tone it down a little bit.”
Toobin shot back, “I spent 2016 covering a campaign where I personally engaged in false equivalence between Hillary Clinton‘s misdeeds and Donald Trump’s misdeeds, and I’m not doing it in 2020. And the idea that one congresswoman’s, you know, silly statement is at all equivalent to the racist and bigoted tirades of the president of the United States is absurd false equivalence.”
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