Nearly eight months after he left office, right-wing media outlets are still so dedicated to Donald Trump that they will literally scream a military veteran off the air for suggesting he is not total perfection.
Newsmax host Grant Stinchfield was interviewing an Iraq War veteran named Joe Saboe, who has founded a grassroots group calling itself Team America. The group is currently doing a “digital Dunkirk,” working to get Americans and local allies out of Afghanistan after the recent withdrawal of troops.
Stinchfield clearly wanted Saboe to criticize the Biden administration for what’s happening in Afghanistan and while Saboe said he agreed with Stinchfield’s general message that “If the government knew what it was doing, we wouldn’t have Americans in this situation,” he refused to place the blame solely on Biden.
“I think multiple administrations leading up to this had multiple opportunities to try to set this up for success. And I think that’s not happened, and right now we as a country need to come together and help these people, our allies,” he said.
That kind of nuance isn’t welcome at Newsmax and Stinchfield didn’t waver. “I can tell ya, this didn’t happen under President Trump. And I know there’s a lot of people on the left that want to blame Trump, he wanted out of Afghanistan real bad,” he insisted, adding that even his 12-year-old son could tell Trump wanted out of Afghanistan. (Sure.) But he didn’t pull troops out, according to Stinchfield, because “he knew this would happen.” Never mind, I suppose, that Trump is the one who brokered the deal promising to remove American troops from Afghanistan by this past spring.
Stinchfield went so far as to call the Americans now “stuck” overseas “a hostage situation.”
Saboe’s response was far more measured than Stinchfield’s fact-free rant merited.
“With due respect, Grant, veterans—and I being one—and our friends are over there,” Saboe said. “We follow this closely from multiple administrations, and we know that Trump administration’s efforts here were fairly weak, that they were trying to limit the number of people that would get out and so there were coordination problems.”
Stinchfield tried to cut Saboe off through that entire statement, but Saboe wouldn’t let him interrupt, leading Stinchfield to begin full-on screaming at his production team to “CUT HIM OFF! CUT HIM OFF NOW!”
“You’re not going to blame this on President Trump on my show! That’s not happening!” he yelled, pointing his finger directly into the camera even after Saboe was gone.
Watch Newsmax host cut the feed and scream at a veteran guest for offering a mild critique of Trump pic.twitter.com/xozk1f5kzH
— Jason Campbell (@JasonSCampbell) September 16, 2021
“I appreciate the work that you’re going. God bless you for being a veteran,” Stinchfield yelled angrily. “God bless you for trying to get Americans out, but don’t come on this program and take the talking points of the left and blame President Trump! That’s not helping anybody.”
“The Biden administration screwed this up from the very start,” he continued, still aggressively pointing at the camera. “You know it, I know it, the country knows it.”
Except Saboe clearly doesn’t know it because he just said so. And the segment of the country that believes that what Stinchfield’s saying to be true does so because they trust propaganda networks like Newsmax over people with actual expertise–the sort of people Stinchfield just screamed off his show.
(via Jason Campbell on Twitter, image: screencap)
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