‘Fox & Friends’ Tells Donald Trump He ‘Chose To Blow It’ By Mocking Christine Blasey Ford In Rally Speech

Donald Trump faced widespread condemnation after he openly mocked Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony accusing Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault at a campaign rally in Mississippi Tuesday night, as Associated Press reported, with even two Republican senators weighing in to criticize Trump’s attack on the Palo Alto University professor who says that Kavanaugh attacked her when they were in high school.

Arizona Republican Jeff Flake, whose reluctance to vote on Kavanaugh sparked a renewed FBI background check into the nominee, called Trump’s comments “appalling,” according to NBC News.

“There’s no time and no place for remarks like that. To discuss something this sensitive at a political rally is just not right.”

Maine Republican Susan Collins, who like Flake has not yet announced which way she plans to vote on the Kavanaugh nomination, also said that Trump’s derisive remarks, in which he ridiculed Blasey Ford’s memories, were “just plain wrong.”

And on Wednesday morning, even Trump’s favorite cable news program Fox & Friends, the morning talk show on the Fox News network, took a shot at Trump over the remarks, as Mediaite recounted — though co-host Brian Kilmeade did not condemn the content of Trump’s remarks, merely the fact that Trump, Kilmeade said, may have made a tactical error by attacking Blasey Ford directly — just four days after calling her testimony “compelling” and praising her as “a very fine woman.”

“The tactic of the president laying low has been lauded by all sides. Last night he chose to blow it,” Kilmeade said on the Wednesday morning broadcast, quoted by The Week. “I wonder about the wisdom, as much as the crowd loved it, I wonder about the wisdom tactically of him doing that.”

Nonetheless, according to The Hill, Kilmeade himself went on to question Blasey Ford’s credibility, asserting that there were “holes” in her account of the alleged attack by Kavanaugh.

Trump is well-known to be a devoted viewer of the daily Fox & Friends program, and prior to becoming a presidential candidate, Trump held a regular weekly guest commentator’s spot on the show. A study of Trump’s Twitter feed by Matthew Gertz of Media Matters For America and published by Politico found dozens of Trump Twitter posts that directly corresponded to topics discussed on Fox & Friends just moments earlier.

Whether Trump did, in fact, make a tactical error by ridiculing Blasey Ford at a campaign rally is unclear, at least with regard to Trump’s Republican “base.” According to a poll released Wednesday by the Public Religion Research Institute, 56 percent of Republicans, including 48 percent — nearly half — of Republican women, said that they would still consider voting for a political candidate who had been accused of sexual harassment “by multiple people.”

Among Democrats, only 16 percent — and just 14 percent of Democratic women — said that they would consider voting for such a candidate. Trump himself has been publicly accused of sexual harassment or sexual assault by 22 different women, according to a Business Insider count.