Award-winning journalist Jemele Hill says she has no regrets for calling Donald Trump a white supremacist because she thought it was a given. Today on Dan Le Batard’s podcast, South Beach Sessions , she said it again.
The Washington Post says that Hill says she had no clue she was causing controversy by suggesting that the president was a racist.
“I was in the middle of a Twitter conversation. I was replying to somebody. If I was really trying to make a bold statement, I would have added the damn president. I didn’t. I was just talking casually with somebody,” she said. “It wasn’t even original. That’s what is so crazy. I got famous for saying something that wasn’t original. It wasn’t new. It was not breaking news. I thought we all decided this after Charlottesville.”
And Hill, who is now a writer for The Atlantic, went on to call Trump other names, casting doubt on his fitness for office, including “bigot, unqualified, and unfit.”
Hill was working for ESPN at the time of the Twitter scandal which caused White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders to suggest that the network should fire her if she didn’t represent their beliefs.
https://twitter.com/murphycat2012/status/1078078105288433668
But in October of last year, ESPN did suspend Hill for two weeks after she told her Twitter followers that they could boycott businesses associated with the Dallas Cowboys or Jerry Jones after the owner of the franchise took what she perceived as an unnecessarily hard line with players who kneeled during the national anthem.
By last summer Hill had given ESPN her notice and then started at The Atlantic . She explains that she decided soon after the scandal hit that this would be something that if it caused her to lose her job, it would be just fine.
“I knew almost immediately that, if I did face some kind of permanent discipline, if I did lose my job, if I was immediately suspended, I was okay with it.”
But Jemele Hill isn’t the only journalist who has suggested that Donald Trump and his administration have issues with racism. Jonathan Karl of ABC News interviewed Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway and made her visibly uncomfortable in a live interview by asking her why there were no senior employees of color in the West Wing.
“What does that say to have not a single senior adviser in the West Wing who is African American?”
Despite the fact that Conway couldn’t name anyone, she responded, saying that it didn’t mean there weren’t any, putting the interview on replay across many media outlets.
