Fox News, in a chyron Thursday night that echoed MAGA talking points, described Kamala Harris as hiding while Donald Trump was speaking to reporters at Trump Tower.
Moments later, however, the vice president was seen at the White House standing alongside President Joe Biden for his signing of executive orders designed to thwart gun violence and boost preparedness for mass shootings.
Fox carried Donald Trump’s press conference into the 5 p.m. hour, when its opinion show, The Five, is broadcast. At the top of the hour, a chyron read, “Now: Trump Holds Newser While Kamala Hides.”
Yet just eight minutes later, Harris was next to Biden in front of a packed East Room, where the president would go on to sign a pair of executive orders on the first anniversary of the establishment of the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention. One order sets up a task force to assess the threat posed by ghost guns, and the other deals with finding how active-shooter drills can be effective and also non-traumatizing.
After hearing from a survivor of the 2018 high school shooting in Parkland, Florida, Harris addressed those watching.
“We know how to stop these tragedies, and it is a false choice to suggest you are either in favor of the Second Amendment or you want to take everyone’s guns away,” she said. “I am in favor of the Second Amendment, and I believe we need to reinstate the assault weapons ban.”
In 2004, the Republican-controlled Congress chose not to renew the assault weapons ban, which Biden had worked to pass in 1994 as a senator.
Meanwhile, Fox stuck with Trump’s live comments until they wrapped up just after 5:30 p.m. But viewers of the right-wing network weren’t shown what Trump had to say to the press after leaving the lectern.
When asked if he still supported Mark Robinson, Republicans’ Holocaust-denying North Carolina gubernatorial candidate who mocked survivors of that Parkland shooting and once declared himself a “black Nazi,” Trump claimed he was uninformed.
“I don’t know the situation,” he said, despite Robinson’s troubles generating extensive coverage.
The Harris campaign pounced on that answer.
“It’s impossible to believe that, somehow, Donald Trump missed the news about his handpicked candidate for governor calling himself a ‘Nazi,’” campaign spokesperson Ammar Moussa said in a statement to the Daily Beast.
