W. House’s outrageous cry: Ax ESPN gal for race slap
— THE WHITE HOUSE wants to see an ESPN commentator tossed from the broadcasting game for insulting President Trump.
Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Wednesday she thinks controversial tweets from “SportsCenter” host Jemele Hill, in which the ESPN star called Trump a white supremacist, are a “fireable offense.”
“I think that’s one of the more outrageous comments that anyone could make and certainly is a fireable offense by ESPN,” Sanders said in her afternoon White House press briefing about Hill’s jab.
The unusual call from a White House official raised eyebrows across the media landscape.
“Can anyone remember such a thing? A WH spox calling for employee of private company to be fired for anti-POTUS comments?” CNN’s Jake Tapper tweeted.
Sanders said she was not sure if Trump was aware of Hill’s tweet storm. But she defended The President against accusations of racial bias, saying his meetings with African-American political and community leaders show he is “committed to working with them to bring the country together.”
Trump has not commented on the tweets, but when he was a TV personality in 2012, he called sitting President Barack Obama bigoted.
“Obama’s ’07 speech which @DailyCaller just released not only shows that Obama is a racist but also how the press always covers for him,” he tweeted then.
In a statement, the National Association of Black Journalists noted that Hill is an “award-winning veteran journalist” and said the group supports her First Amendment rights on all matters.
ESPN jumped into damage control this week after Hill, who is African-American, let loose on Trump in a series of furious tweets while talking with Twitter users.
“Donald Trump is a white supremacist who has largely surrounded himself w/ other white supremacists,” she wrote in one tweet.
In other messages, she called Trump a “bigot,” “unqualified and unfit to be President” and “the most ignorant, offensive President of my lifetime.”
“His rise is a direct result of white supremacy. Period,” she wrote.
After a social media uproar, ESPN issued a statement saying Hill’s comments “do not represent” the sports network’s views and that the station “addressed” the tweets with Hill. “She recognizes her actions were inappropriate,” ESPN said in a statement.
Hill issued a statement late Wednesday. “My comments on Twitter expressed my personal beliefs. My regret is that my comments and the public way I made them painted ESPN in an unfair light,” she said.
There has been no indication that her job is in jeopardy and Hill continued to host “SportsCenter” this week.
“We are with you @jemelehill,” tweeted former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who became his own fireball of controversy last year for kneeling during the National Anthem to protest police brutality against black people.
Long-running complaints about Trump’s racial insensitivity exploded in August after he blamed “both sides” for deadly violence between neo-Nazis and counterprotesters that broke out at a hate rally in Charlottesville, Va. The rally ostensibly started as a protest against the intended removal of a statue of Confederate Army Gen. Robert E. Lee.