Criticism for Hugh Hewitt’s handling of an interview last week with Donald Trump continued Tuesday, as Breitbart News accused the conservative talk radio host of “siding” with the so-called Republican “establishment” against voters.
“Hugh Hewitt,” the 1,907-word article reads, “is firmly on the establishment’s side in its struggle against outsider Donald Trump.”
The article accused Hewitt of making it “clear he doesn’t like Trump,” and suggested that this may influence the radio host’s role in the upcoming Sept. 16 GOP debate hosted by CNN.
Hewitt is not moderating the debate. That duty will go to CNN’s Jake Tapper. Hewitt will have input, and he will have a chance to ask questions, but he’s not moderating the second meeting of the GOP presidential candidates, a CNN spokesperson told the Washington Examiner’s media desk.
Breitbart’s chief gripe with Hewitt, aside from its assertion that he is a covert agent of the shadowy GOP “establishment” and that he’s not sufficiently anti-immigration, is that he tried to trip up Trump last week in a radio interview. Hewitt, whose area of expertise lies in foreign policy, explained at the outset of his interview with the GOP frontrunner that he wanted to see where the potential commander in chief stood on issues abroad.
It became clear early in the interview, however, that Trump was unfamiliar with the material being discussed.
At one point during his phone call with Hewitt, Trump responded to a question about the Quds by suggesting that the United States has treated the Kurds “terribly.” He said later that he misunderstood the question.
Shortly after the Trump interview concluded, Hewitt hosted former Hewlett-Packard CEO and Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina. He asked the sole female voice in the GOP’s 17-person field the exact same questions that he asked Trump. Unlike Trump, she didn’t struggle to answer the questions, and she certainly didn’t complain afterwards about Hewitt being unfair.
Though the questions didn’t appear to be “gotchas” for Fiorina, Trump nevertheless lashed out, accusing Hewitt — “a third-rate radio announcer” — of playing dirty media tricks.
On Tuesday, Breitbart dutifully repeated this refrain.
Along with accusing Hewitt of being some sort of “establishment” tag-a-long, the article claimed the radio host sides with the so-called “mainstream media.” The article also awarded Hewitt a flunking grade in the “language patriotism” category for his failure to condemn former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush for being fluent in Spanish.
The article’s author, Julia Hahn, is a former producer for the Laura Ingraham radio show. Ingraham has made it no secret that she supports Trump, and has been an ardent defender of the former reality TV star throughout his candidacy.
Over the weekend, Hewitt tweeted a New York Times story, titled “Pope calls on all of Europe’s Catholics to house refugees,” that reports Pope Francis has called on European Catholics to help Middle Easterners who have been displaced by war and genocide.
For Breitbart, merely tweeting a headline is enough to suggest Hewitt likely supports a supposed conspiracy by Pope Francis and other “elites” to dissolve national borders in order to make way for an invasion.
“Although a tweet isn’t always an endorsement, it certainly suggests that Hewitt agrees with the Pope’s general post-national, anti-border views. The tweet harkens to mind the controversial 1973 French novel Camp of the Saints, which argued that liberals and Western religious leaders would dissolve national borders in the name of tolerance for foreign cultures and would drown the West under a flood of hopeful migrants,” the article read.
“Many political observers — from Pat Buchanan to The Week Magazine — have argued that the challenges facing Western civilization have become a fundamental issue for ordinary Americans and Europeans, because tens of millions — and soon hundreds of millions — of poor Africans, Latin Americans, Asians and Middle Easterners are responding to the open-borders signals from progressive elites in the developed world,” it added. “That deep divide between elite and ordinary voters, between the developed world and the global poor, ensures that that migration is not only the central issue of the 2016 election, but also one of the primary issues of 21st century global politics.”
