Mike Pence has resisted calling David Duke “deplorable,” even as the Indiana governor has disavowed former Klansman’s support, but Dana Perino doesn’t think he ought to.
In an interview with “Examining Politics,” the Fox News Channel television personality and former press secretary to President George W. Bush said that Donald Trump’s running mate missed a golden opportunity to reset the issue of racism that has been a constant in the 2016 campaign.
The issue arose on the Washington Examiner podcast Friday when Perino was discussing her newer role as a political analyst, versus her old job as a GOP partisan. Perino says the transition has freed her up to criticize politicians of both parties.
In this special edition of “Examining Politics,” Perino described what she would have advised Pence to say in her previous job as a communications adviser.
“You know what I would have done, I would have said, to Gov. Pence: ‘You should say, deplorable doesn’t begin to describe what I think about David Duke and his politics. In fact, I can’t even say the word on your show because it would be against the law for me to do that.’ And leave it at that,” Perino said.
“That would have been a different way to handle that in a way to snuff out the question of racism and racist support in the Trump campaign,” she added.
The issue arose after Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton referred to some Trump supporters as a “basket of deplorables” because of holding racist, sexist, homophobic, Islamophobic and other offensive views.
This Sunday, Perino and Fox News digital politics editor Chris Stirewalt debut “I’ll Tell You What,” a new program focused on the upcoming presidential election. The name of the one-hour live show, set for Sundays at 5 p.m. Eastern Time, is the same as that of the weekly podcast they host together.
