Fox News host Bret Baier imagined how conservatives would have responded had former President Barack Obama declared that the president’s “authority is total,” as Donald Trump did this week.
Speaking on Tuesday’s broadcast of “The Daily Briefing,” Baier noted the hypocrisy. “If President Obama had said those words that you heard from President Trump ― that the authority is total with the presidency ― you know, conservatives’ heads would’ve exploded across the board.”
Check out the clip here:
Trump’s outlandish and false assertion came during Monday’s daily White House coronavirus task force briefing, when reporters asked how he would make governors restart activities shuttered during the public health crisis.
Baier noted there’d been “a lot of coverage” and criticism of why Trump has resisted a nationwide stay-at-home order, but said the coverage had now changed to ”‘No, he can’t open up.’”
“The bottom line is that the president can really influence these governors and work with them,” the host added. “As far as the top-down order, by the Constitution, you can’t do that. So it’s working with these governors to open it up in a rolling kind of open is what I imagine would happen.”
Trump’s claim about presidential authority attracted its fair share of criticism, but Baier’s Fox colleague Brit Hume described it as just “another of his serial exaggerations.”
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