By now, everyone knows about Hillary Clinton’s Grammys cameo, which featured her reading an excerpt of Michael Wolff’s White House tell-all book, Fire and Fury. U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley called the segment “trash” while complaining about the political nature of such a sketch on an awards show. Many people pounced on Haley because music is often inherently political on some level, but Megyn Kelly defended her on Today.
Kelly saw the issue through the lens of Wolff’s book, which to be fair, probably has a lot to do with Haley’s ire. Wolff insinuated to Bill Maher that Trump was having an affair with someone in his administration, and a book snippet pointed toward Haley, who called the suggestion “disgusting.” Kelly stepped up:
“Wolff] suggested that Nikki Haley slept her way to the top and that she’s having an affair with Donald Trump, completely unsupported … if I’ve seen it once, I’ve seen it a million times. Powerful women are often seen as nuts or sluts. And what he said about her was a sexist smear, and there’s a question about whether we should have had people like Hillary Clinton reading from that book.”
It wasn’t that long ago that Donald Trump was calling Kelly a “bimbo” on Twitter, so the host does know of what she speaks. Still and as Melissa Rivers pointed out to Kelly, it’s clear that the sketch in which Hillary appeared was pretaped, and it’s possible that the involved artists, host James Corden, and the writers were not even even aware of the Haley suggestion within the Wolff book.
Kelly does have a point, even if it’s misplaced here, since Haley’s trashing of the Grammys only made mention of her distaste for mixing music with politics. Powerful women do often get painted into unsavory corners, but most awards shows (especially these days) are going to get political. And with artists on both sides of the aisle taking shots at powerful women, perhaps Kelly could find enough material to run a show specifically on that (bipartisan) subject.