On Monday night, Bill O’Reilly accepted a phone call from regular guest Donald Trump, who reached out during the Republican National Convention. Yes, he stepped away from the event where his wife, Melania, was to soon deliver a speech that bore startling similarities to a 2008 Michelle Obama speech. That’s awkward enough already, but Trump breaking away to speak with Fox News during his own convention may yet steal focus.
Strangely, Trump’s segment aired while Pat Smith blamed Hillary Clinton for Benghazi onstage at the RNC. Trump competed with himself for airtime.
This is strange. pic.twitter.com/472x0y1Xzt
— Matthew Gertz (@MattGertz) July 19, 2016
This is fascinating — Trump calling into O'Reilly *during* the #GOPConvention https://t.co/U0y6SraeI8
— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) July 19, 2016
Before Sheriff David Clarke took the stage with a Blue Lives Matter speech, O’Reilly and Trump relived their own statements about the Dallas police shooting. The Fox News host previously told Seth Meyers how Black Lives Matter is a “destructive” movement that Martin Luther King wouldn’t join. This echoed Trump’s opinion that the movement is “divisive.” On Monday night, Trump told O’Reilly how “I have seen” BLM protesters marching while calling “essentially calling death to the police.”
Here, the host wonders what Trump would do about the issue if he became president. The real estate mogul imagines he’s “going to have to look into it very seriously.” Well, O’Reilly wishes to know what “look into it” means in light of the First Amendment right to free speech and freedom of assembly. Then he takes the plunge by asking whether Trump meant pressing “possible charges” from the attorney general. And Trump answers like this:
“When you see something like that taking place, that’s really a threat, if you think about it and when you see something like that taking place, we are going to have to, perhaps, talk with the attorney general about it or do something, but, at a minimum, we’re going to have to be watching because that’s really bad stuff and it’s happened more than once.”
O’Reilly doesn’t disagree with Trump on the Black Lives Matter movement, but he’s sure asking some leading questions. He may, in fact, be bemused at Trump’s notion that he can just call up the attorney general and have charges pressed, constitutional rights be damned. Is Trump serious about wanting to dismantle the “bad stuff” he claims to have seen from the movement?
Judge for yourself in the above clip.