Fox News senior political analyst Brit Hume ripped NBC’s Peter Alexander on Friday via Twitter, calling his question to President Trump a “bullsh*t gotcha question.”
Alexander asked if Trump was giving Americans a false sense of hope with his “impulse” to focus on the positive, and later asked what Trump had to say to Americans who were scared. Much of the back and forth centered over comments Trump has made about a malaria medicine that he hopes might be effective for coronavirus.
Time columnist David French called the question by Alexander legitimate, prompting Hume to respond on social media.
“Legitimate question my a**,” Hume, a former ABC White House correspondent, replied in a tweet. “It was the kind of bullsh*t gotcha question which hack [White House] reporters have been asking for decades.”
“But instead of going off on the reporter, Trump should have said the whole briefing in all its particulars was a message to people who are scared,” Hume added.
When CNN legal analyst Renato Mariotti responded to Hume by saying he thought it was an opportunity for Trump to reassure the nation, Hume replied by stating any response would be spun against the president.
“And if he had said something reassuring, people like that reporter would demand to know why he was downplaying the epidemic again. It would not matter what he said,” he replied.
Alexander contended in several interviews on MSNBC after the briefing that he was only presenting the president with “a softball” to calm a scared nation.
“I was trying to provide the president an opportunity to reassure the millions of Americans, members of my own family … and plenty of people sitting at home right now,” Alexander, who has clashed with the president during press briefings in the past, said. “This was his opportunity to do that, to provide a sort of positive or uplifting message.”
Later in the afternoon, Alexander used a baseball analogy to describe his question.
“We call it a softball,” he said.
Daily press briefings have returned in recent weeks as Trump and other officials have met with reporters to discuss the response to the coronavirus.
Before this past month, the last White House press briefing was March 11, 2019, and was held by then-press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders.