Donald Trump Jr. told a MSNBC reporter to “get out of here” on live TV at the Republican National Convention on Monday over a question about “family separation” during President Trump’s administration.
The incident took place as delegates to the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee were conducting the roll call to formally nominate former President Donald Trump for the 2024 presidential election, with Republican Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio as his running mate.
MSNBC reporter Jacob Soboroff pressed Trump’s eldest son about the border policy, which drew significant criticism from Democrats during the Trump administration.
“I covered the family separation crisis closely, will we continue to see policies like separating 5,000 children deliberately from their parents?” Soboroff asked Trump Jr.
“You mean the Obama administration?” the former president’s son, who was accompanied by his brother Eric, sister-in-law Lara and fiancée Kimberly Guilfoyle, asked.
Soboroff continued to push the issue, asking if former President Trump would launch a “second family separation” policy if elected.
“It’s MSDNC, so I expect nothing less from you clowns, even today, even 48 hours later, you couldn’t wait,” Trump Jr. said, referencing the Saturday attempted assassination of his father at a Butler County, Pennsylvania, campaign rally. “You couldn’t wait with your lies and with your nonsense, so just get out of here.”
One of the photos used to depict the family separation featured a crying two-year-old girl who was detained with her mother during the Trump administration — but never separated from her family.
Soboroff handed coverage over to MSNBC host Katy Tur, who described the exchange as “asking a tough question to Don Jr.”
FACT CHECK: The Obama administration separated migrant children from families under certain limited circumstances and built the cages used to hold children and families.
According to the Associated Press, in 2020, Michelle Obama assailed President Donald Trump for ripping migrant children from their parents and throwing them into cages, picking up on a frequent and distorted point made widely by Democrats.
She’s right that Trump’s policy at the U.S.-Mexico border that he suspended separated children from their families in ways that had not been done before. But what she did not say is that the very same “cages” were built and used in her husband’s administration, for the same purpose of holding migrant kids temporarily.
Trump used facilities that were built during the Obama-Biden administration to house children at the border. They are chain-link enclosures inside border facilities where migrants were temporarily housed, separated by sex and age.
At the height of the controversy over Trump’s zero-tolerance policy at the border, photos that circulated online of children in the enclosures generated great anger. But those photos — by The Associated Press — were taken in 2014 and depicted some of the thousands of unaccompanied children held by President Barack Obama.
When that fact came to light, some Democrats and activists who had tweeted the photos deleted their tweets. But prominent Democrats have continued to cite cages built and used by Obama for children as a distinctive cruelty of Trump.
First published by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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