Laura Ingraham Is the Best Press Secretary Trump Has Right Now

President Trump sat down with Fox News’ Laura Ingraham today for an exclusive interview that aired at 10 p.m.

Expecting hardball questions from a miserable sycophant like Ingraham is out of the question, but the the interview itself was interesting, as it played more like an open attempt to wash away Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ disastrous return to the press secretary’s podium earlier on Monday.

As far as news goes, of course, there wasn’t much: perhaps most relevant was Trump’s announcement that the refugees in the migrant caravan slowly traveling toward the U.S. will be housed in “tent cities,” when they reach the border as their asylum claims are processed (at which point Ingraham fed him the bullshit, misleading stat that 80 percent of asylum claims are rejected).

Ingraham walked Trump through a list of current topics, starting by letting the President address the tragic shooting at the Squirrel Hill Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh (without blaming the deaths on the synagogue’s lack of an armed guard this time). In his answers, Trump tried to launder his image (by pandering to Israel supporters), denying any responsibility for contributing to the culture of antisemitism and hate that caused the shooting, and mentioning, again that yes, Jared Kushner is Jewish.

But then, this: a perfect segue from claiming to not be antisemitic to pandering directly to white supremacists.

Ingraham asked Trump if he wanted to clarify his use of the word “nationalist” at a rally earlier this month.

No. To me, I don’t have to clarify. It means I love the country. I look at two things: Globalists and nationalists. I’m somebody who wants to take care of our country because for many, many years, our leaders— you know this better than anybody— our leaders have been more worried about the world than about the United States, and they leave us in a mess — whether it’s the wars, whether it’s the economy, whether it’s debt, whether it’s all of the things that they’ve done, including putting in the wrong Supreme Court Justices and we’re — we’ve really put two great ones in.”

You might as well do the ((())) thing around all uses of “globalists” and “they,” it’ll have the same effect. Pittsburgh’s Jewish community, fortunately, is not having any of it.

Trump then transitioned into talking about immigration, which was mostly just a further elaboration of his political stunt to send armed soldiers to the border before the midterms. And talking about the midterms is where it all kicked off. Unlike Huckabee Sanders, Ingraham can just steer the conversation any way she wants, and she did so bluntly, at one point pretty much just listing off Republicans in embattled midterm races and letting Trump pop off about them or their challengers any way he wanted. This culminated in calling Andrew Gillum a “stone cold thief,” of course.

Anyway, at one point Ingraham mentioned that she’d worked in the White House for Reagan (she was briefly a speechwriter for his Domestic Policy Advisor). It looks like the only thing keeping her from joining this administration is the multi-million dollar salary she makes at Fox.