Trump Gives Absurd Interview To Far-Right Conspiracy Network One America News

Chanel Rion of OAN asks a question during the daily White House coronavirus briefing on April 1. Win McNamee via Getty Images Far-right conspiracy network One America News aired a White House interview with President Donald Trump on Wednesday afternoon, just hours before that evening’s Republican National Convention events, in which Trump faced questions that would have sounded at home on authoritarian state-owned television. Among other bizarre comments, Rion’s briefing questions claimed that legitimate news outlets were siding with “Islamic radicals and Latin gangs and cartels” and asked Trump if he thought the term “Chinese food” was racist. In the hour before airing President Trump’s interview, OAN ran a segment on nationwide anti-racism protests that focused on “leftist rioters” and “antifa” and that used footage from far-right media activist Andy Ngo. OAN then moved on to cover uncritically Trump’s claims that the Chinese government wants Biden to win the 2020 election and to air an interview on “the Democratic Party’s ties to the Ku Klux Klan.” Trump’s appearance on OAN is the apex of a long courtship between the president and the network’s founder Robert Herring Sr., a millionaire Republican donor who started the outlet in 2013.