Bill O’Reilly’s been Donald Trump’s friend for more than 35 years.
Trump isn’t going to be very happy with O’Reilly now.
And that’s because Bill O’Reilly defended Kamala Harris for one reason no one saw coming.
Bill O’Reilly takes issue with Trump’s Taylor Swift post
It was long expected that Taylor Swift would endorse Kamala Harris for President.
Swift endorsed Joe Biden four years ago.
So, it was just a matter of when Swift would make her support for Kamala Harris official.
The Kamala Harris campaign decided that moment would be following the debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump.
Several days after the Swift endorsement, Trump likely saw an article in the New York Post reporting on a YouGov poll showing that, by a two-to-one margin, Americans were less likely to vote for a candidate who Swift endorsed.
That led to a typically trollish Trump post on Truth Social where he wrote “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!”
Bill O’Reilly called the post “ridiculous” during an appearance on NewsNation.
“If it were Ronald Reagan, you’d say, ‘I hate Lovin’ Spoonful.’ I mean, it was ridiculous. It’s ridiculous! I don’t know why he does it,” O’Reilly began.
O’Reilly takes issue with Trump’s rhetoric
O’Reilly wasn’t happy with much of Trump’s rhetoric in this campaign.
The former Fox News host bought into the media falsehoods about Trump spewing “hateful” rhetoric, which O’Reilly tried to differentiate from what he called “political rhetoric” with the example being Trump calling Kamala Harris a “communist.”
O’Reilly taking up for Kamala Harris wasn’t on anyone’s 2024 bingo card.
But O’Reilly looks like he’s trying to make a comeback into the mainstream, so he might think bending over backwards to be “fair” to Kamala Harris is the ticket back.
“If he wants to call Kamala Harris a communist, he can call her a communist, okay? Because it is not true, but it’s political rhetoric. It’s not hateful, ‘I want her to be crucified.’ This is what politicians do on both sides,” O’Reilly added.
O’Reilly told host Leland Vittert that Trump hurt himself with comments like “I hate Taylor Swift” or saying at the debate that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating residents’ dogs and cats because it fed the media caricature of Trump.
“So as long as he’s in the zone of saying, ‘look, open border leads to rape and murder of Americans,’ that’s true, and he can say it’s true. But when he gets into eating Cocker Spaniels and, ‘I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!’ he hurts himself. Now, I don’t know why he does it, but the fact of the matter is it’s a matter of weighing the danger. That’s what Americans are gonna have to do on election day,” O’Reilly concluded.
O’Reilly was long considered a Trump ally in the media.
O’Reilly knows Trump consumes cable news shows at night.
And O’Reilly – like other Trump allies have in the past – may be trying to communicate the message to Trump that if he sticks to policies and defining Kamala Harris as dangerously out of the mainstream, he stands a strong chance of winning the election.
Bombast allows the press to focus on Trump’s personality, which isn’t a contest he’s likely to win.
