Sometimes it’s acceptable to just let a politician you don’t like have their due. Fox News’ Chris Wallace apparently can’t do that because the orange man is just too bad.

The background on this is that President Trump decided to go visit the troops in Afghanistan for Thanksgiving, which was his first visit to the combat zone. That’s not necessarily unusual, as Trump went to Iraq last year in his second year. Former President George W. Bush made two trips to Afghanistan in eight years by comparison. You also wouldn’t expect that Trump would somehow be framed as responsible for the previous decade and a half of fighting, but the media are going to do their thing

Take Jake Tapper’s response, for example.

CNN: President Donald Trump made an unannounced visit to troops in Afghanistan, the first time he’s visited that nation, where the US has been at war for 18 years.

— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) November 28, 2019

I guess the expectation was for the President to have mounted up and done a tactical decent into Kabul back when he was a private citizen? Why is the length of the war relevant to Trump’s visit given he hasn’t been in office for even three years? There’s also the fact that these same people flip their lids when the President talks about pulling out of Afghanistan, so their hand wringing over the war’s length seems a little hollow.

Regardless, Fox News’ Chris Wallace decided to get in on the act by asking Juan Williams to help him bat around conspiracy theories about the visit being only about impeachment. You know, that thing that’s already falling flat for Democrats as they scramble for a way out. Clearly Trump needs to distract from it a fight he’s winning or something.

Video and excerpts from The Daily Caller.

“We were all surprised when suddenly we heard the president was in Afghanistan, I’m sure he genuinely wanted to support the U.S. forces, those wonderful men and women who were defending us on the front lines in Afghanistan,” Chris Wallace said in reaction to Trump visiting Afghanistan for Thanksgiving.

“On the other hand I also thought, everything is political, doesn’t make it a little bit harder to impeach the president when you see him right there acting there as our commander-in-chief?”

Williams answered in part, saying that the visit “looks like a photo-op.”

“Remember, he hadn’t gone to visit any war zone until last year, he was criticized for it. This is the first visit to Afghanistan, our longest war, 2,000 plus Americans dead. He had no preparation,” Williams added. “He talked about a ceasefire but his military people said, ‘We know nothing about a ceasefire with the Taliban.’ And, the Taliban said they know nothing about a ceasefire.”

This is just so petty. If there’s one thing Trump has done throughout his presidency, it’s express his gratitude for service men and women. Whether some portion of that is political or not is largely irrelevant. The Command in Chief chose to go to a war zone on a major holiday to visit with men and women who are away from their families. That should be enough to have the talking heads take a pass on criticizing matters.

I’d expect this kind of tripe from Juan Williams, as he’s just a Democrat partisan, but Chris Wallace should know better. Let a sleeping dog lie when it involves the President visiting troops. Trying to strain that into a negative and using it to take political shots just comes across as garbage analysis. I know Wallace doesn’t like Trump and I know he’s all in on impeachment, but most of the country simply doesn’t care. These people live in a bubble, where the beltway gossip has to always take top priority. The rest of us just saw the President having a good time with military members.

I don’t know what’s happening at the top of Fox News, but the continuation of this kind of mimicking of CNN is only going to cost them viewers. Why watch Chris Wallace when you can just watch Jake Tapper do the same thing?

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