Melania Trump issued a scathing rebuke of a liberal academic who mocked her son Barron during Wednesday’s impeachment hearing.
“A minor child deserves privacy and should be kept out of politics. Pamela Karlan, you should be ashamed of your very angry and obviously biased public pandering, and using a child to do it,” the first lady tweeted Wednesday, according to Breitbart.
Melania shreds liberal professor
Trump’s tweet came after Pamela Karlan, a Stanford University professor and strident critic of the president, made a play on words using Barron’s name to attack his father. The legal “expert” quipped that President Donald Trump could not make anyone a “baron” since America is not a monarchy.
The awkward quip drew laughs from the audience, but Republicans, the White House, and the first lady were incensed. The controversy overshadowed hours of public testimony from three other Constitution “experts” before the Judiciary Committee, including two liberal academics who agreed with Karlan that President Trump needs to be impeached.
“Classless move by a Democratic ‘witness.’ Prof Karlan uses a teenage boy who has nothing to do with this joke of a hearing (and deserves privacy) as a punchline,” Stephanie Grisham, the first lady’s former press secretary who now serves in the same role for the president himself, said of the incident. “And what’s worse, it’s met by laughter in the hearing room. What is being done to this country is no laughing matter.”
Karlan later apologized for the comment, but as the controversy took over social media, past comments of Karlan’s resurfaced that suggested an anti-Trump bias — including her admission in 2017 that she crossed the street in Washington to avoid passing by one of Donald Trump’s hotels, Fox News noted.
A 2006 speech also resurfaced in which the self-proclaimed “snarky, bisexual, Jewish” scholar railed against the “rich, pampered, prodigal, sanctimonious, incurious, white, straight sons of the powerful,” which may explain the Barron joke.
The clown show continues
Republicans pointed to Karlan’s bizarre testimony as proof positive that the three liberal academics called to testify about impeachment — none of whom had any new evidence to bring — were deeply prejudiced against Trump. Indeed, viewers who expected sober, calm testimony from wise “experts” on the Constitution were treated instead to a bizarre, even deranged, spectacle of partisan frustration.
“This is a very serious, solemn, and prayerful process,” Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC) wrote in response to Karlan’s Barron comment, mocking House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) claim that Democrats are pursuing impeachment reluctantly.
At one point, Karlan veered off track into an irrelevant and confusing diatribe about Russia. The law professor, donning the hat of foreign policy expert, made the strange claim that America must support Ukraine militarily “so we can fight the Russians there and we don’t have to fight them here,” according to RealClearPolitics.
The Republicans’ sole witness, George Washington University professor Jonathan Turley, said that he did not vote for Trump in 2016 but that his actions toward Ukraine are not impeachable. He also criticized Democrats for rushing through the process.
One thing they apparently don’t teach at Stanford Law School — or Harvard, for that matter — is how to be a sympathetic witness.
No comments: