Claire McCaskill: Pam Bondi Hate Speech Stance ‘Trashes’ the ‘Legacy’ of Charlie Kirk
Morning Joe contributor Claire McCaskill shredded President Donald Trump’s “terrible instinct” and unloaded on Attorney General Pam Bondi’s “hate speech” stance as one that “trashes” the “legacy” of assassinated conservative free speech activist Charlie Kirk.
Bondi drew criticism from across the political spectrum after declaring on a podcast Monday that “there’s free speech and then there’s hate speech, and there is no place, especially now, especially after what happened to Charlie [Kirk], in our society.”
The statement came as conservatives spotlighted a fringe of individuals online who had cheered the assassination of Kirk.
On Tuesday, Bondi attempted to reframe her comments in a statement on X by arguing that “threats of violence” are not protected speech, which led to a further pile-on by commentators – left and right – who flagged the dangers of conflating hate speech with threatening speech.
On Wednesday’s Morning Joe, McCaskill, who formerly served as a Democratic senator for Missouri, added her voice to the choir of critics, arguing that Bondi’s comments were an affront to Kirk’s “legacy”:
Pam Bondi, look what she’s done within the MAGA movement. First we’ve got Epstein, where she said, ‘I’ve got the list on my desk.’ Then she trashes the legacy of Charlie Kirk. If Charlie cook said, ‘I want a legacy’, he probably would have said free speech, right? He would have said, ‘I want it to be that you can go out and say whatever you want to say and in America there are no handcuffs.’ And instead what Pam Bondi does is she trashes that legacy and threatens cuffs for anybody who says anything that they disagree with.
McCaskill also laid into Trump, who threw support behind Bondi’s inflammatory comments during a press gaggle. The contributor said:
When you’re a leader, there’s an instinct that kicks in, that should kick in: ‘Okay, this is a moment that I am supposed to lead. This is a moment where 99% of the country is in agreement, and I can step out in front of that and bring down the temperature and do a lot to repair my image with people that are very skeptical in this country.’
That’s what should have happened after this horrific act of violence. That’s what the president should have done. When he got that question, that instinct should have kicked in and he should have walked Pam Bondi’s comment back: ‘We are upset right now because of what happened to Charlie Kirk, and the attorney general was feeling that. And she said something that is being misinterpreted. We are not going to censor our opponents.’
She continued:
I just think when Trump got that question yesterday, it’s what you would think for anybody who is a normal political leader, it would be a softball right over the plate that he could take and turn into a situation where he would be admired even by those who don’t like him. And he can’t do that.
His instincts are so wired to ‘I’m the best. I’m the one. I’m the only one. And everyone else besides me sucks.’ And that’s what his instincts are. And it is a terrible instinct for president of the United States. And we see it every day in many different things he does. And this is a good example.
Watch above via MSNBC.
