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Bill O’Reilly, the former Fox News host, criticized former President Donald Trump during an appearance on NewsNation for “making a lot of errors” on the campaign trail.
O’Reilly argued Trump should be ahead in the polls at this point in the race. The Fox News alum was asked by On Balance host Leland Vittert if conservatives and Republicans would ever admit the fundamental flaws of Trump as a candidate.
“Why would they do that?” O’Reilly asked.
“They think that Kamala Harris is much worse than Trump no matter what Trump does, so why would they acknowledge anything like that? That doesn’t make sense,” he added.
Vittert said he didn’t believe right-wingers would say anything in public, but that “the punditry must acknowledge and take a little bit of responsibility that Donald Trump ... should be up high single, low double digits, and yet by his own unforced errors, he’s giving this to Kamala Harris.”
“He’s making a lot of errors, there’s no doubt about that,” O’Reilly said. “The Georgia thing, that was... you shrug your shoulders.”
Trump was slammed by conservatives for attacking Georgia Governor Brian Kemp during a rally in Atlanta on Saturday.
The former president continues to blame his 2020 loss in the state on Republican officials who refused to give in to Trump’s baseless claims of fraud. For about 10 minutes on Saturday, Trump assailed Kemp for not helping him and for not stopping a district attorney from prosecuting him and others for their attempts to overturn the results in the state.
“He’s a bad guy. He’s a disloyal guy. And he’s a very average governor,” Trump said. “Little Brian, little Brian Kemp. Bad guy.”
On Monday night, Fox News host Laura Ingraham told her viewers that “shooting inside the tent right now of the Republican Party, that’s a loser strategy.”
“It’s not gonna work. They tried that in 2020 and we lost two Senate seats. Then in 2022... it doesn’t work. You’ve got to focus on what they are doing to destroy this country,” she added.
O’Reilly said on NewsNation that “pundits on either side are never gonna admit they make a mistake.”
“They make a lot of money supporting or attacking various candidates, that’s what they do,” he added. “Honesty is not really an equation anymore on television news.”
“I think at this point in history, Donald Trump, I agree with you, should be up in the polls,” he told Vittert. “The reason he’s not is that after he was shot, people had an expectation that he would modify a little bit, and he has not.”
“He picks fights and the fights don’t help him, they don’t help the American people,” he added.
O’Reilly said Trump should be winning Georgia “by seven or eight points just because of Laken Riley, the [Georgia college] student who was murdered brutally by an undocumented migrant.”
O’Reilly claimed that “you have to acknowledge when you allow millions of people into this country unvetted, that’s gonna happen, and that’s what Biden and Harris have done.”
“So that should have been the focus of his remarks over the weekend, not Brian Kemp and the 2020 election beef,” O’Reilly said.
