Monday on MSNBC, anchor Andrea Mitchell was worried to death that President Donald Trump hosting a virtual town hall at the Lincoln Memorial on Sunday may somehow have desecrated the "hallowed ground" upon which the monument sits.
Mitchell began, "And speaking of inconsistent messaging or unusual messaging, let’s talk about the Lincoln Memorial."
She then brought in NBC News presidential historian Michael Beschloss and said, "...to a lot of people, that’s hallowed ground. And to see a cable news program, a virtual town hall, with the President and, you know, correspondents questioning him, anchors questioning him at the feet of Abraham Lincoln."
Mitchell continued to whine: "And to make the whole image worse, let’s take a look at one of the things that (Trump) had to say in a question from a friendly, supportive viewer calling in and asking him, despite her support for him, whether he should change some of his comments and not be as aggressive and as confrontational as he has been in some of those briefings, and this was his response."
She then played a clip of Trump from the town hall saying, "I am greeted with a hostile press, the likes of which no president has ever seen. The closest would be that gentleman right up there. They always said Lincoln, nobody got treated worse than Lincoln. I believe I am treated worse."
A shocked Beschloss then weighed in: "Lincoln was treated with all sorts of scurrilous and obscene and nasty comments about him....But Abraham Lincoln didn’t have two hours live on a friendly cable news network, the way that the President did last night....A modern president has all sorts of ways of getting beyond criticism in a way that makes the comparison pretty hollow."