Hugh Hewitt Was Right to Walk Out on Capehart and Marcus

Screenshot via Hugh Hewitt's "The Rundown"

David mentioned this in his earlier post but I wanted to walk through it in a bit more detail. Hugh Hewitt not only walked off a Washington Post livestream hosted by Jonathan Capehart last Friday, he also quit his job as a columnist at the Post.

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"I have in fact quit the Post but I was only writing a column for them every six weeks or so," Hewitt told Fox News Digital, adding he'd recently offered to write another pro-Trump column for the paper ahead of the election. He informed editorial page editor David Shipley on Friday morning.

His last piece was published on Tuesday, where he called on the MAGA movement to evolve if Trump was elected president again. He was a rare pro-Trump voice at the liberal outlet, whose opinion roster and editorial board lean sharply to the left, but his pieces touched on a wide variety of topics.

As mentioned, this happened shortly after Hewitt walked out on a live show in which he was sitting opposite Jonathan Capehart as host and Ruth Marcus as another guest. The segment which irked Hewitt involved claims by Capehart and Marcus that Trump's legal actions in Pennsylvania were designed to lay groundwork to contest the election.

"Does it seem like Donald Trump is laying the groundwork for contesting the election by complaining that cheating was taking place in Pennsylvania?" Capehart asked Marcus. "By suing Bucks County for alleged irregularities, and this is on top of his continual assertion that if he loses, it's because of cheating."

Marcus said Trump had been preparing to blame an election loss on cheating for months.

"No election can be fair in Donald Trump's mind unless Donald Trump wins it," Marcus said.

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By this point, you could see Hewitt was practically crawling out of his skin. Framing the Bucks County lawsuit as part of some larger plot to undermine the legitimacy of the election conveniently overlooks that Trump won in court. Here's a Fox News report on the line being cut off as early as 2:30 PM on Tuesday.

The Trump campaign sued, claiming the rights of Pennsylvanians were being violated.

In Bucks County, the Trump campaign lawsuit said people who were in line by Tuesday’s 5 p.m. deadline to apply in person for a mail ballot should have been allowed to get a ballot, even after the deadline. However, Bucks County’s election office denied voters that right and ordered them to leave, the lawsuit said.

“This is a direct violation of Pennsylvanians’ rights to cast their ballot — and all voters have a right to STAY in line,” the Trump campaign said in a statement.

And here's the key point, a judge agreed with the Trump campaign and extended the deadline thru today.

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A Pennsylvania judge on Wednesday sided with Donald Trump’s campaign and agreed to extend an in-person voting option in a suburban Philadelphia county where long lines on the final day led to complaints voters were being disenfranchised by an unprepared election office.

Judge Jeffrey Trauger said in a one-page order that Bucks County voters who want to apply for an early mail ballot now have until Friday. The narrowly divided county, which is led by Democrats, is often seen as a political bellwether.

So while Capehart and Marcus are making this part of some paranoid liberal delusion about Trump contesting the election, the reality is that Bucks County was wrong and a judge agreed the Trump campaign was right. As Hewitt put it, "Yes, he's upset about Bucks County but he was right and he won in court. That's the story."

Instead of acknowledging as much, Capehart got irritated and, after a long pause, whined about being "lectured" by Hewitt who he claimed had said "lots of things that aren't based in fact" without specifying what those things were. 

And that's where Hewitt pulled the plug. "I won't come back, Jonathan." He got up and added, "I'm done. This is the most unfair election ad I have ever been a part of." Here's the video of the exchange. 

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Capehart tried to move along as if nothing had happened. Unfortunately for him, the show almost immediately imploded when Marcus' feed was lost. Capehart was left by himself to try to fill time until he eventually had to mention Hewitt walking out.

Kudos to Hugh Hewitt for a) trying to keep the Post honest (a Herculean task) and b) being willing to quit to make a point about their dishonesty. He did what Jennifer Rubin only talked about doing.

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Ed Morrissey 10:00 PM | November 20, 2024
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