MS NOW host Nicolle Wallace revealed Monday she stopped airing press briefings during President Donald Trump’s term when Sarah Huckabee Sanders was press secretary, saying she refused to air them because it “hurt” her.
Speaking to former CNN host Jim Acosta on her podcast, “The Best People,” Wallace brought up Trump’s disdain for the press, citing his assertion that the press is the “enemy of the people.”
“When you take a look at what’s public facing, right, that whole incident and the way they treated you [Acosta] with the cameras rolling, the press release about taking away your pass, Trump telling Lesley Stahl, ‘I call you the enemy of the people because I need people to not believe you when the stories are bad about me.’ I stopped carrying Sarah Huckabee Sanders briefings, just refused to carry him because having worked there, it like actually hurt me to watch her lying,” Wallace said.
Wallace clarified that she wasn’t suggesting administrations don’t try to get the best press coverage they can or put the “best possible light on things their boss is doing,” but that “lies” about immigration were effective for Trump politically.
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Wallace, who hosts “Deadline White House” on MS NOW, previously served as a White House communications director under former President George W. Bush.
During an episode of her show in August 2018, Wallace played a clip of Sanders responding to Trump supporters heckling Acosta, who at the time was covering a Trump rally for CNN.
Sanders said at the time, “While we certainly support freedom of the press, we also support freedom of speech, and we think that those things go hand in hand.”
Wallace angrily responded to the clip, “You know, we’re not going to air that anymore. Let’s make that the last Sarah Huckabee Sanders clip ever aired at four o’clock. Yup, that’s it. You know, it makes me sweat. That is vile.”
Her show on MSNBC —which has since changed its name to MS NOW — debuted in 2017, the same year Sanders became Trump’s press secretary in his first term. Sanders, who is now the governor of Arkansas, held the position for nearly two years, making her the longest-lasting press secretary of Trump’s first administration.
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MS NOW did not immediately return Fox News Digital’s request for comment.
Wallace is one of the most intensely anti-Trump figures on the progressive channel. She apologized in 2018 when she wondered aloud to a reporter covering Sanders how she resisted “the temptation to run up and wring her neck” during a briefing.
