The hacks on this Friday's The Five on Fox not "news" offered the most pitiful defense yet for Trump stealing Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado's Nobel Peace Prize.
Rather than cringing like every sane person in the world over this international embarrassment, here's how Fox's Jesse Watters, Lisa Montgomery Kennedy, Emily Campagno and Greg Gutfeld justified it.
KENNEDY: Jesse, you remarked during the commercial break the smile that he had on his face.
WATTERS: I have never seen him smile like that. He loves awards. I mean, more than me, and I actually require the host to present me with an award when I do a speaking engagement. I have about, I'm not going to name the amount of awards I have, but 80 percent of them I didn't deserve.
FORD: 80 percent?
WATTERS: 90 percent of them I didn't deserve, yet I still display them proudly in my many offices and libraries. And people that don't know me and what a shyster I am think I actually deserve them. And that's what I want to project.
I'm not saying this is the way Trump sees things, but if you go to all of his clubs, it's the same thing. Every wall, every niche, is that how say it? It houses some sort of award, or plaque, silver cup. and most of them he deserves.
KENNEDY: Now if he won one men's singles at the US Open (inaudible).
WATTERS: He's actually is a good golfer. Very good. Now when he does get the second one, he'll get another one. So at some point, yeah...
GUTFELD: I know bookends.
WATTERS: ... he needs two. So do you give the one back if you get another Nobel? I think he keeps both and says no one else has ever won two Nobels, and really, I would do the same thing.
KENNEDY: Should he have kept the award that he was given by the opposition leader in Venezuela?
GUTFELD: Would you ever reject an adopted child?
KENNEDY: No.
GUTFELD: This is just an adopted child, this Nobel Prize. She didn't want it, and he's taking it and he's gonna treat it like it was his own. Because that's what you do with adopted children.
This is the only way right wingers will ever get an award! You know, I have the most successful late night show, in history! I won't get an Emmy, right? That's okay, I'm used to it. Unless you steal one and send it to me, for which I'd be grateful.
But isn't it funny that if you're on the right, you have to work for everything and you get no recognition, but the libs don't have to work for anything and literally, it's a given.
WATTERS: Obama.
GUTFELD: Yeah, Obama's Nobel Prize, Emmy's galore to shows nobody watches, because they create the awards, the award ceremonies. But there aren't any, like, if think about it, there aren't any award ceremonies for firearms and defense, construction, farming. We don't have best farmer or best mining executive or best supporting trucker. These are, you know, because...
KENNEDY: Speak for yourself. You haven't seen my categories.
GUTFELD: Only in the bedroom, Kennedy. But these awards are untethered to achievement, and they're simply transferred from one liberal group to another. Emmys, Oscars, Pulitzers, Nobels. But we don't mind. We'll take the truth over trophies because we know we're helping the world.
KENNEDY: I thought it was very, very smart on her behalf because she knows that if you appeal to that side of the president that loves awards, he's much more likely to endorse her as a future president of Venezuela.
WATTERS: Yes.
CAMPAGNO: Says Jesse. Yes. That's why we have the Patriot Awards, by the way. No, I'm serious. We... that we are really the people who do real things.
GUTFELD: You're absolutely right.
CAMPAGNO: The thing is, you guys, Norway melted down. The Norwegians are losing their mind. Do you realize the comments that they have made about her making that gesture? Obviously, we know it doesn't mean that he was "awarded" the Peace Prize, but it was a gesture, an important one, and you know what? She can do whatever she wants with it.
"That's completely unheard of! Total lack of respect for the award! Meaningless! Unbelievably embarrassing! Damaging!" Ths Oslo mayor saying this.
GUTFELD: Norway!
CAMPAGNO: "Potentially dangerous that it could easily legitimize an anti-peace prize development." But all of these people were dead quiet when Obama got it aspirationally, when the leader of Myanmar got it before a complete genocide happened, including recently Ethiopia, before a total civil war ravaged hundreds of thousands of individuals.
Those awards were meaningless and yet that had no impact on those people that are sitting pretty behind their keyboards of mainstream media and in Norway. It is only this, this gesture that she did with something that she won, that they have a problem with.
And it's a ceremonial medal handoff, that's a thing. So if we're talking scandal to me, it's not about who handed over a medal, it's how easily symbolism gets rewarded while real human consequences apparently fall flat on all of their ears.
So they all basically admitted he's acting like a spoiled child that you have to coddle while pretending that's somehow normal behavior that someone should expect from the President of the United States. Pathetic.
