Jesse Watters, the former Bill O’Reilly protege who, after O’Relly’s show was canceled earlier this month, got promoted to one of the co-hosts of Fox News’ new show “The Five,” inspired intense criticism after a Tuesday-night broadcast ostensibly defending First Daughter Ivanka Trump after she was booed while speaking at a women’s-issues panel in Germany and claiming that her father is an advocate for women.
In the video clip above, Watters had this to say about Ms. Trump and her unappreciative German audience:
“It’s funny, you know, the left says they really respect women but when given an opportunity to respect a woman like that they boo and hiss. And I always thought that Europeans were supposed to be so sophisticated and well-mannered, and now they’re treating this like it’s a soccer match. I don’t understand what’s going on; I think Ivanka’s supposed to be the moderating voice for her father, so I think people in Europe should support that, I don’t know why also saying that, you know, ‘My father respects families’ is controversial, I mean, he’s probably hired a ton of fathers and mothers and, and children, so I don’t really get what was going on here but, ah, I really liked how she was speaking into that microphone.”
There’s nothing inherently objectionable to Watters’ words (at least in regards to Ms. Trump); the criticism of him is based on the smile he gave and the hand gesture he made while discussing how Ivanka Trump “was speaking into that microphone” — basically, an apparent imitation of the sex act commonly known as a handjob. Or, as Newsweek put it, “The joke is exceedingly sophisticated in both structure and content, but sustained analysis by expert humorists suggests that Watters was pointing to the fact that a microphone is shaped somewhat like a penis. What he really liked, presumably, was not Trump’s discussion of female empowerment but, to the contrary, the image of receiving oral sex from her.”
On air I was referring to Ivanka’s voice and how it resonates like a smooth jazz radio DJ. This was in no way a joke about anything else.
Watters, for his part, later tweeted in his defense that “On air I was referring to Ivanka’s voice and how it resonates like a smooth jazz radio DJ. This was in no way a joke about anything else.”
