JOHN AVLON: So what you've got here I think is a question of who was in the room when Donald Trump's remarks were being made, who encouraged him not to call out these groups by name.
CHRIS CUOMO (CO-HOST): They say he spoke with a number of advisers.
AVLON: No exactly.
CUOMO: This wasn't out of haste.
AVLON: Right, exactly, and that's what's troubling, right? And when you have a nationalist wing, an ethno-nationalist wing of political advisers driving a president's agenda, this is the kind of thing you get. Breitbart has a complicated relationship -- I don't even know why I'm putting it politely -- with issues of difference, particularly with the African-American community, with the Muslim community. Sebastian Gorka on Inauguration Day wore a medal from a Hungarian resistance group that gave an award to his father, which has been associated with Nazis in the past. This is not the kind of crew you typically see advising an American president. And you’ve got to believe that these deliberate omissions by the president are driven at least in part by advisers who seem to have a vested interest in stoking these flames on the part of a portion of their base. Again, it's the ethno-nationalists. Let's not be too polite it, that's another name for white nationalists.
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CUOMO: Now, let's give the best defense in this situation, which is, “Hey, they are latching on to Trump wrongfully, he didn't want them.” But you would think, if that's the case, you would deny them most of all, if you were Trump or anyone around him, because that's the last thing you'd want. And then we get the kind of language that we had here, which is not doing that to say the least, Abby.
ABBY PHILLIP: Yeah, I think it should be a pretty easy decision. David Duke says that you support -- that he supports Donald Trump, Donald Trump supports him. It should be easy to say, “That's not true, I reject his support, I disavow him.” I think, Chris, we should also really point out here that White House aide Sebastian Gorka essentially glossing over white supremacy as a problem is a huge movement away from the norm. I think we cannot lose sight of it.
CUOMO: And it's factually incorrect.
PHILLIP: And it's factually incorrect.
CUOMO: He said, “Go to Sinjar,” but we're not in Sinjar, we're in America. And white supremacy is the number one terror threat that they deal with in our government in this country.
PHILLIP: Yeah, we cannot let that slide because the reality is that's not something that would be acceptable in any other administration.
