POPPY HARLOW (CO-HOST): The president last night, instead of doubling down on his comments calling out these white supremacist groups by name, he chose to retweet someone who is not just controversial. This guy peddles in conspiracy theories, he's the one who peddled the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, which became dangerous. He made something up that Democrats and Hillary Clinton's team was somehow involved in a child sex ring in a D.C. pizzeria. Well, you know what? It's not just a conspiracy theory. A guy goes there a month later and shoots the place up. This is dangerous, and the president is retweeting something from him in the last 12 hours.
ERROL LOUIS: Yeah. It's really remarkable. This is, among other things, that you have once again what’s called dog whistle politics, where this is kind of a wink and a nod from the president to some of the worst elements of society, people who have spread conspiracy theories, people who have spread hate, people who have sort of taken us up to the brink of violence, and occasionally we see people take the next step into violence. And so this is something that a responsible leader would go nowhere near. This is something that a White House -- it would have been unthinkable prior to now, just to see something like that coming essentially from the Oval Office. We call them tweets because that's a technological term --
HARLOW: It's a written statement from the president.
LOUIS: It is a written statement from the president of the United States, right. And so for him to even indirectly endorse something like that, I think we all know by now what this is all about. He's done this over and over and over again, starting with the birther conspiracies that he peddled for years. All of these are signals, and as we saw over the last weekend, people take that seriously. And leaders of the Ku Klux Klan will stand there, looking to the camera and say, we are fulfilling a mission that we got from President Trump. It is shocking. I think the good side of all of this, of course, is that there are others including corporate leaders, as we're seeing, who are going to step forward and sort of fill a leadership vacuum that this president, for whatever reason, has chosen to leave behind.
