Fox News’ Geraldo Rivera Agrees That Trump’s Critics Are Right That Trump’s a Racist

You hate to see it. Or not.

The scales have finally — finally! — fallen from the eyes of Fox News reporter Geraldo Rivera, who can now admit what so many people have been screaming for four years: President Trump is a racist.

Rivera told The New York Times this weekend that the president’s recent attacks on four minority Democratic congresswomen, including tweets in which Trump exhorted them to “go back” to where they came from, have been a turning point:

“As much as I have denied it and averted my eyes from it, this latest incident made it impossible,” Geraldo Rivera, a roaming correspondent at large for Fox News and longtime friend, said in an interview.

“My friendship with the president has cost me friendships, it has cost me schisms in the family, my wife and I are constantly at odds about the president,” he added. “I do insist that he’s been treated unfairly. But the unmistakable words, the literal words he said, is an indication that the critics were much more right than I.”

The “Mexican rapists” comments, the complaining about a “Mexican” judge who was really from Indiana ruling against him, the “shithole countries” comment, the ignoring Rivera’s own native Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane Maria, the ginning up anger at undocumented migrants seeking asylum at the southern border…it all adds up to the point where not even Geraldo Rivera can ignore it.

Rivera had started the week appealing to Trump to not go down the racist track long after Trump had already left him behind at the starting gate:

Dear @realDonaldTrump plz don’t continue down this road of intolerance & racial provocation. You’re supposed to be the glue that makes #EPluribusUnum possible. Out of many, one. Appeal to the best of us, not the worst. Plz.

— Geraldo Rivera (@GeraldoRivera) July 18, 2019

On Friday morning he pronounced himself “relieved” that Trump had criticized the “send her back” chant that broke out at his campaign rally:

Relieved @realDonaldTrump has distanced himself from the hideously nativist, xenophobic & racist chants of #SendHerBack directed at @IlhanMN & #TheSquad by the crowd in North Carolina. @POTUS must guard against attacks on our democracy by intolerance.

— Geraldo Rivera (@GeraldoRivera) July 19, 2019

Then Trump walked back his “distancing,” and Rivera had had enough.

Better late than never, but it’s still very, very late.