The Fox & Friends host Abby Huntsman apologised to viewers on Sunday, after referring to Donald Trump’s summit with Kim Jong-un of North Korea in Singapore as “that meeting between the two dictators”.
Huntsman, the daughter of US ambassador to Russia and former Republican presidential hopeful Jon Huntsman, was discussing Trump’s arrival in Singapore with Anthony Scaramucci, the New York hedge fund owner who was White House communications director for 11 days in the summer of 2017.
Over footage of Trump stepping out of Air Force One, on which he had left the G7 summit in Quebec and from which he had fired off tweets and directions to advisers that stoked a burgeoning diplomatic crisis with Canada, Huntsman said: “Anthony, talk to us about this moment. I mean, this is history, we are living history.
“Regardless of what happens in that meeting between the two dictators, what we are seeing right now, this is history.”
Scaramucci did not pick up on her error.
“Yeah,” he said, “because [Trump] is a disruptive risk-taker, he’s willing to break the usual bonds of what would be not going to a meeting like this, because he knows that if he goes to a meeting like this, he increases the chance of peace and global prosperity. And so you have to give him huge credit for being there.”
Huntsman apologised later in the show, saying: “I do want to point out that earlier, as you know sometimes on live TV sometimes you don’t always say things perfectly. I called both President Trump and Kim Jong-un a dictator. I did not mean that, my mistake, so I apologise for that.”
Trump’s tweets have been shown to regularly closely follow discussions on Fox & Friends, Fox News’ morning magazine show. So much is this so that last month the British foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, tried – to no avail – to appeal to the president not to dump the Iran nuclear deal via an interview with the show’s weekday hosts.
Trump did not immediately tweet about Huntsman’s gaffe, although many liberal online commenters did.
In response, Huntsman wrote: “Apologised on the show. I’ll never claim to be a perfect human being. We all have slip ups in life, I have many :) now let’s all move on to things that actually matter.”