FRIDAY, JUNE 13, 2025
Martha MacCallum speaks: Should Senator Padilla have interrupted Secretary Noem?
In our view, the answer is no. Luckily, the word “interrupted” was banned from use on MSNBC programs. On that cable news channel, the solon hadn’t interrupted Noem. He had simply tried to ask a question in the course of doing his oversight. All in all, it was No Upbeat Claim Left Behind.
On the Fox News Channel, things tilted a different way. During yesterday’s three o’clock hour, Martha MacCallum interviewed a pair of Fox News contributors—one a Democrat, one a Republican—about the incident in question.
Later, speaking with Noem herself, this is what MacCallum said the pair had said:
MACCALLUM (6/12/25): We just had a Democrat and a Republican panelist, and both sides agreed that they felt that this was unbecoming behavior of a United States senator.
MacCallum may have thought that’s what the two panelists said. If so, it seems to us that she misunderstood what the Democratic panelist said.
That panelist was the calm, mild-mannered Kevin Walling. Here’s the bulk of what he said:
WALLING: Well obviously, we’re seeing a response from [Senator Padilla’s] colleagues in the Senate, Republicans and Democrats. You know, Lisa Murkowski I think just released a statement saying, you know, it was shocking and horrifying and not what she believes in America.
I think once you saw the senator identify himself—he’s the senior senator of the most populous state, the state where this public press conference was happening—this kind of behavior should not have happened.
MacCallum apparently thought that was a criticism of Senator Padilla. On balance, we’d be inclined to say that she apparently heard Walling’s statement wrong.
The Republican panelist was Marc Thiessen. After Walling spoke, MacCallum turned to Thiessen with a classic leading question. Inevitably, she was rewarded with the classic approved tribal answer:
MACCALLUM: I mean it’s clear, Marc, that he wanted to make apolitical statement with this outburst, right?
THIESSEN: It’s not a very smart one. Democrats are in the process of committing political suicide.
That’s the way the fellow started. Continuing, he now said this:
THIESSEN (continuing directly): You’ve got Democratic congressmen storming an ICE facility filled with criminal aliens who have felony records and child—you know, rape and murder and all the rest, and now you’ve got a Democratic senator storming a press conference with the DHS secretary, getting into a scuffle with law enforcement? What’s wrong with these people? You don’t behave like this. This isn’t how a senator is supposed to behave…
And so on, irately, from there.
For the record, we know of no reason to claim that Senator Badilla “stormed” yesterday’s event. He did loudly interrupt Noem. We don’t think he should have done that.
With respect to Thiessen’s companion complaint, it’s abundantly clear that the three Democratic congressmen to whom he refers did not “storm the ICE [detention center in Newark]” during the month-old event in question.
Sorry, that just didn’t happen! But pleasing tribal claims of that type never die or grow old on Fox.
Claims like that enjoy eternal life on Fox. With respect to yesterday’s event, MacCallum soon said that each of her guests had been criticizing Senator Padilla.
If that’s what MacCallum thought she heard, we think she heard it wrong.
