Colby Hall Calls Out ‘Gotcha’ Politics Surrounding Biden’s Use of — and Apology for — the Term ‘Illegal’

After getting pushback from the left over his repeating the word “illegal” to describe undocumented immigrants during the State of the Union, President Joe Biden expressed his regret for using the word on Saturday. But as Mediaite’s own Colby Hall told NewsNation, playing “word games” will not solve the border crisis.

In a conversation with NewsNation’s Keleigh Beeson on Monday, Hall was asked about the uproar over Biden’s use of the word “illegal” when there was a much more tragic story at play:

Beeson: I think the million-dollar question in all of this is we’re talking about a suspect who authorities say came into the country illegally, was arrested before. Why the concern over what he’s called when we have a woman who lost her life in this story?

Hall: It’s a great question, and everything about this story is frustrating to me and sort of angers me. You know, President Biden used the term “illegal” in his speech that, when I heard, I thought, well, that will appeal to the right, because that’s long been a term that they use, which, you know, has been argued is sort of dehumanizing. And I thought that that was sort of a centrist win for Biden, but it was his progressive side that said, “Uh, uh, uh, you’re not supposed to say that for reasons we’ll all explain later.”

So, you know, he sort of succumbed to the more progressive side, and now he’s being blamed by the right for saying that he apologized to the killer. He didn’t. What he’s saying is that it’s this massive group of immigrants are not all illegal. … So here we are, the president said good things about this tragic death of Laken Riley. I don’t think he was apologizing and trying to show respect to the killer. I think he was trying to say that immigrants as a group aren’t all, shouldn’t all be dismissed. And I think the progressives sort of put Biden in a tough spot where he had to apologize for what was otherwise sort of a nice political win for him.

But Hall’s ultimate point was that no pressure from the right or the left over a verbal gaffe is going to solve the very serious problem at hand:

[P]laying “gotcha” with word games, both from the progressives and conservatives, that are trying to make more hay out of this… It’s sort of, it’s why we can’t have nice things. Like, can we just move past the gotcha and get to the point that this is a tragic death, the border crisis needs to be solved immediately, and word games is not helping either of those situations?

Watch the video above via NewsNation.