On MSNBC on Wednesday, news anchor Stephanie Ruhle discussed Donald Trump‘s AP interview with her guests, former Democrat senator Robert Torricelli and New York Times columnist and MSNBC contributor Bret Stephens, and on the topic of his son, Donald Trump Jr., the right-leaning Stephens unleashed.

Ruhle read from the AP’s extensive interview, in the portion regarding the Trump Tower meeting with Russians about Hillary Clinton.

From the AP transcript, the President said:

“My son’s a good young guy. He did what every other person in Congress would do if somebody came up to them, said, ‘Hey, I have information on your opponent.’ I don’t know of any politician. And I think I can speak for the people in this room that would have said, ‘Oh, gee, information on my opponent and it’s bad information?’ Name me a politician that would have turned that down. There is no such thing as that kind of a politician. So that’s what they heard. They heard it was about Hillary Clinton. They had a meeting or he had a meeting with some people. The meeting became about a different subject and they couldn’t get out of the meeting fast enough.”

Ruhle first asked Torricelli whether that explanation was enough.

Torricelli replied that, “having been through a few campaigns, someone comes up to you with information about your opponent, you’re taking the meeting.”

But he added “If it’s a foreign government, you probably don’t. If the foreign government is telling you something that they’re going to do, like tap into e-mails that is illegal, not only do you not take the meeting, if you’re in the meeting, you get out as fast as you can and you call law enforcement.”

“So, yes, of course you take information on an opponent, but under these facts,” he said, reiterating those facts, “you wouldn’t take that meeting in a million years. I don’t know anyone who would.”

Ruhle then turned to Stephens, asking whether this would have any impact for Trump electorally. “If you ask people across America, they may agree with his nonsense lie,” she said.

That’s when Stephens got going, slamming Trump Jr., not to mention a ricochet shot at Jared Kushner and even managing to work in an Ann Coulter reference.

BRET STEPHENS: “Well no, I mean, that’s because we’ve sort of, we’ve defined deviancy down with the Trump administration that we’re used to the court of King Donald, his sons and courtiers and so on. By the way this is the same story with Saudi Arabia, when you put your son-in-law in charge of foreign policy with Saudi Arabia and then you catch moral laryngitis, as one my colleague Frank Bruni put it, you shouldn’t be surprised. You know something, Ann Coulter did give the president one terrific piece of advice back in 2016—” STEPHANIE RUHLE: “Don’t hire your family.” BRET STEPHENS: “You can’t hire your family for important jobs like these. Because your son happens to be, not a young guy, he happens to be an idiot who wanted to collude with a foreign government to subvert an American election.”

Brutal.

Watch the clip above, courtesy of MSNBC.

[Featured image via screengrab]

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