While interviewing Republican Congressional Candidate Lea Marquez Peterson on Sunday’s edition of KasieDC, MSNBC host Kasie Hunt tried to bait her into calling the President a racist by bringing up his comments referring to MS-13 gang members as “animals”: “The President earlier this week referred to some immigrants and drug dealers as well as animals, not as people. Do you think that rhetoric is racist?”

Peterson, who hopes to succeed retiring Republican Congresswoman Martha McSally in an Arizona congressional district that Hillary Clinton won by five points, did not take the bait. She pointed out that President Trump had directed his “rhetoric” at MS-13 gang members, which Hunt failed to mention: “this comment most recently I think was referring to the gang members that are coming from Mexico that are committing horrendous acts on people here in the United States. So I think calling them animals is not something that is beyond that point. So I think in terms of what he said most recently, I don’t believe it was racist.”

President Trump referred to members of the brutal gang MS-13 as “animals” during a roundtable discussion at the White House with elected officials from California opposed to their state’s politically correct “sanctuary” policy. The media initially made it look like President Trump had referred to all illegal immigrants as “animals,” Shortly after the President made those comments, the Associated Press released a tweet claiming that “Trump referred to those crossing US border illegally as ‘animals’ and slammed California sanctuary laws as ‘deadly.’” Nearly every other major news organization echoed the AP in making it sound like the President had directed the “animals” moniker at all illegal immigrants, not just MS-13.

The AP later deleted that tweet, saying in a separate tweet that “it wasn’t made clear that he was speaking after a comment about gang members.” It was perfectly clear to anyone who had watched the whole video, not just the sound bite distributed by the Trump-hating media, that President Trump’s “animals” description only applied to MS-13 members. Based on Hunt’s line of questioning, which took place three days after the AP admitted its “mistake,” it appears that she did not get the memo.

Even after the context of President Trump’s remarks became clear to the American public, the left still tried to justify their anger towards President Trump’s comments. Pro-abortion House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi went into a big lecture about how every human being has a “spark of divnity” while Trump-hating “Republican” Ana Navarro slammed the President’s comments as “dehumanizing” despite the fact that she had previously described Trump as an “animal” and “unfit to be human.”

With the midterm elections still months away, expect the liberal media to ask many more Republicans running for Congress to weigh in on President Trump’s “racist rhetoric.”