President Donald Trump saluted a man on Wednesday who was fired for tweeting a Nazi salute.
At a speech in Pennsylvania, Trump called former CNN pundit Jeffrey Lord a “good man.”
“Hi, Jeffrey. The great Jeffrey Lord,” Trump called out to Lord, who was apparently in attendance at the event. “He was on fake news CNN for a long time. He was one of my few sources of truth. Thank you, Jeffrey, for being here. That’s a great honor.”
Lord was one of CNN’s in-house Trump surrogates, but the network canned him in August for posting “Sieg Heil!” on Twitter:
Lord was in the middle of an argument on Twitter with Angelo Carusone, head of Media Matters for America, when he made the offensive post. He claimed he was mocking fascists and offered no apologies.
“If I had known this was going to end up like this, I would have done it again,” Lord told The Hill at the time. “You have to go after these people [Media Matters]. This is not allowable under any circumstances.”
Lord has a long history of making inflammatory statements, claiming that there “are no people of color” in the country, calling Trump the ”the Martin Luther King of health care” and blaming, in part, singer Ariana Grande for the terrorist attack at her concert in Manchester, England, earlier this year. He titled a recent Breitbart column: “Hillary Clinton is the new David Duke.”