NEW YORK - Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump's views pose a ‘tremendous danger’ to America while the billionaire businessman has been given a ‘free ride’ by the media, according to author and entrepreneur Arianna Huffington.
Trump’s presidential campaign has been controversial from the beginning, with inflammatory remarks directed against Mexican immigrants, women and Muslims. He caused a political firestorm late last year by suggesting that he would not allow Muslims into the US if he were elected president. "That is a statement of such tremendous danger for the country that really goes against all that America stands for," Ms. Huffington, a liberal, told CNBC on Tuesday.
"That's when we started covering them in way that constantly reminds the public of what a danger it is," added Huffington, who is the co-founder and president of The Huffington Post, a major American online news and digital media company. The Huffington Post announced in July last year that it would cover Trump’s campaign for the GOP nomination as “entertainment news” beside articles on the Kardashians.After the announcement, Trump took to Twitter to insult Huffington personally, and his official Facebook page slammed her organization as a "clown show...pretending to be a legitimate news source."
Huffington said last month that while an editorial decision was made to move Trump stories out of the entertainment section, their coverage would "constantly remind the public what he stands for." "I believe the media has given him a free ride. In many ways they have given him an enormous amount of attention, and they have not really focused on how destructive what he's proposing is," she told CNBC. Huffington called on American news outlets and the world’s media to stop covering Trump “as though he's a conventional candidate,” and remind everyone of the facts.Despite his rhetoric, Trump continues to lead his party rivals in the race for the White House. The real estate mogul has 38 percent support among Republican and Republican-leaning voters, according to the NBC News/SurveyMonkey weekly online poll.US Senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio have 21 and 11 percent support respectively. Retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson is at 8 percent.