MAGA lawmaker left speechless after confronted on CNN with Trump PAC's 'C-word' Harris ad

CNN's John Berman repeatedly tried to pin down Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL) on Donald Trump's menacing vow to "protect women ... whether they like it or not," but the MAGA lawmaker kept wriggling away.

The former president taunted his critics who thought that promise was ominous enough by saying women didn't even have to consent to his protection, and Berman pressed the congressman to justify those additional remarks Trump added to that already controversial campaign promise.

"Why say 'whether the women will like it or not'?" Berman said.

Donalds insisted that Trump's comments were an expression of his border security policy.

"Once again if you're going to clip five seconds out of an hour speech and not provide context, this is why the American people frankly are frustrated with media, because you guys play games, you take things out of context," Donalds said. "You don't explain them clearly, and you want to get caught up in the semantics. The heart of what Donald Trump said very clearly is he's going to protect the women of our country because Kamala Harris and Joe Biden have refused to protect the women of our country."

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Berman then circled back to a previous topic and asked Donalds to comment on Nikki Haley's criticism of the Trump campaign, which she said had focused too much on "bromance and masculinity stuff" and turned off women voters, and another round crosstalk ensued.

"So that's your answer to Nikki Haley then, that Nikki Haley's irrelevant?" Berman said.

"No, John, it's not, John," Donalds insisted. "To answer that matters five days before an election is this: You have young girls who are from other countries who are trafficked to our southern border by the drug cartels, they are raped, they are sold into sex slavery."

Berman cut him off there, saying that Haley was talking about the language the Trump campaign used about women, and then asked Donalds to justify an ad tweeted out by Elon Musk's pro-Trump America PAC calling Kamala Harris "the C-word" – which briefly left the GOP lawmaker speechless.

"Okay," Donalds said. "That's not from Donald Trump's campaign, it's from an outside group. You're assuming that Donald Trump can control what outside groups do – he cannot. That would be a violation of federal election law, you know this, John. So for Nikki Haley to try to put that on Donald Trump is not accurate. That's for outside groups to deal with. We could talk about the outside groups that are running ads against Donald Trump calling him a fascist [likening] him to Hitler, knowing the fact that there's been two attempts on his life, but they do it anyway."

"So don't don't try to just talk about what what one super PAC did because you're trying to run this clip from last night in Green Bay, again, taking the context away from our discussion today," Donalds added, before the segment ended. "The true context is that Donald Trump's going to do the job that a commander-in-chief should do, which is following the law securing our borders."

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