Florida congressional candidate and former Marine William Upham said in a video this week that there is “no doubt” Donald Trump “is the Antichrist,” calling him “a false messiah” and “your enemy” who “must be killed.” The U.S. Marine Corps responded Tuesday with a statement noting Upham was medically discharged on May 30, 2025, and that his remarks are “a direct violation of the oath he swore to uphold” and “not in keeping with the service’s values” — a two-sentence disavowal that took the Corps less time to issue than it took a cable news booker to find a second panelist.

That panelist, once found, was not asked to defend the statement — nobody offered to — but to occupy the “let’s hear both sides” chair opposite it, transforming a call for the president’s assassination into a six-minute segment with a built-in commercial break. Producers described the format as “balanced,” on the grounds that both halves of the panel got equal time, regardless of the fact that only one of them was arguing a position and the other was arguing that positions shouldn’t be rushed into.

Upham’s campaign has not said whether the video will be taken down, reposted, or set to a slower zoom for the next fundraising email. The network, for its part, has already booked the follow-up panel: a debate over whether Tuesday’s debate was itself “fair to both sides.”