You can come up with any antonym for the word trajectory you would like, and that is the CNN path. When CNN fired Brian Stelter from his weekly program Reliable Sources, that was the first shot fired at liberals and moderates. The moving of Don Lemon from a sometimes hard-hitting and sometimes galling confrontational nighttime format to a morning coffee klatch was a recipe for disaster; his eventual firing was a foregone conclusion. The jumble of nightly panel shows mixing strident Republicans and smiling pseudo-liberals has become unwatchable. Watching the latest cat herder, Alisyn Camerota, chase the catnip laid out by new CNN boss Chris Licht is painful and beneath her.
There is a political adage that goes when your opponent is digging a hole, hand him a shovel. Fox and MSNBC should be pulling up a backhoe because CNN cannot dig fast enough. While they still have a free hand to drive nails in their own coffin, they presented America, Wednesday night, with a lying sex abuser, using the guise of providing a platform for a presidential candidate. CNN was obviously and shamelessly making a rating grab. Not only did CNN rig the audience, but they also offered Trump a female foil he had previously clashed with. With the ink barely dry on the documents of Mr. Trump’s scarcely twenty-four-hour-old loss in a liable case for sexual abuse and defamation, Trump’s appearance must have sent a shiver of excitement up the leg of Licht.
‘Shecky’ Trump used name-calling, dismissive hand gestures, and bad jokes to the cheers and laughter of a fawning group of sycophants. Trump accused Democrats of not just being in favor of a woman’s right to choose but of infanticide, saying they wanted to kill babies after birth. Either host Kaitlin Collins was silent because of stunned disbelief, or her former job at the Daily Caller overrode the instinct to ask a follow-up question, such as; what legislation or Democrat favors infanticide except in the most extreme circumstances?
The post-panel show was just as unbearable. I waited for Anderson Cooper, who hosted one of two alternating panels and was anxious to give the audience a lecture on why hearing Trump was necessary, to ask why Donald Trump brought a group of women to a debate with Hillary Clinton in 2016, who he alleged had affairs with her husband if no one cared about a candidate’s character. That would have been the logical response to Florida Republican Congressman Byron Donalds’ assertion that no one is interested in discussing Trump’s lies or infidelity. Trump’s audacious lie of ending the war between Ukraine and Russia in twenty-four hours was a bigger whopper than his promise to build a wall on the southern border and have Mexico pay for it.
I am at a loss as to why a reporter or a pundit faced with Mr. Trump never says, please do not insult me with a dismissive hand gesture or a smirk, I am a professional just as you are and I will extend the same courtesy—to you, now for my questions. I heard a lot of poor Kaitlin Collins commentary in the past 30 hours, but I am not in that pity choir. She helped orchestrate her ambush when she accepted the assignment with all its parameters. Maybe it is time I take my business elsewhere.
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