Politics
WATCH: CNN Guest Smacks Down Host’s Out-Of-Context Attack On Trump
In a recent CNN segment, Republican communications professional Lee Carter brought to light the network’s misleading portrayal of former President Donald Trump, after comments he made during Tuesday night’s town hall. Carter said that Trump’s remarks were taken out of context, offering a different perspective than the narrative CNN has been pushing.
During the interview with Sean Hannity on Tuesday, Trump was asked about the media’s overwhelming fear of him taking power. “You are promising America tonight, you would never abuse power as retribution against anybody?” Hannity asked.
“Except for Day One,” Trump joked. “I want to close the border and I want to drill, drill, drill!”
Carter argued that this soundbite, detached from its full context, distorted the former President’s intended message. The discussion on CNN, ironically, served as a platform for exposing the network’s own biases as well.
“I don’t think that what he meant to say was, ‘I’m really going to be a dictator’ in that moment. That’s not what he was saying. He was saying, ‘I’m going to be a dictator on day one and under these two terms,'” Carter explained.
“This is very much like in 2016, everybody said, ‘He’s an outsider, he’s got no experience.’ And he’s like, ‘Yeah, I’m an outsider with no experience. I’m gonna blow things up in D.C.’ He’s got that kind of a way about him. He did, and he did, but that’s what people like about him, by the way,” she finished.
During the primetime pre-recorded Iowa town hall, Trump appeared to be deliberately baiting the media. And based on the newsfeed Wednesday morning, the bait seems to have worked.
The mainstream media, exemplified by headlines like “Trump Deflects Question On Retribution And Law-Breaking At Town Hall” from The New York Times, have interpreted Trump’s remarks in the most negative light possible.
The Associated Press wrote Tuesday:
“Trump declines to rule out abusing power to seek retribution if he returns to the White House,” despite giving an accurate account of the exchange, albeit without the Executive Order context. The AP’s take was not dissimilar to the radical left publication The Daily Beast, which wrote, “Donald Trump, in a Fox News town hall Wednesday, did not rule out breaking the law if re-elected president.”
Indeed earlier in the interview, Trump threw a similar question back at Hannity as referring to the Biden Administration’s recent actions against him. The host asked Trump if he had “in any way” made “plans whatsoever, if reelected president, to abuse power, to break the law to use the government to go after people.”
To which Trump asked, “You mean like they’re using right now?”
The former President even made his own bold prediction about Joe Biden over the next four years: “I personally don’t think he makes it, OK? I think he’s in bad shape physically.”
“And by the way, it was OK for him to say that ‘I’d like to take him behind,’ and he could say that and everyone thought it was so cute. If I ever said it, they’d say, ‘He’s a dictator. He’s a horrible human being.’ You know, it’s a whole double standard we have,” Trump added.
