Colorado Gov. Jared Polis tells CNN’s Jake Tapper that Biden needs to show Democrats that he can turn his campaign around and says “he hasn’t
‘That’s a Very Smug Way To Look at Me’: CNN Guest Not Happy With Glare From Scott Jennings
Social media influencer Leigh McGowan snapped at CNN senior political commentator Scott Jennings on Tuesday for looking at her in “a very smug way.”
Reacting on CNN NewsNight to the crowd Vice President Kamala Harris managed to draw for her speech in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday, Jennings said:
I mean, she’s gonna get 90% of the vote in Washington, D.C., so I would hope she could draw a crowd from her town that’s gonna give her the most support from a bunch of government bureaucrats. I would hope they would turn out for that. Look, I was sort of taken aback by the absolute full-on attack on Trump. We’ve heard it all before. It sounded a little frantic to me, to be honest, this close to the end of the election. I took a few notes. Again, they’re still pushing the lie about Project 2025 . It doesn’t matter how many times she says it, Donald Trump did not write it, he has disavowed it. This is not his agenda. He has his own campaign agenda, it is not Project 2025–
McGowan interrupted, “No, it’s Agenda 47, which is exactly the same as Project 2025, and you can say that as many times as you want, Scott, but it’s not true.”
Jennings then rested his chin on his fist and stared at McGowan, prompting her to remark, “That’s a very smug way to look at me, my friend.”
Jennings laughed before sitting in silence as McGowan continued to criticize him.
“You’re totally overlooking what she has done here. She’s brought together 100,000 people to say, ‘I look forward to the future. I will be a president for everyone and not just a president for the people that I like,’” said McGowan. “And if you look at it in contrast to what we looked at Madison Square Garden, which said, ‘Hey man, we don’t like you, we don’t like you, we don’t like you, we don’t like you, we’re not for you, we’re not for you.’ And she’s saying everyone is an American, everyone will be taken care of.”
Host Abby Phillip then played a clip for the panel before Jennings could respond.
Watch above via CNN.
The post ‘That’s a Very Smug Way To Look at Me’: CNN Guest Not Happy With Glare From Scott Jennings first appeared on Mediaite .
Biden Refers to Trump Supporters as ‘Garbage’ Before White House Quickly Walks It Back
President Joe Biden referred to supporters of former President Donald Trump as “garbage” on Tuesday night, and the White House quickly walked the comment back.
The remarks were delivered from the White House just before Vice President Kamala Harris pitched national unity at the nearby Ellipse in what was billed as her closing argument to voters.
According to Politico , Biden was remotely addressing Latino voters when he offered a “stinging rebuke of the racist rhetoric aimed at Puerto Rico during Donald Trump’s weekend rally.”
CNN obtained a clip of the remarks in which Biden said:
And just the other day, a speaker at his rally called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage.” Well, let me tell you something. I don’t– I– I don’t know the Puerto Rican that– that I know– or a Puerto Rico, where I’m from– in my home state of Delaware, they’re good, decent, honorable people.
The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters– his– his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American. It’s totally contrary to everything we’ve done, everything we’ve been.
In a statement about Biden’s comment, a White House official said, “The President referred to the hateful rhetoric at the Madison Square Garden rally as garbage.”
Biden also later took to X, formerly Twitter, to address the comment:
Roast comedian Tony Hinchcliffe was one of several speakers who opened Trump’s New York City rally Sunday. Hinchcliffe told a joke about Puerto Rico that sparked an immediate backlash.
“Republicans are the party with a good sense of humor,” Hinchcliffe said at the rally . “I don’t know if you guys know this, but there is literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. I think it’s called Puerto Rico?”
Watch above via CNN.
The post Biden Refers to Trump Supporters as ‘Garbage’ Before White House Quickly Walks It Back first appeared on Mediaite .
10 Cards Charging 0% Interest Until 2024
CNN’s Harry Enten Makes The Case Kamala Harris’s Support May Be ‘Underestimated By Polls’
CNN data guru Harry Enten made the case Tuesday that current polling could be underestimating support for Vice President Kamala Harris a week before the election.
Wave after wave of surveys continue to show the race either neck and neck or with former President Donald Trump creating some separation – at least nationally. Battleground state surveys continue to show the pair essentially tied in the states that will decide the election.
Seven days out from a third consecutive race in which much of the focus is on the so-called hidden Trump vote pollsters struggle to capture, Enten flipped a potential scenario on CNN News Central.
Host John Berman noted Trump had been “underestimated” previously and asked, “Any precedent for happening three times in a row?”
Enten said Harris could become the candidate that might shock election forecasters.
Eneten said, “Is there any precedent that the polls will underestimate Donald Trump once again? Because that’s all we hear about – Donald Trump’s going to outperform polls.” He continued:
I went back and checked out whether or not a party outran the polls. Three presidential election cycles in a row and the key battleground states. It’s never happened. It’s never happened. Zero times, zero times since 1972. So if the polls are going to underestimate Donald Trump once again, that would be historically unprecedented. Now, maybe you want to make the argument that Donald Trump himself is historically unprecedented.
But what normally happens is the pollsters catch on, hey, we’re underestimating. We’re not taking into account some part of the electorate. They make adjustments. And I think that helps to explain why we have never seen that the same party has been underestimated three times in a row in presidential elections, at least over the last 52 years.
Berman noted Enten had seen signs of a “polling miss” that “wouldn’t necessarily even benefit Trump as much this time.”
Enten concluded battleground state polls from the 2022 midterms underestimated Democrats by four points. He theorized if a similar phenomenon occurred next week, Harris would sweep the battleground states – winnig the election in a clean sweep.
“Maybe that’ll happen,” he said. “Maybe it’ll happen. But I think that there are folks who are undressing the underestimating the idea that maybe Kamala Harris will be underestimated by the polls, at least a week out.”
Watch above via CNN.
The post CNN’s Harry Enten Makes The Case Kamala Harris’s Support May Be ‘Underestimated By Polls’ first appeared on Mediaite .
CNN Invited the Shameful Ryan Girdusky Moment By Creating a Panel Show Around Pointless, Petty and Personal Conflict
Viewers of CNN’s NewsNight were likely caught off guard by Abby Phillip telling them that one of her guests, Ryan Gidursky, had been removed from the show’s panel after he insinuated fellow panelist Mehdi Hasan was, at best, a Hezbollah sympathizer and at worst, an actual terrorist.
It was the culmination of an ugly episode handled gracefully by the anchor and by the network itself — which quickly issued a statement condemning Gidursky’s comments and announcing he would not be invited back on CNN. Philip’s words to camera are worth including here because they get to the essence of her show’s standards:
There is a line that was crossed there, and it’s not acceptable to me. It’s not acceptable to us at this network. We want discussion. We want people who disagree with each other to talk to each other. But when you cross the line of a complete lack of civility, that is not going to happen here on this show. It’s a heated time. We’re in the middle of a political season. We are eight days from a presidential election. But we can have conversations about what is happening in this country without resorting to the lowest of the lowest kind of discourse. Want to address that.
And I want to apologize to the viewers at home because we wanna be able to hear each other. We wanna be able to talk to each other. And we plan to do that in this next segment.
But however astute the handling of the ugly ordeal was, it was a bound-to-happen moment for anyone paying attention to how NewsNight has dramatically evolved since it was remade as a classic clash of cable news pundits — each dying to go viral with some sick burn of a partisan rival.
The esteemed media critic Brian Steinberg summed up the show’s quick transition writing for Variety in September, first explaining its origin story:
“NewsNight,” which launched in the aftermath of the terrorist attack on Israel in October of last year, looked at first like most other programs on CNN and its main rivals, Fox News Channel and MSNBC. Phillip sat alone on set, always spoke directly to the audience and interviewed experts, analysts and newsmakers about the most important headlines of the day. Earlier this summer, CNN remade the program — which shares its title with a primetime show anchored by Aaron Brown on the network in the early 2000s — and it has quickly become the loudest thing on the schedule. The program operates at a volume that has almost become unrecognizable in these days of ownership under risk-averse Warner Bros. Discovery .
But Steinberg’s observation is that it has recently become something of an ideological battleground, with DNA much closer to that of the show Jon Stewart once suggested was CNN’s original sin, Crossfire, which regularly featured fights between James Carville, Paul Begala, Tucker Carlson, and Mary Matalin (among other dignitaries).
During a famous appearance in 2004, Stewart told the show’s hosts that their regular partisan bickering was “hurting America,” which resonated so deeply that former CNN CEO Jonathan Klein canceled the show. But Steinberg’s description of the Phillip-anchored NewsNight captures the business motivations behind re-tooling the show:
In recent weeks, however, the network has seemed to be on the verge of rekindling its inner Zucker . CNN re-hired Brian Stelter , who anchored the long-running but now defunct “Reliable Sources” media-criticism program and became a CNN fixture under former president Jeff Zucker, who managed the network with significantly more flair during the Trump administration .
…
Could the strategy be working? Viewership for the retooled “NewsNight” is on the rise. To be sure, the overall audience for the program is small compared to its rivals, part of a broader decline in CNN’s ratings in recent years. The “NewsNight” crowd remains under 1 million on most nights, while both Fox News’ “Gutfeld” and MSNBC’s “The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell” handily break that mark. Since launching in late July, however, the new format has sparked an 82% increase among viewers between 25 and 54 — the demographic most coveted by advertisers in news programs — when compared to its performance in June. More noticeable, perhaps: In September through the 11th, “NewsNight” had the second-highest viewership among the 25-to-54 crowd on CNN — only Anderson Cooper’s 8 p.m. hour won more.
There it is — currying cable news fights is good for business, especially after the rollout of the original iteration of NewsNight failed to make any splash, either in ratings or the sort of watercooler moments that are bread and butter for sites like ours.
But there’s a reason we’re not writing this column about CNN This Morning with Kasie Hunt—which has come to regularly feature panel discussions—or CNN’s Inside Politics, Fox’s The Five or Outnumbered, MSNBC’s Morning Joe, or Deadline: White House—although those shows tend to feature a much more narrow point of view with little to no dissent.
The issue with NewsNight is not the spirited conversation — the shows I just mentioned all have that. The difference with NewsNight’s format is that encourages sharp, sassy and personal insults from one panelist to another. The spicier the fight, the more attention the show gets, and as a result, more viewers tune in. Judging by an increase in viewers, it’s working from a business standpoint. But let’s not be surprised when things go so far off the rails that a guest must be removed from the show, and the anchor needs to apologize to their viewers.
The writing was on the wall when Scott Jennings dismissed his fellow Panelists during a particularly piqued argument, saying, “It’s conspiracy theory night on the Abby Phillip show.” Or when Democratic strategist Keith Boykin yelled , “You’re a liar, congressman!” at Rep. Byron Donalds about crime being on the rise under the Biden administration. Or guest Leigh McGowan shouting , “This is insane!” at two of her fellow panelists who attempted to downplay some of former President Donald Trump’s most incendiary remarks.
These are just a handful of examples where Socratic discourse gave way to the lesser angels of NewsNight panelists, which may have been good for clicks but not so great for the health of the body politic. It’s part of a more significant trend at a network struggling with ratings and willing to throw anything at the wall to get people to tune in, when the network boasts some of the absolute best in business at conducting thoughtful and news-eliciting interviews — namely, Anderson Cooper and Jake Tapper, for example.
This ugly episode from Monday night was not a bug; it was very much a feature of what CNN programmers are looking for. If they are not careful, this could damage a brand already dealing with dubious criticism from a presidential candidate who may very well return to the White House.
The post CNN Invited the Shameful Ryan Girdusky Moment By Creating a Panel Show Around Pointless, Petty and Personal Conflict first appeared on Mediaite .
The Trump Movement Keeps Telling Us Who They are
Trump held a big rally at Madison Square Garden yesterday. All indications are that it did a great job of stoking the flames of the politics of Us versus Them.
Some headlines of relevance.
- Via Politico: Trump’s New York homecoming sparks backlash over racist and vulgar remarks .
- Via CNN: Trump unveils the most extreme closing argument in modern presidential history
- Via the NYT: Trump at the Garden: A Closing Carnival of Grievances, Misogyny and Racism .
- NPR’s report on Morning Edition today is quite a contrast: Trump and Harris campaigns concentrate on swing voters in the homestretch .
- And I fear that this, from the Daily Beast, is wishful thinking: Donald Trump’s Racist NYC Rally Was Vile. It Was Also Political Suicide .
Where to start?
How about “comedy” time?
That’s Tony Hinchcliffe , whose website describes him as a “world-renowned comedian.” He apparently tours with Joe Rogan. He is also a podcaster. I think I have heard his name before, but that’s about it.
He went on Twitter not long after his comments went viral to complain that it was just a “joke,” stating that “these people have no sense of humor.”
But, of course, labeling a US territory populated by Hispanics as “literally a floating island of garbage” is unlikely to be funny to many people, the least of which being Puerto Ricans. Moreover, such language is clearly racially coded and fits into Trump’s broadening “othering” language.
And of course, as Ben Meiselas notes, Trump has been talking a lot about garbage of late in the contest of immigration.
And there is this screeching from Stephen Miller that fits the theme (the second Tweet):
By the way, understand how Miller’s rhetoric would be appealing to a lot of listeners, as well as. I mean, I get it: if the gangs, cartels, and “criminal migrants” are all “gone,” who would argue with that? But, of course, one suspects that to Miller pretty much all migrants from the south are “criminal migrants.” Even if we assume that he is fine with non-criminal migrants (spoiler: he isn’t), then we know that all of this talk about crime and the border is part of a broad othering that is linked to other fascistic rhetoric from Trump and his supporters that I have recently noted.
At a minimum, the fear-mongering (Rudy’s Palestinian bit) and racist-coded/misogynistic (e.g., the Black woman has “pimp handlers”) language was strong.
Or she might just be the devil.
And as Rupar noted on the attached Tweets (that I cannot avoid for some reason), the valorization of Trump based on the assassination attempt, and the nebulous usage of “they” is very much part of the politics of “us v. them” that is at the core of fascistic politics .
Indeed, it is hard to listen to these clips and not see what Stanley noted in his book, How Fascism Works. “In the rhetoric of the extreme nationalist, such a glorious past has been lost by the humiliation brought on by globalism, liberal cosmopolitanism, and respect for ‘universal values’ such as equality” (4).
The whole “garbage” thing above fits, especially the notion that people from the outside (immigrants, Palestinians, etc.) are a range to “us.”
And on the front of degrading values such as “equality,” we get this:
The whole thing is a non sequitur, insofar as concerns about diversity, equity, and inclusion are not antithetical to hard work. But, of course, the mythology is needed that people with jobs and wealth got there solely because of hard work and so things like DEI (and affirmative action before it) are simply designed to help lazy persons of color get ahead when they don’t deserve it.
So, look, on the one hand, campaign rallies can be weird and will certainly be off-putting to opposing partisans. But all this (and more) is well beyond that. The valorization of Trump in a thoroughly unhealthy way, it is full of racist attacks, and it is, above all else, very much the politics of Us versus Them.
One last one from Tucker.
Trust me, I don’t trust Tucker.
Hey, Tucker, this you? Remarkably, Tucker also claimed that Trump had liberated him from having to tell lies. I will say, he is making an effective rhetorical appeal to stoke fear in the population. But, of course, it is more fascistic Us v. Them with a sprinkling of replacement theory to boot. The liberation of which he speaks is the ability of your racist uncle to be racist and feel like he has been freed from any criticisms for being such.
If Tucker feels “liberated” it is simply because he is free to spout his white nationalist garbage. And let’s not forget the ironic fact that he lost his job at Fox News for lying about the 2020 elections.
(And if anything thinks RFK, Jr. should be anywhere near health care policy…well, ugh).
BTW, worth noting.
The depressing part about all of this is that there is a substantial percentage of the country that loves and buys it all. And then there is another large slice that ignores all this nonsense because they can’t fathom voting for the other team.
Bonus Clip.
Let me note this Mike Johnson clip, if anything to make the following observation: I guarantee you that “your father’s Democratic Party” was also being accused of being Marxist. So, at a minimum, his rhetoric is close to “normal.” It does contain the typical lazy lack of ability to figure out whether to call them “Marxists” or “socialists.”
Dem Rep Tells Skeptical Jake Tapper Trump Has Plans To Build ‘Internment Camps’ and She May End Up a Prisoner
Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-MI) insisted to CNN’s Jake Tapper that former President Donald Trump has plans to build “internment camps” and she may end up a prisoner in one of them.
Dingell made her claim on CNN’s The Lead during a discussion on Arab American voters in Michigan protesting the Democratic ticket and potentially supporting Trump.
“[Trump] wants to deport Muslims, and he wants to start internment camps, and that‘s what we are busy talking to every voter. He’s telling you what he’s going to do. Believe him,” Dingell said.
“Internment camps?” an unconvinced Tapper asked.
“Yes, he has talked internment camps. You know what, Jake, you may have to visit me in one,” Dingell said. “I get worried enough when he talks about what he’s going to do to his political enemies, but he has talked about them in this with different groups of people.”
Tapper continued to press for what exactly Dingell meant by “internment camps” and how it related to Arab American voters in Michigan.
“Well, I’ve heard him talking about rounding up undocumented migrants and, obviously, for that, you would need some sort of camp. But what do you mean internment camps for Muslims and Arabs?” The CNN anchor asked.
Dingell claimed Trump has been “very clear” about internment camps in speeches to multiple audiences, but she admitted she did not have the “citation.”
The congresswoman told Tapper she’d find proof of what she was saying later and moved on to accusing Trump of “dividing” the country.
“He’s done a great job of continuing to divide us, and I don’t want to see — we are the United States of America, not the divided garbage country,” she said. “I’m proud to be an American; he needs to remember that he should be.”
Watch above via CNN .
The post Dem Rep Tells Skeptical Jake Tapper Trump Has Plans To Build ‘Internment Camps’ and She May End Up a Prisoner first appeared on Mediaite .