Monday on CNN’s “Right Now With Brianna Keilar,” during a discussion with the network’s chief White House correspondent Jim Acosta about President Donald Trump’s weekend tweets, the network briefly had a chyron which read, “Trump goes on rambling tweet binge while running the country.”
Keilar opened the show by saying, “After a 24-hour tweet binge, two people close to the president in the right wing have to defend his tweets and show that he is not a white supremacist.”
She continued, “Chief White House correspondent Jim Acosta is joining us now. Jim, what does it say that the top aides are defending the president’s mental fitness and denying that he’s a white supremacist? These are pretty extraordinary defenses to be out there with.”
Acosta said, “We saw the Acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney on the Sunday talk shows defending the president, like you said, saying the president is not a white supremacist. In any other administration, you just wouldn’t hear that kind of thing being said by a chief of staff. Earlier this morning, things got even more surreal. You saw the White House Counselor Kellyanne Conway talking to reporters after she appeared on one of the other networks, and she was essentially fielding questions about the president’s tweets from over the weekend, dozens of tweets addressing all sorts of grievances, like you said from “Saturday Night Live” to his old nemesis Senator John McCain.”
He added, “It’s just another day at the office over here at the White House in terms of trying to address these sorts of questions and seeing senior officials like Kellyanne Conway and Mick Mulvaney have to go to these lengths to address the president’s behavior it is quite something. When I talked to White House officials privately, they will tell you, no, they don’t believer the president is insane. They believe he’s more crazy like a fox. And that he sends out a lot of these tweets in an attempt to really dominate the news cycle, drive the narrative. One thing we saw over the weekend is there was a lot more discussion about General Motors, the way the president has responded to the terror attack in New Zealand, and not as much about the Russian investigation. When you talk to White House officials, people who are close to the president privately, some of this is by design. He wants those tweets out there he wants those distractions out there, so we’re spending time talking about those sorts of things and not the thing that really strikes fear in the hearts of people inside this administration, and that’s the special counsel Robert Mueller.”
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