CNN host Jake Tapper made the claim that the Obama administration was in fear of his tough questions, comparing his treatment of the Obama White House with his approach towards the Trump White House in an interview published Monday.
“My experience with this White House is not really all that dissimilar, believe it or not, from my experience with the last White House, which is, I think they regard me as somebody who’s going to ask them questions that they don’t necessarily want to be asked,” Jake Tapper told The Atlantic in an article about Sunday morning news shows in the Trump era.
Tapper added, “And I am not necessarily their first choice when it comes to putting people on to get the administration message out.”
The Atlantic article also brought up Tapper’s contentious interview with White House adviser Stephen Miller, in which he accused Miller of being “obsequious” and a “factotum” for President Trump.
While not grilling members of the Trump administration, Tapper is delivering nuggets of wisdom, like when he claimed after President Trump’s State of the Union that many Democrats find the phrase “Americans are Dreamers, too” to be “offensive.”
“I think President Trump doesn’t actually necessarily understand just how offensive many Democrats in that chamber are going to find some of the things he proposed and some of the things he said in terms of, there are Americans who are DREAMers, too, etc., some of the things he said about immigration that are going to turn off a lot of people in that chamber,” he said after the president’s address.
Tapper’s own ratings, and indeed the ratings of his whole network, have suffered badly in 2018.
For all of 2018, CNN has been getting trounced by competitors Fox News and MSNBC. In the second quarter of 2018, Fox News attracted an average of 1.409 million total viewers during the day, while MSNBC came in at 930,000 and CNN at 658,000.