CNN Airs Supercut of Trump Being Trashed by His Own Appointees
CNN broadcast a supercut of some of the withering comments that Donald Trump’s appointees have previously made about him.
The president-elect took to Truth Social this week to detail his White House blacklist, saying he doesn’t want any officials in his new administration who’ve worked for someone “suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome,” citing some of his most prominent critics as examples of those with the imagined condition.
Despite his passionate rebuttal of these characters, some of his current close political allies have been highly critical of him in the past. Just a few of these moments were compiled and broadcast on CNN’s News Night with Abby Phillip Thursday.
“Trump himself has announced a blacklist of sorts, refusing to hire anybody who’s associated with specific people like Nikki Haley or Mike Pence, maybe not a surprise, or in his words, quote, anyone suffering from Trump derangement syndrome,” Phillip said.
She continued: “Here’s the thing though, he is hiring people who’ve been critical of him. In fact, many of them are already in his future Cabinet.”
The montage began with Robert Kennedy Jr., Trump’s nominee for secretary of health and human services calling his possible soon-to-be boss a “bully.”
“Well, I think the problem is, number one, he’s a bully,” he said in a Yahoo Finance interview. “And, you know, I don’t like bullies and I don’t think America [does]...that’s part of America’s tradition.”
Florida Rep. Mike Waltz, Trump’s national security adviser pick, was next up with some choice words for the MAGA chief.
“He went to prep school, said he was in the military, dodged the draft, insulted a POW and John McCain, a true hero,” the former White House and Pentagon adviser raged on Fox News in February 2016.
“If I’m sent into combat again and I’m still in the reserves, I want to be sent in by a steady hand, a thoughtful hand, an experienced hand in the Oval Office, not a sound bite celebrity guy,” Waltz added. “It scares me.”
He is now towing the party line, lauding Trump as working hard to “preserve” TikTok.
Trump’s nominee for secretary of state, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, also made the cut in CNN’s compilation.
“We’re about to turn over the conservative movement to a person that has no ideas of any substance on the important issues, the nuclear codes of the United States to an erratic individual, and the conservative movement to someone who has spent a career sticking it to working people,” Rubio told CBS News during his failed campaign against Trump for the 2016 GOP nomination.
Rep. Elise Stefanik from New York, Trump’s choice for U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, used to be critical of Trump’s record of his treatment of women.
“I think he has been insulting to women,” she said in a WAMC Northeast Public Radio radio broadcast in August 2015 that rounded out CNN’s montage. “I think this may be Mr. Trump’s peak moment.”
Phillip noted that these people had probably bent the knee to Trump to get their place in his good books. “I think the key thing is that you have to come back around and maybe he might let you in,” she said.
