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If there were two thing’s President Trump knew how to do well, it’s tweet and get under the skin of the folks at CNN. Well, he did both on Sunday, when he tweeted a rather juvenile clip of a fight he had with WWE Chairman Vince McMahon a long time ago, with the CNN logo placed over McMahon’s face. As would be expected, CNN’s ridiculous figure Brian Stelter lost his mind on Reliable Sources later that morning as he and his stacked liberal panel decried the tweet as fascist, a grave danger, and a threat to the people that work at CNN. “The early reactions in the last 90 minutes have ranged from this is juvenile, ridiculous, idiotic, or wait no it's just funny. He's just having fun. Wait, no it's actually scary, dangerous,” Stelter declared as the championed CNN’s response to the tweet:
‘It is a sad day when the president of the United States encourages violence against reporters. Cleary Sarah Huckabee Sanders lied when she said the President had never done so. Instead of preparing for his overseas trip, his first meeting with Vladimir Putin, dealing North Korea, and working on the health care bill he is involved in juvenile behavior far below the dignity of his office.’ The statement from CNN ends by saying: ‘We will keep doing our jobs. He should start doing his.’ -- He then berated Trump for preferring to stick with news organizations that treated him well and wouldn’t pose much of a challenge. Which was the same thing former President Barack Obama did along with trying to eliminate Fox News from the White House press pool. So far, the only thing the White House has done to CNN in that regard was refuse to take their questions from time to time.
Stelter took his analysis to where it often goes when he talks about the President: Comparing him to murderous dictators: “Is this President trying to impersonate Hugo Chavez? Recep Tayyip Erdogan? Vladimir Putin? Because this is exactly the kind of language that leaders use when they're trying to undermine the press. Of course, the American press is much more free than reporters in places like Russia and Turkey and Venezuela.” -- The first panelist to speak was Carl Bernstein, who claimed that the tweet was a sign that Trump had real and serious mental problems. He also asserted that military leaders were openly concerned about them. “I think it also goes to the question that many military leaders in this questions raised by military leaders in this country now,” he smeared. “By the intelligence community. By people in Congress, about the stability of the President of the United States. This is an index of his state of mind, visually.”
The Baltimore Sun’s media critic, David Zurawik denounced the idea that Trump could just be having fun with his feud with CNN as dangerous. “You can kill somebody in seven seconds. That's part of the problem with social media, is people don't think about what they say,” he spat. “And they put out hateful, nasty stuff like this.” Zurawik took his criticism to a very dark place when he claimed the tweet was akin to the tactics of Nazi Germany. “Look, you take somebody and slam them physically to the ground, you put a logo on identifying them. That’s what fascists did in the 30’s to people,” he chided. Conservative radio host Ben Ferguson was one of the few voices of reason on the panel despite his camera feed having “technical difficulties.” He told them how he kind of laughed when he first saw the video and added that, “I don't think it incites violence. I think you people are stretching when they imply that. Wrestling is fake. Everybody knows that wrestling is fake.” But before Ferguson could finish speaking, Stelter cut him off and chastised him for not taking Trump’s threat seriously.
“You get hate mail that sometimes threatens your life. And that's what's happening to folks at CNN right now,” Stelter reminding Ferguson. “I've seen some of the trash that's coming to people's inboxes. How can we look at this video and not think that it's actually going to cause even more of those threats more of that hate to fester out there?” Ferguson called out elements in the liberal media for blowing up stories about Trump into massive heinous acts. “He's trying to make it abundantly clear that there are people in the media who have made it their personal mission and their job to destroy this President,” he noted. “Who's turning it into a bigger story, Ben? This is what the President of the United States decided to post today,” Stelter un-ironically spat, as he interrupted his conservative guest again.