How did CNN White House correspondent Jim Acosta react to President Trump’s summit with the North Korean dictator? With his usual grandstanding attitude. Daily Wire podcast host and bestselling author Andrew Klavan breaks down Acosta’s predictably slanted coverage on Thursday’s episode of “The Andrew Klavan Show.” Transcript and video below.
The fear, the narrative that the press is putting forward, especially CNN but also the New York Times: that Trump is such a dope he’s gonna give the game away, he’s such a narcissist he’s gonna give everything away to North Korea. Then Trump walked away, so immediately the narrative changes. It’s like you can’t keep up with them, they’re running so fast to change the narrative. Immediately, he’s a terrible failure, and you can always count on Jim “look at me I’m Jim” Acosta to deliver the press narrative. Here he is picking on Trump, he’s now on the same place, CNN, same guys who were worried he was going to give the game away, now Trump proves that he’s a tough guy, he spits in Kim’s eye, that’s a big problem:
Acosta: The president staked a lot of his presidency on something that is just much more difficult than reality TV. This is not something that can be wrapped up in a season of ‘The Apprentice’, and the president made some very strong statements showing his affection for this North Korean dictator. Earlier on in the summer he talked about having a very special relationship with North Korea and with Kim Jong-un, showing off the economic boom that has taken place in Vietnam as perhaps a roadmap for the North Koreans economically if they were to come back into the community of nations. But at the end of the day, it just seems to be not enough for Kim Jong-un to put, really, his entire regime on the line to take that kind of gamble.
First of all, Acosta is always doing this. He’s declaring that Trump has bet his presidency on this success which just isn’t true. I mean, Trump bet his presidency on two things – on the economy and the wall. So far the economy’s going well, the wall not so well, but this is something that has surprised everybody, and the fact that he has made as much headway as he has, the fact that Kim hasn’t been shooting missiles over Japan, that’s a kind of a major thing, that’s a good thing.
You can count on Jim “look at me I’m Jim” Acosta, he delivers the ultimate narrative of this negotiation, it all had to do with Michael Cohen:
Acosta: So it’s strike one in Singapore, he didn’t get a deal with Kim Jong-Un. Now it’s strike two in Hanoi, once again no deal to denuclearize North Korea, something that he’s staked a lot of his legacy, a lot of his presidency on, and…in the backdrop of all of this is what happened back in Washington up on Capitol Hill at the House Oversight Committee when the president’s former fixer really just blasted away at his former boss. Accusing him of being a liar and a cheat and a criminal, basically, and so on. And what was a bombshell hearing up on Capitol Hill, the president presumably will be asked about that as well, he has been steering clear of that conversation here in Hanoi, he has not tweeted about it really in the aftermath of Michael Cohen’s testimony. So this will be really the first comments coming from the president about all of this…I find that just to be kind of remarkable, that the president was able to hold his Twitter to a bare minimum here in Hanoi, that is something we don’t see very often for the president. But he kept his powder dry, so presumably, we’re gonna hear the president weigh in on all of that as well.
As you know if you’re listening to this show, you know that Trump has been doing that a lot since the midterms because he catches on, he’s got a very good instinct for politics and he has dialed back his Twitter. But he did talk about Cohen, this is what he said:
President Trump: I think having a fake hearing like that and having it in the middle of this very important summit is really a terrible thing. They could have made it two days later or next week and it would have been even better, they would have had more time, but having it during this very important summit is sort of incredible. And he [Cohen] lied a lot, but it was very interesting because he didn’t lie about one thing he said – no collusion with the Russian hoax. I said “I wonder why he didn’t just lie about that too, like he did about everything else?” I mean, he lied about so many different things and I was actually impressed that he didn’t say “well I think there was collusion for this reason”…I was a little impressed by that frankly, he could have gone all out.
Trump’s narrative is exactly the opposite of CNN’s. CNN’s narrative was that Trump staged this summit with Kim Jong-un to distract from the Michael Cohen testimony. Trump’s narrative is that they staged the Michael Cohen testimony to distract from the summit. Which of those is more plausible? It’s actually Trump’s narrative that’s the more plausible. I don’t even know if either of those happened, but just putting it forward, if we’re going to have stupid narratives I’d rather have one that I can believe. I mean, you can’t set up a summit in time to distract from a hearing which you could reschedule in any way you want.