CNN Guest Roasts MAGA Panelist’s ‘Kool-Aid’ Defense of Trump’s Wild Memory Lapse
Journalist Touré hit out at the suggestion the 79-year-old president works “20 hours a day.”
A CNN panel erupted into a fiery back-and-forth over Donald Trump’s memory lapses and misleading statements, and whether they’re more alarming than Joe Biden’s mental and physical decline.
“They’re not having to plan meetings around certain times when he’s cognitive and then give him a nap time in the day and say he works four hours a day,” Republican radio host Ben Ferguson said during Thursday’s NewsNight with Abby Phillip, referencing Biden’s alleged White House schedule. “Donald Trump literally works 10, 12, 15, 18, 20 hours a day.”
“Twenty hours a day? There’s Kool-Aid on the side of your [mouth],” replied journalist Touré. “Are you serious?”
Donald Trump, 79, will become the oldest sitting president in U.S. history in his final year in office.
ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images
The debate, which also featured host Abby Phillip and CNN MAGA contributor Scott Jennings, centered on Trump’s newest confusing comments, which have reignited questions about his mental acuity.
That includes whining that he was “surprised” that Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell was appointed as head of the U.S. central bank, even though Trump was the one responsible for putting Powell there in the first place in 2017.
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Then there was the fabricated brag that the president’s uncle, John Trump, taught the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Not only did Trump’s uncle die in 1985, more than a decade before Kaczynski was publicly identified, the terrorist never attended MIT.
Trump also repeated the long-debunked boast that his uncle was the “longest-serving professor in the history of MIT,” despite the school confirming there are at least 10 people who held the role longer.
The Unabomber Ted Kaczynski took his own life in prison in June 2023 at 81.
Stephen J. Dubner/Getty Images
On Thursday’s show, Phillip asked Trump defenders to explain “why he didn’t remember” appointing Powell.
Jennings brushed the concerns aside and said “I’ve been around him, I have detected nothing” to suggest cognitive decline. Phillip shot back, saying Jennings “sounds like Joe Biden’s aides.”
Ferguson also rejected the concerns about Trump’s worrying remarks and suggested they were the “most nothing burger I’ve heard in a while.”
Touré had a sharper take on why Trump keeps embarrassing himself in public.
“Throughout the time that we have seen him on the public stage, this is not the most intelligent person we have,” he said. “This is not the best analyst of information. He doesn’t have a lot of information at his fingertips as far as things that he knows.”
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