President Donald Trump spent much of his Phoenix rally attacking CNN Tuesday night. When he was done, it was left to Don Lemon to respond. Lemon did not disappoint.
“Well, what do you say to that?” the CNN host asked in disbelief as The Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” played from the rally speakers. “I’m just going to speak from the heart here.”
One week after Lemon denounced Trump’s “both sides” press conference in the starkest terms, he went even further Tuesday night. “What we have witnessed was a total eclipse of the facts,” Lemon said. “Someone who came out on stage and lied directly to the American people. And left things out that he said in an attempt to rewrite history, especially when it comes to Charlottesville.”
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During his speech, Trump blamed the media for misquoting him in the aftermath of Charlottesville, while misquoting himself in the process.
“He’s unhinged, it’s embarrassing—and I don’t mean for us, the media because he went after us—but for the country,” Lemon added. “This is who we elected president of the United States.” He described the speech as being “without thought,” “without reason,” “devoid of facts,” and “devoid of wisdom.”
“There was no gravitas. There was no sanity there,” Lemon said, comparing the president to a “child blaming a sibling” for something he did.
“He certainly opened up the race wound from Charlottesville,” Lemon added, calling Trump “a man clearly wounded by rational people abandoning him in droves, meaning the businesspeople and the people in Washington now questioning his fitness for office and whether he is stable. Lemon called Trump “a man backed into a corner, it seems, by circumstances beyond his control and his understanding.”
“That’s the truth,” Lemon said. “If you watch that speech as an American, you had to be thinking what in the world is going on? This is the person we elected as president of the United States? This petty? This small? A person who’s supposed to pull the country together? It certainly didn’t happen there.”