Donald Trump’s top mouthpiece, Steven Cheung, has thrown a tantrum at a CNN host who dared to question the president’s war in Iran.
Abby Phillip and the NewsNight panel were reacting to Trump’s freewheeling address to the nation on Wednesday evening, in which the 79-year-old president said the “core objectives” of his campaign against Iran were “nearing completion.”
Phillip poured scorn on the president from the top of the show. In her opening remarks, she said: “If you were looking for some new insights from the president about how this war is going, where it‘s headed, how exactly it might end, I‘m not sure that you got it today. The president basically repeated a lot of the things that he‘s been saying in Truth Social posts, except he said it out loud.”
This didn’t land well with Cheung, the White House communications director.
“Totally unhinged @abbydphillip of CNN has no sense at all,” he began his rant on X. “Complete lightweight who has no idea what she is talking about on foreign policy. It’s now clear why her ratings are in the s--tter.”
NewsNight is the fourth most popular show on the network, behind only Real Time with Bill Maher, Have I Got News for You, and CNN Newsroom, according to TVDB.
Ad Week reported earlier this month that CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360 was the network’s top performer in total viewers in February, with 908,000, while Phillip’s show was the network’s No. 1 among adults aged 24-54, with 187,000 viewers.
Phillip lamented his “nothingburger” address and grilled MAGA commentator Scott Jennings on why President Trump “can’t get his story straight on the nukes.”
“That‘s so central to this whole thing. The administration is saying all kinds of different things about it and not leveling with the American people,” she said.
Even after the strikes at nuclear sites last summer and the ongoing “Operation Epic Fury,” Iran still has roughly 1,000kg of uranium enriched to 20 percent and 8,500kg enriched to 3.6 percent.
Phillip pointed out that Trump’s Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, testified under oath to Congress earlier this year, claiming that Iran‘s nuclear enrichment program was obliterated. Trump, too, has parroted this line, and after the strikes last June, the White House went as far as to release a statement headed “Iran’s Nuclear Facilities Have Been Obliterated — and Suggestions Otherwise are Fake News.”
Trump, in a Reuters interview, said the enrichment of uranium didn’t matter to him.
“That is so far underground, I don’t care about that,” he said, even though one of his justifications for the war was to prevent Iran from making nuclear weapons with it.
During his address to the nation, Trump said that, after strikes on Iranian nuclear sites, “it would take months to get near the nuclear dust,” suggesting the nuclear material is no longer a priority.
On this, Phillip was exasperated. “He actually proposed an alternative [to clearing the nuclear material], which is that we would just perpetually surveil and bomb them if they ever attempted to get the nuclear material that is still in their territory… Are we really going to just perpetually be poised to bomb Iran until the end of time?”
