If it had been up to Kasie Hunt, host of CNN This Morning, the rest of today's show could have been ditched, replaced by a non-stop loop of Trump making his claim, during last night's debate, that migrants are eating the pets of residents of Springfield, Ohio.
She cited leftist late-night jester Stephen Colbert, and smirked at Trump "spouting baseless allegations about migrants eating pets." After playing it once, Hunt begged a show director:
"Can we, can we just, Jimmy in the control room, can we play the pets bite one more time? Can we just watch that one more time?"
Sadly for Kasie, Jimmy didn't have the bit cued up. Instead, they moved to a clip of a CNN post-debate focus group in Erie, Pennsylvania of supposedly undecided voters. Hunt said "we do have sound of undecided voters talking about this pet-eating conspiracy." The one participant who was shown was a self-described pastor. Saying Trump's pet comment turned him off, the pastor said:
"What really bothers me about it is what the underneath message I get from that. As a pastor, I hear, kind of, the dismissing the other, keeping the other away, giving bad impressions about other people."
On Monday, we noted the phenomenon of the left's creation of "lingo." High on that lingo list is "other/othering." And here, the pastor managed to get the phrase into his brief comment three times.
If he was an "undecided voter," I'll . . . eat a cat!
PS: Much is being made of Kamala's facial expressions in reaction toTrump's debate comments. But as you'll see in the screencap, Kamala couldn't come close to topping Kasie's expression of dubiousness about Trump!
Here's the transcript.
CNN This Morning
9/11/24
6:17 am EDTKASIE HUNT: Late night host Stephen Colbert, weighing in on one of several eyebrow raising moments from Donald Trump's debate performance last night, from praising Hungary's controversial leader, to spouting baseless allegations about migrants eating pets. And then, the January 6th attack on the Capitol.
Trump made a number of comments over the course of last night that, let's say, may be outside of the mainstream for many voters.
DONALD TRUMP: Viktor Orban, one of the most respected men. They call him a strongman. He's a tough person, smart, Prime Minister of Hungary. He said the most respected, most feared person is Donald Trump.
In Springfield, they're eating the dogs, the people that came in, they're eating the cats, they're eating, they're eating the pets of the people that live there.
I said during my speech, not later on, peacefully and patriotically, and nobody on the other side was killed.
HUNT: So, that last bit there was about January 6th.
But can we, can we just, Jimmy in the control room, can we play the pets bite one more time? Can we just watch that one more time? Oh, we just have the VO [voice over] of it? All right, okay. Well, the laughter and the pets, guys.
The way that that moment played, we have, we do have sound of undecided voters talking about this pet-eating conspiracy. Because the way he talks about it, just like directly, they're eating dogs, they're eating cats, takes this very sort of complicated internet conspiracy meme and makes it very direct.
Let's watch what voters had to say about it.
FOCUS GROUP MEMBER: I'd not heard anything about it before, so I thought it was just another one of these kind of crazy things that he comes up with that kind of turned me off.
And what really bothers me about it is what the underneath message I get from that. As a pastor, I hear, kind of, the dismissing the other, keeping the other away, giving bad impressions about other people.
