The fallout from Thursday’s meeting of Kanye West and President Trump spilled over into that evening’s edition of CNN Tonight, when host Don Lemon asserted that he was not being condescending toward the rapper even while making disparaging remarks about West’s mental health.
Instead, the CNN anchor claimed that he was “just telling the truth.”
Lemon’s comment was made during a discussion with New York Times columnist Charles Blow and political commentator Steve Cortes, who slammed the host for describing the meeting earlier that day as “a minstrel show in front of all these white people.”
“Could you possibly be any more condescending to this man?” Cortes asked.
The CNN host responded:
If you ask any African-American around the country, they will tell you the exact same thing. That's what's it looked like today, sadly.
I feel sorry for him, and I think he needs to take care of himself.
“He doesn’t need your pity,” Cortes stated.
The liberal anchor also claimed that people are giving the rapper “the wrong advice” about going to the White House and taking part in the meeting, which Lemon claimed was “embarrassing.”
Cortes shot back: “I think, quite frankly, what's embarrassing is [what] you've shown to Kanye West, someone who I think is a brave and an independent figure, a creative genius.”
“And for you and a lot of your guests to dismiss him as a quote, ‘token negro’ and to question his mental stability when you are not doctors and you haven't examined him, I think is really unfortunate,” he noted.
Such treatment “is all too common on the left which is liberal when a minority doesn't tow the party line,” Cortes added before stating that such tactics are commonly used by “[y]ou and your friends and your allies in the resistance.”
“I'm not part of the resistance,” Lemon replied. He then accused his guest of making that remark because “the truth is not on your side.”
Cortes responded, “You call Donald Trump a racist every night on your program.”
“Don't make up things. You're making up things again,” the host asserted before hilariously adding, “And if I called him that, I do it out of evidence” or “when it is warranted.”
Lemon then stated:
So if Kanye West wants to be a conservative, that's his business. If Kanye West wants to support Donald Trump, that's his business.
But have some sense about it. Don't go in the Oval Office and embarrass yourself by speaking about things that you have no idea about.
Blow took part in the discussion by claiming what “Donald Trump keeps showing us over and over and over again is that he cares not one iota about the issue surrounding black people.”
“Because if he cared, all of his interaction would not be with these kind of unstable eccentric characters,” the columnist continued. “They would be with people who actually understand those policy (sic), people who sometimes disagree with him," he added.
“Kanye has a mental problem,” Blow stated. “That's why I don't want to talk about Kanye. It wasn't Kanye's problem he was in the Oval Office,” he added.
It’s amusing that some Democrats consider people who disagree with them as having some kind of mental health problems. After all the mob violence in Washington, D.C,, this past week, perhaps they should look in the mirror before making such accusations.
