If you tuned into CNN on Thursday night at 9 pm, expecting to see President Trump address the Nation on election interference and other issues from the White House, you were out of luck, as they joined the major broadcast networks, who apparently bowed to a request by AOC, not to provide the public with the opportunity to hear what the the President had to say. Instead, CNN's The Source with Kaitlan Collins aired as usual, and made no secret about why they decided not to platform the President's speech.
Collins began by acknowledging the President was about to speak, and attempting to justify why CNN was not going to present it live.
COLLINS: We'll be monitoring what the President says tonight, as we always do, but aren't taking it live, given the President has a well-documented history of saying blatantly false things about elections.
After airing a clip of Trump repeating the phrase "rigged election," she sought to assure viewers that CNN could still be trusted to keep them informed on the speech.
COLLINS: The White House is also releasing newly declassified documents, and we will analyze those so we can provide context around them. Our team is going through them actually, right now, as we speak, and we'll bring you all the newsworthy moments from the President's speech and from those documents, this hour, as we talk about it with my fellow reporters and experts.
And instead of letting viewers hear what the President was actually saying as she spoke, Collins previewed what he was expected to say, while admitting that could change, "He is known to go off script, and we'll see if he does so this evening."
No, the viewers would not see, bad choice of words. Collins message to her viewers, Trump can't be trusted, you can't determine what is true or important so we will do it for you. She then brought on a panel while the President spoke, and at the bottom of the hour, when the speech was over, Collins returned from a break, and proceeded to attempt to discredit it.
COLLINS: The President has just concluded his speech tonight, that is focused on U.S. elections and what they say is attempts at foreign interference in U.S. elections. The President also brought up conspiracy theories about the recent California primary, theories that are unfounded. And I should note, like the claims he's made about the 2020 elections, he offered no documents to back up what he said about what happened in California.
Collins then played a clip from the speech, of Trump talking about the recent California elections, and made a snide remark about his last line, and assigned motivation for Trump's speech.
TRUMP CLIP: Took a month to count the votes. I wonder what they were doing. This is worse than any third world country. There's no third world country that has elections like we have.
COLLINS: That's because, officials would say that, U.S. elections are a lot stronger than third world country elections....The President's entire argument tonight, as he was building up with these newly declassified documents from his officials, was about the SAVE Act in and of itself.
She then brought on someone, who unlike herself and her viewers, had actually watched the speech, CNN's John King, and the trashing started immediately.
KING: A lot of ominous tone from the President, ominous words from the President. Sounded more like a spy novel. A familiar complaint... about the Deep State.
The most striking thing the President did was he focused mostly on China, and he said he was releasing all of these new documents tonight that were going to prove more things about China, he says, trying to get voter roll information, trying to learn about how to pry into voting machines and voting systems. He never directly connected any of that to changing an election result. That's important. I don't have the documents in front of me. We'll see if they get you there. But the President never did.
CNN, which spent years spinning tales of Russian collusion, a "spy novel" narrative they loved, kept hitting Trump for having Deep State conspiracies. King concluded: "What was most striking to me.... was he had a boogeyman, and it was the familiar Deep State. The President saying that this was all kept from him....Keeping this information away from him about what he alleges is a deeper, more nefarious Chinese plot--than we have ever known about....So, a lot of it was greatest hits."
This was CNN's "greatest hits" album: Trump is a liar who was involved in a deeper, more nefarious Russian plot that stole the election from Hillary Clinton, or "rigged" it.
