On Sunday’s State of the Union, Sen. Cory Booker (D-New Jersey) dropped a murderous metaphor for MAGA Republicans, and CNN anchorman Jake Tapper sat there like like it was just a wonderful Democrat speech. Booker said the election can “finally kill that strain of the Republican Party.”
It’s been just 44 days since a man almost shot Donald Trump to death, and Jake Tapper let Booker blabber on after the "kill the MAGA strain" line for another 48 seconds without interruption.
Does anyone think if a Republican said we need to "kill that strain" of the Democrat Party that backs Hamas, Tapper would sit there like he was deaf? Or "kill that strain" that backed Black Lives Matter riots?
It started with a decent question: How is Kamala Harris not the incumbent? Then it devolved.
TAPPER: A new chapter? I mean, she's the incumbent vice president. Democrats have controlled the White House for 12 of the last 16 years. How can Democrats talk about a new chapter, turning the page? You guys are the ones writing the book.
BOOKER: Well, you know that that's not true, Jake, because you know politics like I do. Right now, we see the MAGA Republicans in Congress killing all kind of pragmatic policies that we need to get done. On the most contentious issue, we had a bipartisan deal argued by -- excuse me -- settled on by Senator Lankford, a right-wing Republican, and Chris Murphy, a blue-state Democrat.
And what killed that deal? What killed the pragmatic progress? It wasn't the sensible Republicans, but really people that were kowtowing to Donald Trump. His influence is egregious and incredible, from his appointment of three people to the Supreme Court that are now rolling back the most fundamental of our rights and freedoms, like bodily autonomy and reproductive rights.
So, to say that the MAGA Republicans are not still undermining commonsense, pragmatic, sensible politics is just wrong. And what I know this election can do is finally kill that strain of the Republican Party in a way that I think helps the pragmatic Republicans come back.
That’s 66 seconds into an uninterrupted answer. Booker was granted almost a two-minute answer, without objection. Tapper didn't even interrupt to say this deflected from his question -- you can't run as the non-incumbent because Team Biden-Harris couldn't get a bill passed over GOP objections.
Tapper could have at least tried to soften the blow – “you don’t mean actually kill anyone” – but no, Booker was on roll. He then let Booker make it more bizarre by saying “I just can’t stand this tribalism, this zero-sum game, us versus them.” You just talked about killing the MAGA “tribe”!
In fact, moments later, Tapper interrupted the Senator when he made a reference to himself as a football player, and Tapper wanted to tell the audience: "And for folks at home who didn't understand Senator Booker's football reference, he played for Stanford. Now, he was not a professional football player." Booker said "wow," and laughed, and Tapper said: "I just don't want any of the fact-checkers to come at you. I'm just trying to help you here."
Worse yet, Tapper soon went even lighter on Booker, playing a pile of "joy" clips from the convention, and asking, "I'm not accusing the convention of plagiarizing from you, but joy is kind of your thing. It was central to your 2020 presidential campaign. That didn't work with Democratic voters then, at least not enough to make you the nominee. Why do you think it's working now?"
Obviously, Booker didn't have the entire "objective" media backing him in a primary, like they're backing Harris now.
