CNN's Jake Tapper is a company man, and the company is now returning the loyalty by helping him plug his new novel repeatedly on CNN. And if this can match with their 24/7 loathing of Donald Trump, that's even better. Tapper joined Inside Politics host John King on Thursday to promote his new novel The Devil May Dance and it quickly turned into how today, Donald Trump is...the Devil.
King described the book as being "about dysfunctional relationships, it’s about loyalty, it’s about real people, you’re making a fictional account here, Sinatra and The Mob, Sinatra and Kennedy, that come to where choices have to be made. That's kind of happening here." He meant the forthcoming vote on an "independent" commission to investigate the January 6 riot.
Tapper naturally agreed:
TAPPER: It's very resonant, I think, if I may say so, the title of the book is The Devil May Dance and that's a fictitious Sinatra song about what happens to you when you dance with the devil. If you're the Kennedys dancing with the Rat Pack or if you're Sinatra, dancing with The Mob, that's in the book. But I also think we're seeing examples of what happens when you dance with the devil, play out on Capitol Hill today.
Do you really think, removing Donald Trump for a minute, that Senate Republicans would vote against an investigation into the attack on the Capitol? No, of course not. Of course they want to get to the bottom of it deep down but they danced with the devil. Donald Trump in this case, in this metaphor, is the devil and the devil doesn't want them to. They made their deal with him and now they're beholden to him and that's kind of what the novel is about, except remove the ugly, messy, contemporary politics from it.
Concluding the portion of segment that had "GOP to choose between Trump & Truth in Jan. 6 Commission Vote," on the chyron, King added that separating the GOP from the moral of the story provides a challenge, "If you can. That’s your challenge, reader, that is your challenge: remove the ugly, messy, contemporary politics from it."
Earlier, Tapper cited a number of congressional hearings into the Obama administration's inaction as terrorists attacked the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, saying he was all favor of it "as a journalist and as an American; I had no problem with that. I wanted to know more. I wanted to get to the bottom of it. I wanted people with subpoena power, which I don't have, to get answers."
That was NOT the actual CNN attitude at the time. In 2014, Tapper's boss Jeff Zucker sneered at alleged tantrum-throwing Republicans who wanted CNN to cover the House select committee on Benghazi's hearings: "We're not going to be shamed into it by others who have political beliefs that want to try to have temper tantrums to shame other news organizations into covering something."
This segment was sponsored by Bath Fitter.
