When it comes to the Republican half of the presidential race, CNN is going to hate all the candidates. On Monday's CNN This Morning, the anchors were outraged at a eye-grabbing ad shared by the DeSantis War Room twitter account. It asserted Donald Trump was pro-LGBTQ and then showed scare headlines of how DeSantis outraged the gay groups. It seemed designed to outrage leftists for more clicks.
Co-host Phil Mattingly set up the discussion: "We saw this Ron DeSantis superPAC put out an ad attacking former President Trump for his support for LGBTQ rights -- I think we've got some of that. I want to play at least a little bit of it."
After playing a clip of the ad which highlighted headlines touting some of Governor DeSantis's actions in Florida regarding gay-related issues, Mattingly threw shade at the ad's designer:
Yeah, I mean, like, whatever drugs that guy was on who made that had a good weekend. And, to be clear, the campaign did not make that, whatever that was, but they didn't back away from it, and some of them retweeted it, and then they defended the retweeting of it. I think my question is, is with stuff like this beyond the earned media element for which we are providing them, it's -- what's your end game here? Like, who are they targeting? What's the message? This doesn't happen in isolation -- like, they're talking about this. Why?
CNN only picked liberals to respond to this. Former Congressman Max Rose (D-N.Y.) unleashed the typical "hate-filled" and "xenophobic" adjectives, and said there's no way this would work.
And this ad is illustrative of what Ron DeSantis is actually trying to do here -- which is a hate-filled, utterly xenophobic primary campaign. Then he thinks that he's going to be able to shift to the center and everyone's going to forget about that because he's going to try to go to outflank Donald Trump from the right. There's no chance that this works.
He added:
Donald Trump has locked up about 25 percent -- 30 percent of the Republican primary base. And it's those people -- and this is no -- we can judge them, I'll judge them all I want -- but they're motivated by ads like that. DeSantis is not going to pull them away, saying that he is more Trumpy than Trump, that he's more hate-filled than Trump. It's appalling, but, just as appalling as it is, it's also politically incoherent. I do not understand what he's trying to do.
Mattingly then went to CNN contributor Errol Louis and gave him a chance to also predict that the strategy would fail for DeSantis, that the race is more than Christian conservatives in Iowa. Louis notably has a history of running for New York city office both as Democrat and Green candidates, so it was an all-liberal panel discussion of Republican campaign news.
In spite of the network employing several right-leaning contributors, none was used on the entire three-hour show.
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Transcripts follow:
CNN This Morning
July 3, 2023
7:14 a.m. Eastern
PHIL MATTINGLY, CNN HOST: Max, can I ask you, you know, on the, kind of, the political atmosphere at this moment in time -- and particularly when it comes to gay rights -- we saw this Ron DeSantis superpac put out an ad attacking former President Trump for his support for LGBTQ rights -- I think we've got some of that. I want to play at least a little bit of it.
(clip of ad promoting actions by DeSantis on gay-related issues)
Yeah, I mean, like, whatever drugs that guy was on who made that had a good weekend. And, to be clear, the campaign did not make that, whatever that was, but they didn't back away from it, and some of them retweeted it, and then they defended the retweeting of it.
I think my question is, is with stuff like this beyond the earned media element for which we are providing them, it's -- what's your end game here? Like, who are they targeting? What's the message? This doesn't happen in isolation -- like, they're talking about this. Why?
EX-CONGRESSMAN MAX ROSE (D-NY): ROSE: First of all, I don't care if that was a superpac ad -- the campaign is responsible for it. And this notion that there's some division between superpacs and regular campaigns in modern-day politics is totally BS. And this ad is illustrative of what Ron DeSantis is actually trying to do here -- which is a hate-filled, utterly xenophobic primary campaign. Then he thinks that he's going to be able to shift to the center and everyone's going to forget about that because he's going to try to go to outflank Donald Trump from the right. There's no chance that this works.
Donald Trump has locked up about 25 percent -- 30 percent of the Republican primary base. And it's those people -- and this is no -- we can judge them, I'll judge them all I want -- but they're motivated by ads like that. DeSantis is not going to pull them away, saying that he is more Trumpy than Trump, that he's more hate-filled than Trump. It's appalling, but, just as appalling as it is, it's also politically incoherent. I do not understand what he's trying to do.
MATTINGLY: Errol, can I, I mean -- and I understand that donors aren't the most important thing -- but I don't know Republican donors that are in anywhere near that place. The Republican party had moved pretty sharply away from this, and Trump is a good example of that in 2016. He, like, he was, in his -- in his nomination speech, he was mentioning it. Your deal spoke at the convention.
ERROL LOUIS, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: DeSantis appears to be trying to do what social conservative candidates have done for the last several cycles, which is, get to the evangelical base in Iowa and spark something and then try and build on that momentum. Didn't work for Ted Cruz. Didn't work for, you now, I mean, on down the line, right? 'Didn't work for Pat Robertson. It generally doesn't work. But it did work for George W. Bush 20 years ago, and so some people think that they can, sort of, catch fire and do it all over again. I don't think that's a sound assumption, but that seems to be what Ron DeSantis is up to.
