CNN Bemoans Trump Ditching ‘Kumbaya’ With Media, Both-Sides Rise of Political Violence

Curtis Houck
April 28th, 2026 12:51 PM

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Monday’s Inside Politics featured CNN host and congressional Republican stalker Manu Raju offering a despicable minimization of political violence on the left with a horrendously misleading graphic painting both sides as equally victimized and a guest accusing anyone who says the left has a problem of “cherry pick[ing]” while Trump has encouraged and “glorified violence.”

And, when it came to ABC host Jimmy Kimmel’s vile smear last week wishing death on President Trump, another panelist defended Kimmel by arguing the First Lady and President didn’t immediately speak out.

He began the segment by lamenting Trump had done away with his “conciliatory tone with reporters” from Saturday immediately after the White House Correspondents Dinner (WHCD) shooting. 

Instead, Trump threw away his “kumbaya moment” by criticizing CBS’s Norah O’Donnell for reading from the suspect’s manifesto that, in Raju’s description, “[laid] out an array of grievances.”

Correspondent Jeff Zeleny fretted that “we’ve learned many things in the Trump era,” including “that things don’t last for a long time.”

Raju shifted to the topic of political violence and huffed Trump has been “going after Democratic hate speech and downplaying the amount — saying that, you know, this has happened — this is — this kind of — these kind of incidents have always happened, but we really have seen the rise over the last decade or so on targeting both sides, political violence, targeting both sides of the aisle.”

He then placed on-screen the misleading graphic showing alleged acts of political violence as some sort of own to Trump: “Just you can see here on your screen a number of really troubling episodes that just shows the moment that we’re in right now. But the President sees it differently.”

Our friend and 2025 MRC Bulldog Award winner Erick Erickson fact-checked it in his Tuesday morning Substack column, noting the cases of the CDC shooting, Paul Pelosi, and Minnesota lawmakers required more context and couldn’t simply be labeled right-wing terror.

Notably, the graphic (seen at the top of this blog) “left out the attempted assassination of Brett Kavanaugh and the violent attacks on ICE facilities last year in three Texas cities that killed some and left others wounded.”

Back on CNN, Politico partisan tool Eli Stokols shoveled the disinformation, grousing “it’s not surprising that he would, you know, cherry pick the Democratic rhetoric in an instance where he was seemed to be the target.”

Stokols brought up the Minnesota lawmakers and, of course, January 6 to suggest the right has a chronic issue, deeming it “incredibly selective” to say the left has a problem:

But it’s glaring. You put up that graphic and you see all these examples. You know, you think back to Melissa Hortman being shot on her doorstep in Minnesota. The President didn’t have much to say about that. And this is a President who, you know, all of this stuff is public. You can go back and pull the clips, glorify — has glorified violence among his supporters, has threatened violence against demonstrators in the summer of 2020 with the George Floyd protests. There’s obviously January 6 and his role in instigating what was ultimately a very violent clash at the Capitol. So, you know, it’s not surprising because we’ve seen it before. But his response to the rhetoric and singling out Democratic violent rhetoric and blaming only Democratic rhetoric is incredibly selective.

They went to break by defending Kimmel with Raju dubbing the former’s “expectant widow” remark toward the First Lady as simply a “crack....when he was speaking, pretending like he was giving a speech at the White House Correspondents Dinner.”

 

CNN White House reporter Betsy Klein went to the mat for Kimmel when asked about the First Lady’s X post demanding Disney take action against “Kimmel’s hateful and violent rhetoric” (click “expand”):

RAJU: Betsy, you cover the First Lady very closely. What do you make of her coming out like this so aggressively?

KLEIN: Well, I think it’s definitely notable — and it’s notable, too, that we didn’t hear from her in the 48 or so hours after Jimmy Kimmel gave that monologue. And she was remarkably silent in the immediate aftermath of this shooting incident. The President had spoken for her, he said of his wife, it was a rather traumatic experience at the Washington Hilton. We know that security and safety has been top of mind for the First Lady, and this really marked the first time that she was beside her husband when he was aggressively evacuated by Secret Service.

RAJU: Yeah, it’s a good point. 

To see the relevant CNN transcript from April 27, click here.

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