CNN Hit on Trump 250 Vanilla Ice Concert Takes Dark Turn: Trump Acts ‘Have Literally Killed People!’

A CNN panel on the copious exodus of artists from the President Donald Trump-backed Freedom 250 “Great American State Fair” concert took a dark turn into death and slavery.

On Friday, “Freedom 250” organizers proudly announced a lineup for the show that included Vanilla Ice, Young MC, C+C Music Factory, Milli Vanilli, The Commodores, Morris Day & The Time, Flo Rida, Bret Michaels, and Martina McBride.

But as backlash erupted, groups began dropping out, led by Morris Day. Vanilla Ice is now the most prominent of the remaining potential acts.

On Friday night’s edition of CNN NewsNight, anchor Abby Phillip hosted a panel that included Harrison Fields, Tara Setmayer, Caroline Downey, Josh Doss, and Paul Mercurio to discuss the concert.

Doss punctured the light tone of the segment by telling his fellow panelists that “some of the things that we’ve seen come from President Trump have literally killed people” and cited a report on the effects of Medicaid cuts as an example:

PHILLIP: So they started with a list of artists that frankly were not the A-list of stars, but most of them are now out. I mean, here are the ones who have canceled, Bret Michaels, C&C Music Factory, one of the founders at least, The Commodores, Martina McBride, Milli Vanilli, Morris Day, Young M.C.

Only a few are still on there, Flo Rida, Vanilla Ice, and Freedom Williams.

DOWNEY: That’s the C&C.

MERCURIO: Yes, Vanilla Ice made a video, he’s really excited about it.

PHILLIP: It seems like people just weren’t aware that there was this partisan element to it, and when they found out, they bailed, and now there’s kind of not much of a concert.

MERCURIO: Yes, it’s kind of exhausting. Everything’s so politicized now, and it’s ironic that it’s for the 250-year anniversary of the founding of the country, because sort of the point of the founding of the country was to sort of bring a group of people together and move on, and we can’t even get together and agree on a birthday party.

Can we just have a cookout, watch fireworks, eat hot dogs, get drunk and argue with our family? Isn’t that what everybody wants to do on the Fourth of July?

DOSS: No. I mean, I truly, I think it is that serious. I think some of the things that we’ve seen come from President Trump have literally killed people.

There was a Harvard report that said that there’s going to be an extra 16,000 deaths just from the cuts to Medicaid. I mean, these are serious issues that people carry with them every single day.

So President Trump is deeply unpopular. He’s very popular online among his groups, but in surveys, the data tell us that President Trump is extremely unpopular. People don’t want to connect themselves to his brand. I’m not surprised by it.

DOWNEY: I think sometimes, though, to your point, it’s hard to congregate everyone today of both sides of the political aisle to celebrate America’s 250th birthday, because we can’t all agree that the Founding Fathers were actually brilliant visionaries. There’s a lot of people on the left.

DOSS: Slaves.

DOWNEY: Yes.

DOSS: I just want to make sure that we’re acknowledging that.

DOWNEY: That’s fair, but then embedded in the founding documents was essentially the blueprint to undo that historical grave evil, which happened with the Civil War, which we prosecuted. It was such a bloody conflict. By the way, we fixed that.

A lot of countries and humans, we fought it. We killed each other.

DOSS: Wait, who’s we? I’m just curious.

DOWNEY: Americans killed each other. Brothers killed brothers, so that they could end that horrific abuse and remove that.

SETMAYER: It took 100 years for people of color, for Black folks to get equal rights in the country and be able to vote.

DOWNEY: I’m just pointing out, though, that it works.

PHILLIP: I think that Caroline is making a fair point, which is that what’s supposed to make the United States different from other countries is an ability to self-correct, that the Constitution can be amended, that it can be fixed, that we can take things that were part of the flaws of the founding documents and fix them down the road.

But none of that is really center stage in some of the planning for this 250th. It’s become, in a lot of ways, about Trump’s vanity in terms of the physical space of the White House and Washington.

Watch above via CNN NewsNight.

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