CNN Anchor Asks Maggie Haberman Point-Blank If ‘Fear’ Of Trump ‘Is Justified?’
CNN anchor Kasie Hunt asked commentator and New York Times White House correspondent Maggie Haberman point-blank if the fear of President Donald Trump that Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) described in recent remarks is “justified?”
Sen. Murkowski spoke at a leadership conference hosted by The Foraker Group, and was asked how to deal with fear and anxiety under Trump:
MURKOWSKI: We are all afraid. It’s quite a statement. But we are in a time and a place where I certainly have not been here before. And I’ll tell ya, I’m oftentimes very anxious myself about using my voice, because retaliation is real. And that’s not right.
On Thursday’s edition of CNN’s The Arena, played the remarks for Haberman and asked if the fear is “justified.”
While measured in her response, Haberman noted that Trump is “crossing lines” that he hasn’t crossed before:
HUNT: That quote she used, Maggie, we are all afraid. Is that fear justified?
HABERMAN: Look, she’s saying something that you have heard senators say over time, privately. And most vocally. Frankly, Kasie, around the January 6th Senate impeachment trial of Donald Trump, which I think was in February of 20 — February of 2021 was when the trial itself took place. January 6th was obviously the event and the attack on the capitol by a pro-Trump mob.
You had some senators who were afraid that they were going to see their families targeted. And so, you know, is her — I can’t speak for how she — why she feels afraid or is it justified, but it is certainly something that we hear over and over again. I would say that Congress and the Senate, the House and the Senate are co-equal branches of the government, and they represent constituents.
And if they have concerns, you know what? What would seem to be keeping them from speaking out is, you know, maybe its personal fears, but in a lot of cases, its fears of them losing their jobs. And that’s sort of a different issue than fear of personal safety or something else.
HUNT: Yeah. I mean, that is that’s absolutely taken, I guess, when I — when I was asking, is it justified? It’s just you noted in your story that there seems to have been this evolution for Trump himself, right, that there has been this change. I think my question is, is there really a marked difference in his behavior here? And do you think that you see a willingness on his part to go after people in a — in a new way?
HABERMAN: Oh, sure. Look, I mean, this was Jonathan Swan and Mike Schmidt and Charlie Savage and I wrote about this. Theres — I don’t think there’s been an evolution in terms of what Trump would like to use the levers of government for. I think there has been an evolution in terms of how he is using the levers of government and how streamlined and centralized it is within the White House.
So, you know, instead of using his Twitter feed or having phone calls with Jeff Sessions, as we saw in 2017, you had in the Oval Office last week, Donald Trump signing presidential memoranda targeting two individuals who had worked in the first Trump administration, one of whom because he disagreed that the election was stolen and spoke openly about that. And that is a line crossed that we had not seen before. And what that portends for the future, we shall see.
Watch above via CNN’s The Arena,
