CNN Panel Savages Trump’s ‘Weapons-Grade Narcissism’ For Creating Fawning Campaign Video During El Paso Victims Visit

On CNN Tonight with Don Lemon, a panel of Rick Wilson, Frank Bruni, and Michael D’Antonio savaged President Donald Trump for the “weapons-grade narcisssism” he displayed during a hospital visit to the victims of the El Paso mass shooting.

“There is no better version of Donald Trump. There is no, there is no thoughtful Donald Trump. There is no empathetic Donald Trump. What you see is exactly what you get,” Wilson told Lemon, after the CNN host played a clip from a cellphone video taken during the visit that captured Trump bragging about his rally crowd size the last time he appeared in El Paso.

“When he reads from a TelePrompTer, that’s the lie. When he talks like he did there, that’s who he is,” he continued. “This is a man with no empathy, with a low character, he is a person who does not have any recognition of the suffering of other people or of the role he is supposed to play as the American president in terms of bringing the nation together, consoling people and putting other people before his own gigantic roaring vacuum of ego.”

Lemon then turned to D’Antonio to point out how divergent Trump’s behavior was — and has been in previous, similar moments — from the expectation that presidents put aside politics and personal score-settling in a time of national tragedy and mourning.

“This says that when he told me that he’s the same person he was when he was six years old, he was right,” D’Antonio explained, eliciting chuckles from the panel. “He is precisely what you’d expect from a child, and I think what’s astounding about the president is he has no interest in other human beings. People do not — he’s not curious about people. He’s curious about what’s going on in his own head, and in his head there is this screaming voice that says ‘I have to win this. Whatever I’m in in this moment, I have to win.’ So in this crowd at the hospital, you know, I think he might have been upset that the people who were wounded and the people who treated them were getting attention. And he wasn’t getting attention.”

Bruni agreed and pointed out that Trump went on to project his own narcissism onto the victims, staff, and law enforcement heroes he met yesterday.

“He said to the workers there, you know, everybody in the world is talking to you,” Bruni noted. “He said it three different times, as if what they care about in the aftermath of this horrific event is what their press is like out there. He thinks everybody’s like that, because he can’t envision being a different way.”

But Lemon and the panel saved their strongest criticism for the fawning, campaign-style video the Trump White House created from footage of the El Paso visit. “Every shot includes President Trump or someone taking pictures of him,” Lemon pointed out. “It’s pinned to the top of his Twitter feed. He’s incapable of putting himself to the side. What kind of narcissism is this?”

“This is Olympic-grade, weapons-grade narcissism,” Wilson bluntly said. “I’ve made a lot of political ads in my career and done a lot of things that are pretty much out there on the borderline of ‘Should we do this or not?’ This is one I would have said, ‘No, bro. No. Uh-uh. Stop.’ This is a guy who would make a video of himself doing the thumbs up at 9/11. It’s just disgusting.”

Watch the video above, via CNN.