‘Down to Kool-Aid Drinkers and Next of Kin’: Jim Acosta Calls Out Culture of White House Yes-Men as Trump Lashes Out Amid Surging Pandemic
CNN’s Jim Acosta pulled no punches in a segment with Anderson Cooper on Tuesday night, directly calling out the culture of yes men and sycophants surrounding President Donald Trump in the wake of his nearly hour-long political diatribe in the White House Rose Garden earlier in the day.
Trump had quickly metastasized a policy speech, ostensibly about the administration’s moves to counter a Chinese crackdown on Hong Kong, into a long, low-energy, rambling airing of political grievances. Just after the event, Acosta had noted the president’s breach of decorum, and noted the White House’s bait and switch for a “news conference” where hardly any questions were answered and the president continued to push the lie that more Covid-19 testing is somehow leading to more actual cases.
“This is just ludicrous. This is the President of the United States. More than 130,000 people dead in this country and he’s continuing this ridiculous lie, it’s nonsensical. It defies any belief,” Cooper said. “There seems like there is no one around the president, Mark Meadows, the chief of staff is new. He came in, I guess, some people thought there would be some change right… Is there anyone around the president who shakes their head when they hear him rambling in the Rose Garden like this?”
“No, Anderson, we are down to Kool-Aid drinkers and next of kin,” Acosta said, lowering the boom with a not-so-veiled reference to the mass suicide by members of the Jonestown cult (which isn’t the first time this analogy has appeared on CNN of late). “There are no more adults that will level with the president and tell him he can’t deliver a rally like rant in the Rose Garden as he did earlier. The reason why that took place in the Rose Garden was so much like a rally is because the way he just went into the lies, the myths, and the truth stretching that he does out on the campaign trail.”
“You know, one of the reasons why the rally isn’t covered as much anymore is because the president can’t be relied upon to tell the truth at those kinds of events,” Acosta added. “What he essentially did in the White House Rose Garden is transform one of the last places any presidential administration is supposed to be sort of removed from politics and plunged it headfirst into a cesspool of campaign politicking. We heard him check the boxes checked at a rally. He went off on Hunter Biden and immigration. At one point he was making magical claims that the wall was going to be finished or almost completed by the end of the year. That is not true.”
“And so no, Anderson, getting to your question, there isn’t anyone to rein him in and make sure he doesn’t do that,” Acosta concluded.
Watch the video above, via CNN.
