CNN’s Axelrod Gushes Over Trump’s ‘Well-Crafted’ SOTU, Leave ‘Fact-Checking to the Fact-Checkers’
Former senior advisor to President Barack Obama and current CNN contributor David Axelrod praised President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address as “well-crafted,” while saying he would prefer to leave “fact-checking to the fact-checkers.”
On CNN’s post-State of the Union coverage Tuesday night, an all-star panel gathered to discuss the speech, with a singular emphasis on the political goals and effects thereof.
Correspondent Nia-Malika Henderson observed that many the invited guests who were highlighted during the speech were minorities, and mused that while “Donald Trump’s administration is probably the least diverse ever in the history of administrations over the last 30 or 40 years, the Republican party itself the least diverse Republican party we’ve seen in quite some time,” but concluded the tactic was effective.
“Does that matter to African Americans who might be looking at this, or Latinos?” Henderson asked, then added it “matters to those suburban white women in particular who are nervous and turned off by Donald Trump’s displays of intolerance.”
“So I think in that way it worked for him with, we’ll see, this is one speech, and we know who Donald Trump is on Twitter and on the road, so it’s hard for him to stick to this, but for just average Americans who are tuning in I think for this hour they did that in a very effective way,” Henderson said.
“I think it turned out as we expected,” Axelrod said. “It was a blueprint for the reelection. The touting of the economy, the red meat for the base, the characterization of the opposition as socialists who want to take away your health care and give it to illegal immigrants and, all of that was there.”
CNN had earlier fact-checked excerpts of Trump’s speech and determined his claims about health care to be false, and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi did the same during the speech by mouthing the words “That’s not true,” but Axelrod simply repeated the claim and moved on.
“The interesting thing was the outreach to minorities that I think was meant to reassure particularly some of these women who are nervous about him,” Axelrod continued. “He’s running a huge gender gap he needs to close it, I think divisiveness is one of the reasons, so I think that is one of those things, one of his motivations, and the reunification of the family at the end and so on, which was a reality show touch, but probably worked with a lot of people.”
“So this was a very, very, well-crafted re-election speech, I’ll leave the fact-checking to the fact-checkers,” Axelrod said, adding “And it will arrange a lot of his opponents but he did what he wanted to do. The question is what is the half-life on it and how much does he carry through all these themes moving forward?”
On Wednesday morning, CNN ran multiple fact-checking segments that called out the claims that Axelrod repeated, in addition to other false or misleading statements Trump made.
Watch the clip above via CNN.
