CNN continued its round-the-clock negative coverage Donald Trump’s presidency up until the last possible minute on Wednesday.
As Trump vacated the White House and headed to his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, the CNN reporting team took turns bashing the outgoing president who made them relevant.
Tom Elliot, the founding editor of Grabien media, documented some of their most egregious parting shots on Twitter:
Jim Acosta, the chief White House correspondent, reported from Joint Base Andrews, ahead of Trump’s arrival: “[H]e’s almost leaving town like an autocrat, ousted from power, heading off into exile.”
Acosta’s justification for comparing Trump to a dictator was that the president had bucked tradition by declining to attend Joe Biden’s inauguration ceremony.
- On air and on Twitter, Acosta also made much of the relatively small crowd for Trump’s departure ceremony — though he at one point acknowledged supporters had been lining up to try to get into a small area.
Dana Bash, one of several co-anchors of CNN’s presidential transition broadcast, commented as Trump walked out of the White House and boarded Marine One for Joint Base Andrews that he “looks small.”
“He just looks like a small man,” Bash continued, finding a metaphor in the inevitable optics of the aerial footage. “And that is exactly the way that he has handled his presidency since he lost.”
Wolf Blitzer said while Trump was landing at the air base that “it’s gonna be a little, pathetic, tiny little crowd at Joint Base Andrews, where he’s gonna say goodbye.”
Jake Tapper provided his typical wry commentary as the outgoing president and first lady Melania Trump waved goodbye on the steps of Air Force One before leaving for Mar-a-Lago.
“He leaves with the lowest approval ratings of any president after one term in the history of scientific polling,” said Tapper, who earlier in the broadcast referred to Trump as “the disgraced 45th president of the United States.”
Abby Phillip added, “Melania Trump also leaving with the lowest approval rating of any first lady in the history of polling, which is a remarkable thing.”
Trump’s approval rating fell after a Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol spurred by his unproven claims that the election was stolen from him.
- But, according to Gallup, no president has had a higher average approval rating among his own party’s supporters.
Record scratch: The CNN team’s Trump-bashing was interrupted when the video feed suddenly cut to Biden and his wife, Jill Biden, heading to Catholic mass ahead of the swearing-in ceremony.
- The tone of the broadcast changed just as quickly:
- Tapper: “[W]ith the grace and class we have come to expect from them, they waited for Donald Trump to have his moment.”
- Bash: “That’s right. … This is going to be Joe Biden’s day … from here on out.”
In other news: The presidential transition of power looked similar across cable news and the rest of the mainstream media, with many journalists dropping any last pretense of professional objectivity.
- Meanwhile, CNN anchor Don Lemon, bitterly live-tweeted the morning’s events.
