Did someone yank a figurative leash on Alisyn Camerota this morning after she offered criticism of Adam Schiff on CNN’s New Day? Daily Caller reporter Eddie Zipperer believes so after watching this clip in which the host argues that Jerrold Nadler isn’t the only House manager offering tone-deaf arguments to Senate Republicans in the impeachment trial. Did a producer tell her to get back to criticizing Republicans, or did Camerota just suddenly change gears on her own?
Either way, the real value in this clip is the argument she made. It applies much more broadly than even Camerota spells out here with former Clinton administration official Joe Lockhart (via Twitchy):
Alisyn Camerota delivered a VERY rare criticism of Adam Schiff on CNN this morning, and I'm pretty sure a producer told her in her ear to get back to the purpose of today's show which is lobbying Lisa Murkowski.
Listen to this clip and tell me that's not what happened: pic.twitter.com/1SaGwlS59f
— Eddie Zipperer (@EddieZipperer) January 24, 2020
LOCKHART: Listen, I think it was a political long shot from the beginning, that you’d get four. I think there was a moment when McConnell had to climb down on the resolution when there seemed to be an opening, but, you know, that may have closed. I have to go back, though, to Schiff’s closing last night. He, last night, as Ali and I were talking about, he looked directly at the Republicans and played the shame card, and said, if you want to — you know, the president should be ashamed of himself, and basically saying that if you want to shove this under the rug and go home, that is a shameful act.
CAMEROTA: Yeah, I thought there was a misfire, actually, in Chairman Schiff’s final closing statement to them, because what he said to them was, you know that the president isn’t thinking about doing what’s best for the country. That’s not what they think. They think that lower taxes, they think that rolling back regulations, they think that blocking the border IS what’s best for the country. And so I felt like when he tried to say that to them, they could just be like “time out,” that’s actually not what we think. The reason we support this president is not because we love him and not because everything he does is perfect, it’s because we do think he’s doing what’s best for the country.
At that moment, as Zipperer notes, Camerota seems to have a physical reaction to something and offers to “table” the point. Lockhart seems read into the tabling motion already, too:
CAMEROTA: But that’s neither here — but let me just table that for a moment, if I could —
LOCKHART: You have the votes to table it, so — [laughter and crosstalk]
CAMEROTA: I do want to get back to Lisa Murkowski, because I think that her argument was curious…
Ehhhh … I’m not convinced. The reaction — if that’s what it was — wasn’t dramatic at all, and Camerota seemed about ready to wrap up the point anyway. She might have just been looking around the table and realizing that her argument wasn’t convincing the rest of the panel.
That’s too bad, too, because Camerota is actually spot on with it. Trump obviously has a base of voters who do love him and think everything he does is great, but the percentage of that base in the Senate Republican caucus is likely much lower than it is among Republican voters in general, where it’s probably not all that high either. The rest of the people standing behind Trump do so because the only alternatives at this point are the sharp progressives in the Democratic Party. Even for those Republicans who don’t particularly like Trump or worse, they do like the policies he’s implementing and the results he’s getting.
One could argue that they’d get the same from a President Mike Pence after removal, which was an argument made in 1999 about Al Gore, too. That’s wishful thinking, however, because a successful removal of Trump at this point would (a) emasculate Pence for the few months he’d have left, and (b) destroy the Republican Party in recriminations. If Trump had truly committed actual crimes while in office, it would be necessary to live through that, as the GOP had to do when it finally pushed Richard Nixon out of office. This case is so weak, however, and over such a ridiculously picayune issue, that Republicans would rather stay in control of policy than to default the presidency to the hard-left Democrats who would then take power.
Whether CNN yanked a leash or Camerota did so on her own, she had offered the most honest explanation for Trump’s continuing support heard on this network thus far. Bookmark the moment, rather than tabling it.
