President Trump condemned this weekend's mass shootings in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio in a White House speech Monday morning. He uttered the phrase many of his critics have been waiting to hear: "white supremacy." But, the speech wasn't good enough, as one would quickly discover if they were watching CNN. A virtual panel who analyzed Trump's remarks were still preoccupied by how his rhetoric supposedly motivated the shooter to pull the trigger, including the CNN anchors who were moderating. Take Poppy Harlow, for starters. She tied the alleged El Paso shooter's hate-filled manifesto to President Trump.
"One thing that has changed is that the highest office in the land has seemed to make it okay to call people from other countries invaders," she noted.
In fact, it seems the entire network was under the same impression.
Chyron. pic.twitter.com/d6CAVpe2un
— Cortney O'Brien (@obrienc2) August 5, 2019
David Urban, the former senior adviser to the Trump 2016 campaign, was offended by Harlow's conclusion.
"That's an unfair jump," he said, before offering a comparison.
Urban challenged Harlow to consider the congressional baseball practice shooting in the summer of June 2017. The assailant, who shot at the field full of Republicans that day, badly wounding Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA), had been reportedly motivated by Sen. Bernie Sanders and the mainstream media. He hated Trump. Look, even CNN covered it. Yet "there was no cry against" the TV personalities and the progressives who fueled him, Urban noted. Instead of responding to Urban's reasoning, however, Harlow went straight to Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-IL).
Harlow was happy to let Gutierrez talk for two uninterrupted minutes. In his comments, he made declarations like, "The Republican Party is owned by the NRA," and Trump “doesn’t care about people who are dying in Chicago from gun violence.”
Urban pushed back again, but then came the lecture from Harlow's co-anchor Jim Sciutto. He noted that Republicans are often motivated by their NRA ratings. And if that number isn't impressive enough, they get primaried.
"That’s a fact," Sciutto said.