CNN has already set the stage for an unfair debate between the two. Former President Trump He has taken aim at President Biden by selecting a debate moderator who has a “history of anti-Trump falsehoods,” according to the Trump campaign, and abruptly ending an interview with a campaign spokeswoman on Monday morning.
Trump national campaign spokeswoman Caroline Levitt told Fox News Digital on Monday morning, “CNN cut my microphone for bringing up the debate moderator’s history of anti-Trump lies, proving our point that President Trump will not be treated fairly at Thursday’s debate. Yet President Trump is prepared to go toe-to-toe with this 3-1 vote to get his winning message to the American people, and he will win.”
Levitt abruptly interrupted an interview with CNN host Casey Hunt on Monday morning, criticizing CNN hosts Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, who will moderate Thursday’s program. debate between trump and biden,
“That’s why President Trump is intentionally going into a hostile environment on this very network, CNN, with debate moderators who have expressed their opinion of him very well over the last eight years and their biased coverage of him,” Levitt said on CNN while previewing the debate.
“So let me just say that my colleagues, Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, have been acquitted Yourself as a professional Hunt responded, “Because he’s covered the campaign and interviewed candidates on all sides. I would also say that if you talk to analysts of past debates, you’ll find that if you’re attacking the moderator, you’re usually losing.”
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When Hunt attempted to turn the interview toward a debate preview, Levitt said it would take just a few minutes to present examples of Tapper’s anti-Trump rhetoric from years past.
Hunt said, “Ma’am, if you continue to attack my colleagues, I will stop this interview.” Levitt then said she was “stating the facts” about what CNN presenters had previously said about Trump.
Former President Trump addresses supporters at a rally in support of local candidates in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, on September 3, 2022. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
“I’m sorry, guys, we’re going to get back to the panel,” Hunt said. “Caroline, thank you very much for your time. You can come back any time. She can come back and talk about Donald Trump, and when they both join us for this debate in Atlanta this weekend, Donald Trump will get equal time as Joe Biden.”
Hunt told Axe on Monday morning that when guests appear on his show, they should “be respectful of my co-workers.”
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“You come on my show, you respect my colleagues. That’s it. I don’t care what side you stand on, as my track record clearly demonstrates,” Hunt posted,
A CNN spokesperson told Fox News Digital on Monday morning that Tapper and Bash are “highly respected veteran journalists who have covered politics for a combined more than five decades.”
The spokesperson added, “He has extensive experience moderating major political debates, including CNN’s Republican presidential primary debate this cycle. There are no two people better equipped to work together to moderate a meaningful and fact-based discussion, and we look forward to the debate on June 27 in Atlanta.”
Caroline Levitt exits Trump Tower on April 25, 2024 in New York. (MEGA/GC Images/Getty Images)
Trump had already predicted that there was a 90% chance that he would be treated unfairly at the upcoming debate on CNN, and highlighted that there was still a “good 10% chance” that moderators Tapper and Bash would treat him fairly.
“Fake (Jake) Tapper and a number of other people on CNN, the (Biden campaign) wanted to sit down, which I didn’t like. I said we should stand, and I think we won that point,” Trump said. Logan Paul’s “Impaulsive” Podcast earlier this month. “But anything I would have agreed to, I would have agreed to because they didn’t want to do it. They thought I wouldn’t do it because it’s CNN, but I’ve done a lot of work on CNN. I did a town hall with CNN a while back that went well. But I think they’ll be fair. I think they’ll try to be fair. As fair as they can be.”
CNN’s Jake Tapper will co-moderate Thursday’s presidential debate. (Scott Kovalchik/CBS via Getty Images)
“But I think it’s important to have a debate. So (the Biden campaign) said, ‘You want to debate?’ ‘Yeah, I’ll accept. You don’t even have to tell me.’ Then they said CNN, they said different people involved, but we’ll see what happens. I used to work very closely with (debate moderator) Jake Tapper. We’ll see what happens, but it doesn’t matter. Whatever happens, it will happen,” Trump added.
“They might (be fair),” Trump said. “I would say there’s a 10% chance.”
Tapper has a long history of anti-Trump rhetoric, including trying to link Trump to Adolf Hitler, as Levitt noted in his brief remarks on CNN on Monday. In December, Tapper linked Trump to Hitler after the 45th president remarked that illegal immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country.”
In a recent CNN segment, CNN anchor Jake Tapper admitted that “Trump was right” when he accused Hunter Biden of corruption with foreign interests during a 2020 presidential debate. (Fox News)
“Ohioans have four weeks left to vote before they can cast their first ballot in the nation.” 2024 presidential race“The inhumane rhetoric of Adolf Hitler is once again alive and well on the national political stage. This time, of course, in the United States. This time, brought to life by former president and current Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, whose views on immigrants became shockingly clear over the weekend,” Tapper said, before playing clips of Trump’s comments. “If you open a copy of Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf,’ you’ll find the Nazi leader described the mixing of non-Germans with Germans as poison. Jews, Hitler wrote, ‘poison the blood of others.'”
In 2020, Tapper also praised Trump’s defeat to Biden, declaring “To millions of our fellow Americans: their long national nightmare is over.”
“This has been a time of tremendous division, many of which were caused and exacerbated by President Trump himself,” Tapper said at the time.
President Biden speaks during the United Auto Workers union convention in Washington, DC, on January 24, 2024. (Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images)
“This has been a time of many significant and entirely avoidable failures, the most tragic, of course, being the unwillingness to respect facts and science and do everything possible to save lives during the pandemic. It has been a time when truth and fact were treated with disdain,” he added. “It was a time of cruelty when official inhumanity like separating children became the official shameful policy of the United States. But now Trump’s presidency is coming to an end.”
Trump predicts there’s a ‘10% chance’ CNN will be fair to him at first presidential debate
Tapper also shamed Trump after he was diagnosed with COVID-19 in 2020, arguing that it was “a demonstration of an unbridled disregard for human life” and that Trump “became a symbol of his own failures.” Early in the pandemic, Tapper claimed Trump “continues to lie to the American people” about COVID testing.
Trump held a rally on the campus of Temple University in Philadelphia over the weekend, and told Fox News before that holding campaign events is “actually the best strategy” to prepare for Thursday’s debate.
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Former President Trump speaks to the media after voting at the Morton and Barbara Mandel Recreation Center on March 19, 2024 in Palm Beach, Florida. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
“We have a lot of people here and they are shouting questions. I’m looking forward to the debate,” Trump said.
He said he is confident ahead of the debate, though not worried. On Biden’s preparations for ThursdayBiden visited Camp David last Thursday, where he is expected to remain until the debate, preparing with senior officials.
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“I think if he prepares, he’ll be fine. Then he’ll forget it within an hour of preparing. So, we’ll see what happens. We’ll see what happens,” Trump said.
Fox News Digital’s Hannah Panrek and Joseph Wolfson contributed to this report.
