On Sunday’s edition of Inside Politics, host Chris Cuomo accused MSNBC host Rachel Maddow of turning to “the super sleuth” to get Trump testimony for her show – and then he revealed he was telling it straight: he had been watching it on CNN, he said, so Maddow knew exactly what to ask.
“It was Geraldo’s show I think which – a slightly less reputable show,” Cuomo said, talking about Maddow interviewing infamous Trump interviewer Geraldo Rivera who was believed to have offered a proposal that Trump could privately discuss his parts of the Russian investigation and his expectation that he was going to be “tarred as a traitor”.
The light-hearted clap-back prompted Maddow to label Cuomo a “vitally important reporter” who “takes no crap from anybody and is willing to go where no reporter will go on anything”.
Cuomo responded that, all day, he had been watching The Rachel Maddow Show – trying to work out whether Maddow was going to ask Trump something that would break his silence about his part in the New York Times story which claimed the President had previously said he had a loyalty oath with the Russian government – and that she was tapping his nerve.
Maddow went on to ask Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen about the meeting, which was attended by Donald Trump Jr, Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort, at which Trump Jr is alleged to have promised dirt on Hillary Clinton. Cohen says he did not know anything about it until a few days later and is alleging at the end of the interview that he felt the story was fake.
On Inside Politics, Cuomo went straight for the jugular, attacking CNN for getting Cohen to say that he did not know about the meeting, when in fact, Cuomo argued, he may well have been told before it took place.
Cuomo was not alone in describing the White House as looking rudderless.
On CNN’s State of the Union, Dana Bash used the possibility of Vice President Mike Pence’s firing to label the White House “humiliated” by how the travel ban had been struck down and wondered if “they thought they were defenseless”.
That view was confirmed later on by former Republican representative Jason Chaffetz, who is a part-time CNN contributor, who told Bash that “the administration needs to make sure Mike Pence is in front of the TV camera every day to show they are still in charge.”
Following last week’s humiliation of the administration’s push for a very nasty immigration bill on the floor of the House, a senior Republican strategist also raised the question of Trump’s leadership at a time when the Republican party is looking to see whether it can gain ground on the Democrats in the upcoming mid-term elections.
“Are we staring into a mirror and trying to figure out is this the worst ever than we are working to make sure we can actually reach these voters, and can these voters be won back if we mess up again with this bill to take care of these immigrants?” Jeff Roe, a GOP strategist and Fox News contributor, said on Sunday’s edition of Fox News Sunday.