Cooper has no patience for this | Photo: YouTube/Real Discussions
Anderson Cooper isn’t here to play nice. On a recent CNN segment, the anchor discussed President Donald Trump’s surreal Fox & Friends interview.
Cooper became ignited after a comment from guest Alan Dershowitz, a professor at Harvard Law School. He said: ‘I think we would go down a very bad road for us to start parsing the president’s words.’
In an almost exasperated and amused tone, Cooper responded: ‘Don’t you think that it’s kind of surreal that we are in a place now as a county where we’re, like, “Oh, don’t listen to the president,” like he’s a crazy person on a park bench with an onion tied to his belt, just mumbling incoherently?’
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Should people listen to the president?
Cooper kept going: ‘You’re saying, “Don’t parse his words,” you’re saying, essentially, don’t listen to him, don’t pay attention to the words that come out of his mouth because they really have no meaning.’
‘I’m making a different point,’ Dershowitz countered. ‘I’m saying the words of a president have special authority under the Constitution. He is entitled to express views, he’s entitled to speak to the public. We shouldn’t be making crimes, like obstruction of justice, out of his words, unless they’re unambiguous or very clear.’
Cooper, however, compared it to another president who had entanglements with the law.
‘It was like listening to the rantings of Richard Nixon on the tapes. Except this is on live television, he’s calling in screaming, yelling into the telephone.’
Dershowitz eventually did acknowledge that Trump sends ‘conflicting messages and wishes, ‘as an American citizen’, he wouldn’t speak that way.
CNN wasn’t the only place to discuss Trump’s interview. Stephen Colbert also riffed on the bizarre talk.
