CNN’s Jim Acosta on Monday laid bare the truth about Donald Trump’s claim that millions of undocumented voters cast ballots in this election and handed the popular vote to rival Hillary Clinton, telling host Don Lemon, “that is a falsehood, full stop.”
Describing the president’s verbal assault of the media over the weekend, Lemon asked Acosta if Trump “conducted himself on the campaign trail” in a way that “warranted some very tough coverage because of the words that came out of his own mouth.”
Acosta agreed with Lemon, slamming White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer for complaining that negative coverage of Trump “demoralizes” the administration.
“There are going to be demoralizing days at this White House, and they’re going to have to deal with much bigger issues than inauguration crowd sizes,” Acosta explained. “But what Sean Spicer was trying to do was to get to this point that there’s this automatic, default setting for negative news coverage when it comes to this president.”
Acosta noted Trump “does garner a lot of negative news coverage,” but repeated Lemon’s assessment that it’s “primarily … because of things that have come out of Donald Trump’s mouth.”
The CNN correspondent—who Trump himself publicly berated in his first press conference as president—took Spicer’s briefing Monday as an example of Trump garnering negative news coverage himself.
“Take today for example,” Acosta said, pointing out that Spicer had a “fairly successful news briefing” in contrast with Saturdays mess of a conference.
“At the very end of the day, when they could just tie a ribbon around the whole thing and go home and crack open a cold one when they get home, [Trump] has to go and ignite this controversy that just seems to be pulled out of thin air,” Acosta said, referring to a meeting Trump had with congressional leaders Monday where the president insisted, without evidence, that millions of illegal voters handed the popular vote to Clinton.
“Millions of undocumented voters did not cast ballots in this election,” Acosta said. “That is a falsehood, full stop.”
Watch the video below, via CNN:
