In a lengthy monologue on Wednesday, CNN’s Anderson Cooper assailed Donald Trump’s campaign rally Tuesday night, referring to the president as “the world's biggest victim, trapped inside the body of the world's most powerful man.”
“Last night, the president stood before a crowd of supporters in Phoenix and revealed just how far he'll go, how much he'll bend the truth, whose memory he'll sully, who he will attack—even within his own party,” Cooper began Wednesday night. “Sometimes he does this to cover, sometimes he does it because he cheerily thinks of himself as a victim. A victim of Republicans, reporters, leaking staffers, Democrats, and just about everyone else.”
“Donald Trump,” Cooper continued. “The world's biggest victim, trapped inside the body of the world's most powerful man.”
After issuing multiple fact checks on the president’s dubious claims—or, as Cooper put them, “outright lies'— the CNN host pointed out Trump’s speech “became an ‘airing of grievances’ in which the president went out of his way to make himself the victim in the tragedy of Charlottesville. A tragedy that had many real victims, including 32-year-old Heather Heyer—struck and killed.”
Cooper later played Vice footage of the “very good people” Trump described who attended the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, including clips of neo-Nazis shouting “Jews will not replace up.”
“Last night, the president did not mention his belief that some of those men were ‘very fine people,’” Cooper continued. “Another lie by omission. Last night the president did lash out at the press coverage and no surprise, he wasn't honest about that either.”
“You know what that is?” Cooper later asked, when discussing Trump incorrectly claiming the media was turning off footage of his speech. “That is the sound of the president lying again.”
After fact-checking the president, Cooper called out the false claim that his movement is “built on love.”
“Movement built on love,” Cooper said. “You can just roll that one around in the old brain pan for a moment.”
Playing clips of fellow Republicans criticizing the president’s speech, Cooper noted, “supporters say his base doesn't care if the president lies or not, so be it. But even those who don't care if he lies have to, at some point, wonder what makes someone so untethered by facts and the truth—not just in random tweets pounded out in the early morning hours, but in settings like last night, lying directly to those who support him most?”
“It might be fruitless to get in inside the man's head,” Cooper continued. “Better to look at what he does. Whether it's insisting that his inauguration crowds were the biggest, or whether he won a historical electoral vote—which he didn’t—with President Trump, there's always one constant: himself.”
“It is always about himself,” Cooper said. “About his crowds. About his victory. His strength. His wealth. His intelligence. His speech. His reviews. His coverage. His innocence. Him. Last night, first and foremost, wasn’t about the people in that auditorium as the president claimed it was—maybe that was the biggest lie at all. Last night, what we saw, was all about him.”
Watch the brutal takedown below, via CNN:
Part One—
Part Two—
