Former CNN anchor Jim Acosta expressed his shock and disgust Tuesday following the White House’s “deeply personal attack” on a reporter that invoked their children, an attack that Acosta argued reached a “new low” even for the Trump administration.
President Donald Trump snapped at CNN’s Kristen Holmes on Monday after she asked about his especially close relationship with his 35-year-old female aide Natalie Harp, a relationship so close that it’s reportedly “unnerved people around” the president. Trump’s staffers followed suit, attacking Holmes online.
“Someday, your children will come across your disgusting and inhumane question,” reads a social media post from “Rapid Response 47,” the White House’s official rapid response account on X. “They will be sickened and embarrassed to have a parent be so callous and vindictive. It’s quite troubling.”
Acosta, who has his own storied history of being on the receiving end of insults from Trump, sympathized with Holmes, whom he said he’d worked with “going all the way back to the 2016 campaign,” while also issuing Trump’s staffers a blistering rebuke.
“The only people who should be sickened and embarrassed are the staffers who operate this account. It is never acceptable for government employees to go after a reporter’s children in this disgraceful fashion,” Acosta wrote in an analysis published Tuesday on his Substack.
“But, of course, these White House employees work for Trump. As I like to say, it’s another day that ends in Y. So, they will do this again, and again. And again. There is no bottom. There is no worst. Until they finally go and this is all over.”
Acosta scoffed at the idea that Trump and his team would ever “treat members of the press with any kind of professional respect, or at the very least, like human beings,” but did issue a call to journalists to rally behind Holmes and any reporter attacked by the president’s staff in such a manner.
“It is not too much to ask that members of the D.C. media establishment rise to the moment and defend their colleagues when they are subjected to the ugliest kinds of personal attacks,” Acosta wrote. “I have no doubt that Kristen’s children will be proud of their mom someday. The real question is… what about the rest of us?”
