CNN Panel Whines: Trump ‘Whiffed’ Statement on North Korea Launch

Nicholas Fondacaro | February 12, 2017
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News broke late Saturday night that North Korea launched a missile in a show of force during the Japanese Prime Minister’s visit to the United States. During a quickly put together media event PM Shinzo Abe spoke first to condemn the launch and was backed up with a brief statement of support from President Donald Trump. But that wasn’t enough for CNN’s Inside Politics, whose Nia-Malika Henderson proclaimed, “He has talked tough, I think Trump, on Twitter about North Korea, but when it got to his time to be that tough person that we've come to know, he just kind of whiffed I think in many ways.

According to the entire panel, President Trump should have said more and come out stronger against the communist regime. “It was essentially like 140 characters he was using there, 240 characters or so, so I think it was very striking because it's a Trump we're not used to seeing without the kind of bluster and strength,” Henderson continued, comparing Trump’s comments Saturday night to a tweet.

It was, I don't know the right word for it, just bizarre that's all we heard from the president,” stated host John King. But this complaint is coming from the news outlet that demanded little from former President Obama the morning after the attack on U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Libya.

The Daily Beast’s Jackie Kucinich whined that Trump wasn’t tweeting his condemnation of the missile launch. “During the campaign, we're saying, ‘Okay, he talks tough, but what happens when something actually happens,” she recalled, “And right now it's silence. And it's not like he's up and tweeting. He's up and tweeting.

The panel then turned to bashing the president’s knowledge (or lack thereof) about the subject and his refusal to read a prepared statement placed on the lectern ahead of time. “It's almost like there isn't a depth of knowledge there perhaps and he didn't feel comfortable reading the statement, we don't know,” Kucinich chided, “But saying, “Yeah, what he said,” when you boil down the statement to what he said last night.

The New York Times’ Johnathan Martin seemed to make the argument that the White House’s prepared statement was too intelligent for Trump:

If you saw the statement which, I think, a Reuters photog had a picture of on Twitter. You can sort of make out most of the text. Let’s put it this way, it didn't quite sound like the words that would typically come from the mouth of Donald J. Trump. So, I think, he may have had some reluctance to actually speak using that of, sort of, high-tone diplomatic language that's not really him. Whereas, there a one-sentence tough talk type like he did is Trumpian.

It's hypocritical for the liberal media to bemoan the fact that Trump didn’t come out and make the controversial statement they wanted him too (and would complain about for another news cycle). During the campaign they didn’t bat an eye at Hillary Clinton’s argument that Trump was so unstable his tweets would start World War III, in fact, they talked about it as a possibility. So, to now complain that he was being too reserved is ridiculous. 

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