Wasted ‘Enough Of My Viewers’ Time’: CNN's Jake Tapper Suddenly Cuts Off Trump Adviser, Ends Interview
It’s safe to say CNN host Jake Tapper is not too fond of White House aide Stephen Miller.
During a Sunday interview on “State of the Union,” Miller and Tapper got into a heated discussion regarding the White House’s response to controversial columnist Michael Wolff’s new book, “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House.”
As noted by Talking Points Memo, Wolff’s book quotes former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon as he criticized President Donald Trump.
Miller stated that Bannon, who has since apologized for his comments portrayed in the book, was “vindictive” and “out of touch with reality,” adding that Bannon’s comments directed at Trump were “grotesque.”
However, Miller and Tapper’s feuding didn’t begin until the White House aide referenced a tweet made by Trump on Saturday where he referred to himself as “a very stable genius” in response to left-leaning media’s speculation that he may be mentally unfit to be president.
Miller stated that the president’s claim “happens to be a true statement.”
“And I’m sure he’s watching and he’s happy that you said that,” Tapper responded.
Miller replied by calling Tapper’s response “condescending,” sending the somewhat stable interview into all-out chaos.
Claims found inside the book at the center of the interview have been denied by the White House.
As The Western Journal previously reported, Wolff stated inside “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” that he has no way of being certain that every part of what he relayed about the Trump White House is valid.
Business Insider pointed out that on the tenth page of the publication’s prologue, Wolff “included a note that casts significant doubt on the reliability of the specifics contained in the rest of (the book’s) pages.”
Wolff wrote that many of the sources he interviewed lied to him, while others contradicted each other. However, he indicated that in some of those cases, he included the accounts with the goal of “allowing the reader to judge” the validity of the claims.
“Many of the accounts of what has happened in the Trump White House are in conflict with one another; many, in Trumpian fashion, are baldly untrue,” Wolff added. “These conflicts, and that looseness with the truth, if not with reality itself, are an elemental thread of the book.”
He went on to write that, “Sometimes I have let the players offer their versions, in turn allowing the reader to judge them.”
“In other instances I have, through a consistency in the accounts and through sources I have come to trust, settled on a version of events I believe to be true,” Wolff added.
Wolf has also had his credibility questioned in the past.
Though Wolff’s writing has appeared in the pages and on the sites of some of the nation’s most venerable media outlets, The Washington Post‘s Kyle Swenson rehashed some of the often critical ways Wolff’s style of reporting has been described in the past.
Much of the less-than-flattering analysis deals with his reputation for writing from the perspective of someone who has gained unparalleled access to his subject. Once he has established that trust, however, some say he uses it to embellish his reports with sensationalism.
Historian and journalist Eric Alterman, for example, described Wolff as “a portraitist who has mastered the art of the suck-up putdown.”
A 2004 article by New Republic’s Michelle Cottle cast him as a part “gossip columnist, part psychotherapist, part social anthropologist” who “invites readers to be a fly on the wall of the moguls’ inner sanctum.”
Cottle cited an editor who described what he believed to be Wolff’s strong suit as a writer.
“His great gift is the appearance of intimate access,” the source said. “He is adroit at making the reader think that he has spent hours and days with his subject, when in fact he may have spent no time at all.”
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