David Axelrod
Former Obama chief strategist and White House adviser David Axelrod usually interviews his Democrat friends for his CNN show/podcast The Axe Files. But it wasn't cozy in Saturday night's installment, at least not about 35 minutes into the hour, when Axelrod asked Sen. Elizabeth Warren why she decided to call herself an "American Indian" on professional applications, including a law license. She bumbled through her answers.
The morning after Democratic Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (MI) made some vulgar comments about the need to impeach President Trump, ABC’s Good Morning America refused to cover it, but CNN’s New Day offered a welcome contrast as not only as Tlaib’s tirade covered, but it was covered heavily across the show’s three hour duration. Most notably, co-host John Berman repeatedly wondered about what the outrage would be like if a hypothetical freshmen Republican member of Congress had said the same thing during the Obama presidency.
Election Night 2018 was a mixed bag that left both parties walking away feeling happy. Republicans blunted the so-called “blue wave” and captured key governorships while Democrats flipped control of the House. During CNN’s Election Night in America, Tuesday, liberal activist and commentator Van Jones was a whirlwind of emotions as each development unfurled.
During Friday’s edition of HBO's Real Time With Bill Maher, host Bill Maher and his panel each gave a hypothesis as to who authored the anonymous New York Times op-ed allegedly written by a senior member of the Trump administration. After thanking the op-ed author for their “service” and sharing his theory that White House Chief of Staff General John Kelly wrote it, Maher surmised that For Kelly, working for President Trump “has got to be worse than Iraq,” citing the fact that Kelly called his role as Chief of Staff the “worst job he ever had” in Bob Woodward’s upcoming book, a claim that Kelly denies.
What did David Axelrod and David Gergen want to see happen on Friday morning that the U.S. Capitol Rotunda ceremony honoring the late John McCain? A 2018 version of the Paul Wellstone memorial from 2002? Following the moving event as McCain lied in State at the place he spent over three decades in both the House and Senate, Axelrod and Gergen condemned the remarks by House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell for failing to properly honor McCain’s values and, as men, not sufficiently opposing Donald Trump.
From the moment the late Republican Senator John McCain’s Arizona memorial service ended Thursday afternoon, CNN’s assembled panelists continued the embarrassing network’s obsession with tying McCain tributes to President Donald Trump, the latter’s attacks on the former, and how McCain was the anti-Trump.
During Saturday’s edition of The Axe Files With David Axelrod, host David Axelrod sat down with New York Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet and The Washington Post Executive Editor Marty Baron. The first portion of the interview focused primarily on President Trump and his relationship with the media.
Despite the first half or so of CNN’s The 2000s episode on the 2008 election and the early Obama years being largely pain-free on the bias front, the liberal media’s overwhelming love for Barack Obama burst through when it hit Election Day 2008 and the two years afterward. In all, CNN swooned over the Obama election with zero objectivity, portrayed Obama as trying to be bipartisan, and subtly painted Tea Partiers as angry, irrational conspiracy theorists who ran around with signs depicting the President as the Joker or a Nazi.
During two different cable news broadcasts on Friday morning, personalities compared President Trump to two different “strong men” dictators, apparently growing tired of the Hitler comparison. CNN senior political commentator and former Obama aide David Axelrod compared Trump to the Roman Emperor Nero while MSNBC’s Jon Meacham described him as “Stalinist.”
As expected during this era of Trump Derangement Syndrome, several media members and outlets have had a tough time maturely handling President Donald Trump's pardon of early 20th-century boxer Jack Johnson, the sport's first black heavyweight champion. Likely topping them all were the reactions of Frank Bruni of the New York Times and former Barack Obama adviser and current CNN Senior Political Commentator David Axelrod.
In a very candid expression of his displeasure for President Trump during an appearance on Anderson Cooper 360 Thursday, CNN commentator David Gergen suggested that the President was bringing about the “death” of democracy in America. The comment was telling because it didn’t faze his host or fellow talking head, former Obama Chief Strategist David Axelrod.
Criticism and speculation swirled over the weekend that Chief of Staff John Kelly was on his way out after it was discovered that the White House had hired, not one, but two alleged domestic abusers. But it all got out of hand during ABC’s This Week on Sunday when former Bloomberg News editor Megan Murphy decried the administration’s hiring practices by berating everyone who wanted to work in the Trump White House as the new chief of staff, regardless of who they were.