Former Breitbart editor challenges left-leaning media over its coverage of Trump's fiery Arizona rally
That's what former Breitbart editor Ben Shapiro asserted in a CNN interview on Wednesday night.
"One thing Trump has benefited from, is that the left is constantly reacting to everything he says with an enormous level of passion and I think that's actually a negative," Shapiro told CNN host Don Lemon.
Shapiro was speaking about the reaction within left-leaning media circles that followed Trump's freewheeling rally in Phoenix, Arizona, a day earlier, where Trump relitigated his remarks about a deadly white nationalist protest that erupted in Charlottesville, Virginia, earlier this month.
While conservative media largely applauded Trump's remarks on Tuesday night, commentators on left-leaning media outlets torched the president, calling his behavior "unhinged," a "disaster," and "downright scary and disturbing."
Trump began his remarks by reading from a script, before he lashed out at the journalists and news outlets that covered him. After the Arizona rally, some commentators questioned Trump's fitness for office and his mental health.
Shapiro argued that liberal media tends to take an emotional stance on Trump when the president goes off the rails.
"Instead of doing objective analysis of where he was not telling the truth, they jumped to extraordinary critiques of his mental health and talking about how he was crazy and how he was morally bereft," Shapiro said of Trump.
"All that does is it plays to his crowd. His crowd thinks that the media is out to get him. His crowd thinks that the media have a particular emotional animus for him, personally."
Shapiro pointed to Lemon's own Tuesday-night response to Trump as an example.
Lemon defended his choice to take a position on Trump's fiery remarks at the Phoenix rally, but insisted that having a point of view is not the same as being biased, or harboring personal hostility toward Trump.
Shapiro responded to that assertion: "Whether it's true or not, that's the way a lot of his followers are going to take it."