CNN anchor Anderson Cooper went scorched earth Tuesday night on President Donald Trump, calling the president a “little man” for peddling baseless murder conspiracy theories about a dead congressional staffer even while her family begs Trump to stop.
First taking aim at Trump for mocking former Vice President Joe Biden for wearing a face mask during a pandemic that’s killed nearly 100,000 Americans, Cooper moved on to Trump’s recent obsession with falsely accusing MSNBC host Joe Scarborough of murdering Lori Klausutis, an aide who died in Scarborough’s congressional office in 2001.
Noting that the widower of Klausutis had unsuccessfully pleaded with Twitter to take down Trump’s “vile” tweets, the CNN anchor aired footage of the president claiming that Klausutis’ family wants “to get to the bottom” of her death, despite her husband explicitly stating that the tweets were causing the family tremendous pain.
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“What a little man,” Cooper seethed. “He’s just a little man. He’s the leader of the free world and he is a little, little man.”
Adding that Trump has been boasting that he’s a “wartime president” during the COVID-19 crisis, the veteran CNN anchor asserted that the president “doesn’t have the guts to say he doesn’t care” about the anguish being caused to Klausutis’ family.
“No, no, he doesn’t have the guts to say, I don’t care what they think because this serves my political purposes,” Cooper exclaimed. “That’s why he’s doing it. He doesn’t have the guts to say it because he is just a little man despite his girth and size. He’s a little man inside and he knows that.”
Cooper would go on to describe what presidential “leadership looks like” now: “The President of the United States raising conspiracy theories about a dead woman, though her family is begging Twitter to take them down.”
The anchor wrapped up his barn-burning monologue by highlighting the fact that Twitter, while declining to enforce any actions on the president’s Scarborough tweets, added a fact-check link to Trump’s recent mail-in voting tweets.
“Twitter is now acknowledging you won’t find facts in the president’s statements. That’s where we are,” Cooper concluded. “In the midst of a pandemic, this is what we’re talking about, this is what the president is talking about every single day. You think it’s normal. You start to think this is just normal. It’s not. Man, we are in trouble.”
