Reacting to the scene of former President Donald Trump entering a Manhattan courthouse and turning himself in for arrest on Tuesday, CNN political commentator Van Jones said he took no “joy” in the moment as it showed a “granddad having a very bad day.”
The former Obama administration official, who has faced criticism from the left over his bizarre praise of the ex-president in the past, juxtaposed Trump’s arraignment on charges related to a hush-money scheme with his previous work on criminal justice reform. (Jones secretly helped craft Trump’s so-called police reform initiative while lauding it on TV.)
“You never feel more helpless than in that situation,” he said during CNN’s coverage of the arrest. “The government is bigger than you. The state is bigger than you. You don’t have power and control. You’re looking at people who can control your life. And it’s a very bad feeling, and I think that there’s really nothing to celebrate here, even those of us who are opponents of his politics and his policies.”
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Jones continued: “This is a sobering moment, I think for him. And there’s a lot of pain that comes as you go through this process. There’s pain in his marriage. There’s pain for your kids. He’s a grandfather. There’s a lot of human stuff that the cameras can capture. But I can tell you, having spent time with defendants, this is one of the worst moments of anybody’s life.”
Later in the conversation, anchor Anderson Coopper invoked an image of Trump holding his first up as he entered the courthouse before asking Jones for his personal reaction.
“Yeah, he looks sad,” the CNN pundit replied. “He looks like, um, the weight of it’s hitting him. And you know, just as a human being, I don’t take joy. I don’t like the prison system. I don’t like what it does to people. I don’t like this process.”
Jones concluded: “I don’t take any celebration and seeing him looking that way he looks. It now doesn’t mean that accountability is not owed. We don’t know what he’s going to be charged with. There’s a lot more—but at that moment, that is not a conqueror. That is a granddad having a very bad day.”
