CNN anchor Chris Cuomo might want to brush up on his slang.
During an interview Thursday with Republican National Committee Chair Ronna Romney McDaniel, Cuomo challenged McDaniel over accusations that Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) had "mansplained" to Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. Nielsen appeared before the committee Tuesday, and Booker attacked her for tolerating President Trump's reported vulgar remarks about immigrants.
"You [and the RNC] accused Booker of 'mansplaining' to Nielsen," Cuomo said. "Why? Why did you call it that?" McDaniel replied that a male Republican senator would have been lambasted for talking to a woman the way Booker did to Nielsen. "I know he's auditioning for 2020, I understand that, but he was disrespectful and he did mansplain to her. And she's an intelligent woman, she's the secretary of homeland security, and she deserved an opportunity to answer his rant," she said.
Cuomo then — with no apparent sense of irony — interrupted McDaniel to show a clip of Booker responding to the RNC's accusation. Then Cuomo asked: "In this age of recognizing women as equal, once and for all, at all levels, why would [Booker] have to treat Nielsen differently?" As McDaniel tried to point to "hypocrisy" in the treatment of Nielsen compared to, say, the sympathy afforded Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Cuomo interrupted again to ask, "How is it mansplaining ... just because she's a woman, that's what you're saying? ... [Senators] talk to people like that all the time, Ronna, they talk to men like that all the time."
"Here's the deal," McDaniel said. "Cory Booker was grandstanding, he was lecturing her, he didn't give her a chance to respond. It was disrespectful." Watch the full interview at Mediaite.