President Trump on Tuesday morning lashed out against a former White House staffer at the exact moment he was being interviewed live on CNN.
Trump tweeted that Cliff Sims, who worked in the White House for a year and a half and just published a tell-all book full of damaging anecdotes about what he observed there, is just pretending to be an insider but was actually "nothing more than a gofer." Trump claimed the book is fiction and revealed that Sims signed a non-disclosure agreement, an unusual White House practice.
When Trump posted this tweet, Sims was in the middle of an interview on CNN's New Day, which host Alisyn Camerota interrupted in order to read the tweet out loud to its subject. "Nice," Sims responded to Trump's claim that he was just a gofer, also laughing when Trump called his book boring. Sims told CNN that he knew when he wrote Team of Vipers that Trump might tweet about it, but "my identity is not wrapped up in being a Trump staffer," and it "don't matter to me what Donald Trump or anyone else says that I am." Watch Sims' comments below. Brendan Morrow
The Week
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