CNN media analyst Brian Stelter interviewed Jenna Ellis, senior legal adviser to President Trump's re-election campaign, on Sunday, and he asked about the Trump campaign's lawsuit against CNN, a cease-and-desist letter Ellis signed demanding CNN retract and apologize for a SSRS poll showing Trump trailing Democrat Joe Biden by 14 points, and Trump's tweet Saturday urging Comcast ("Concast") subscribers to switch providers because it owns MSNBC and NBC News. It was like watching a Twitter fight in real life.
Trump's Comcast tweet was "an opinion," Ellis said. "He is also a citizen. No, he is the first one to actually use, to use his platform as an American citizen to be able to call out the fake news media." Stelter cut in: "You understand that someday you're going to regret this, right? Someday you're going to regret this, when your kids and grandkids look back at this time, and you use slurs and smears like 'fake news' to hurt news outlets."
Ellis said she wouldn't regret her comments, adding, "You're not trying to do your job, you're not a journalist, Brian, you're an activist."
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Ellis wasn't done, though. When conservative Trump critic Tom Nichols cited the part of the interview where Stelter said Ellis will regret this, she accused him of endorsing "sexist rhetoric," a curious charge repeated in a statement from the Trump campaign. She also tried to rebut CNN's survey by linking to another poll.
Her second attempt linked to a Zogby poll that showed 51 percent of likely voters expect Trump to win in November.
The CNN/SSRS poll was a bit of an outlier. RealClearPolitics has Biden up 8.1 percentage points over Trump, 49.8 percent to 41.7 percent, in its polling average. "Recent state-level surveys also give Biden an edge over Trump in a number of key swing states," FiveThirtyEIght's Geoffrey Skelley writes, noting that the election is still five months away.
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