CNN bails on Donald Trump’s incoherent Missouri speech almost immediately

| 6:02 pm EDT August 30, 2017
Dear Palmer Report readers, we all understand the difficult era we're heading into. Major media outlets are caving to Trump already. Even the internet itself and publishing platforms may be at risk. But Palmer Report is nonetheless going to lead the fight. We're funding our 2025 operating expenses now, so we can keep publishing no matter what happens. I'm asking you to contribute if you can, because the stakes are just so high. You can donate here.

During the course of the election, all three major cable news networks were guilty of regularly airing Donald Trump’s campaign rally speeches in their entirety, thus allowing him to control the narrative and promote any lies he wanted to, even as they rarely aired Hillary Clinton’s campaign rally speeches. It’s part of why Trump is in the White House. But times have changed. Today CNN gave the hook to Trump’s incoherent speech in Missouri almost immediately after it began.

It’s still not entirely clear why Donald Trump was giving a speech in Missouri today. He had initially visited Corpus Christi, which is three hours away from the floods in Houston, so he could say that he made a visit to Texas amid the Hurricane Harvey disaster. But he stopped in Missouri on the way back, and he gave a speech which served no recognizable purpose. He was supposed to be promoting tax cuts, but he instead quickly went off the rails with an attack on Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill.

But by that time CNN had already decided to pull the plug on Trump’s speech just five minutes or so into it, in favor of post-hurricane flooding coverage. While the floods are far more important than partisan babbling, it’s worth noting that there was no breaking news about the floods in that particular moment. CNN simply seemed to conclude that Trump’s speech was off to too stupid of a start to be worth continuing to air.

This is remarkable: the cable news networks are giving less airtime to Donald Trump’s speeches now that he’s holding the office of President of the United States than they gave to his speeches when he was merely one of more than a dozen candidates running for the office. If only they had made this decision during the election, they wouldn’t need to be cutting away from him now. If you find Palmer Report valuable, make a donation.