Last night Don Lemon responded to the outrage over his segment where he and his guests were bashing Trump supporters. And as you might’ve guessed from the title, he denied everything:
#BREAKING: @DonLemon addressing the now-viral Saturday @CNNTonight segment mocking and showing such venom toward Trump supporters. Not surprisingly, Lemon deflected: "I don't believe in belittling people….In the moment…I didn't catch everything that was said." pic.twitter.com/oI4eNz7rkR
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) January 29, 2020
Lemon claims he “didn’t catch everything that was said” because he was too busy laughing at the U-crane joke made by his guest Rick Wilson. He then adds “just to make this perfectly clear, I was laughing at the joke and not at any group of people.”
Anyone believe that? I don’t. Here’s the video if you need to watch it again, just to be sure:
The arrogance, the dismissiveness, the smug cackling, the accents.
If Donald Trump wins re-election this year, I’ll remember this brief CNN segment late one Saturday night in January as the perfect encapsulation for why it happened. pic.twitter.com/8kQ6zN9AZV
— Steve Krakauer (@SteveKrak) January 28, 2020
No way he didn’t hear what they were saying. And his laughter only intensified as Wilson and Ali continually mocked Trump supporters in a dumb hick southern accent.
But even if he really didn’t hear it, shouldn’t he at the very least apologize for what his guests said on HIS show? They were mocking a whole group of people, something Lemon claimed he doesn’t do! If it was so offensive that he felt the need to distance himself from it, you’d think he would apologize for this happening on HIS show, vowing to never let it happen again. But no, nothing. All we got from Lemon was him trying to cover his own butt, and he probably only did it because Zucker realized how bad it made CNN look and told him to fix it.
It was a pathetic response and he deserves all of the animus he gets for not owning up to his mistake and those of his guests.