Steve Cortes, a returning champion of the troll army of Trump apologists tried to match both wits and his alternate universe of 'facts' with David Corn of Mother Jones. Steve's one of our favorite crowd pleasers, especially when Joy Reid gets a hold of him. It was a heated and comical exchange, especially when Corn offered to explain what the three lettered intelligence agencies of government mean.
Host Stephanie Ruhle addressed the skepticism of Steve's boss, Cheeto Mussolini, regarding the unanimous findings of every single U.S. Intelligence agency.
RUHLE: What is Donald Trump going to do?
CORTES: I don't know but we'll find out shortly today or in the coming days. I think that skepticism of intelligence reports is okay.
RUHLE: Publicly?
CORTES: Yes. had George W. Bush been skeptical of the CIA's conclusion, we might never have got, I don't know involved, gotten involved in that awful imbroglio in Iraq, as we did had he taken a skeptical view.
Aaaah yes, the Iraq war which Trump was for, against, for....ah who cares. He changes his opinion with the wind.
This evoked a very audible sigh from David Corn. Ruhle asked why Trump has been a public skeptic, goading and denigrating the agencies he will desperately need as POTUS.
Donnie's 'Spanish advisory director' wished all this stuff could have stayed behind closed doors. That's funny, because we all imagine that Hillary Clinton and her voters wish Comey could have kept his baseless witch hunt private too. Hacking is illegal and 'bad' when Republicans are publicly outed as being on the receiving end of that criminal conduct.
RUHLE: So two wrongs make a right?
Then Steve says something pretty amazing. He flips the script faster than Simone Biles tumbles.
CORTES: What was revealed by all indications of the truth and the truth about the Democratic Party and about Hillary Clinton and her top staffers, the truth once revealed convinced Americans the more they knew about them, the less they liked her, the less they trusted them.
CORN: I pity you, Steve, to have to defend Donald Trump on this matter. He has said so many things that are just outright false. Not that he's a skeptic. That's a polite way of saying it. He said weeks ago this wasn't an issue during the election, why are we seeing this now? When in fact the ODNI and DHS, you can look those up if you don't know what they are.
CORTES: David, don't talk condescending to me this way. I know exactly what they are.
I bet he doesn't. Stephanie steps in with the standard, yet somewhat futile, 'gentlemen, we're going to end this right now if you can't be respectful to one another.' She asks David to continue.
CORN: He just sort of made it up that this was a post-election issue. He said Julian Assange knows more than the intelligence community does. He said he knew something special about the hacking, he would tell us this past Tuesday and Wednesday. He didn't do that either. He's been spinning or fabricating and saying false and misleading statements on this issue for months and it all ties into the mystifying approach he has towards Russia and Putin and trying to dismiss this intervention.
The lying Republican hits a nerve with the host with this next comment:
CORTES: It's what the Mainstream Media has been saying for weeks is that the election was hacked. That's not true. The DNC was hacked.
RUHLE: Steve, Steve, Steve, Steve I'm not going to let you make a generalization about the media because here we are, you and I. I'm not making a generalization about anything,I'm not saying the results or saying that the election would have been different had the hacking not have happened. but in terms of this "special information" that Donald Trump has, what is it?
CORTES: I don't know. Clearly. And nobody knows.
Corn laughs and says, yeah, says something inaudible about the absurdity of this whole charade and shakes his head, like the rest of us have done every day since November 8, 2016.
Then Cortes goes on some acid-based trip about the hacks, hacking bad, bad China and Trump is vigilant and will stop the thing that he won't acknowledge happened, the usual insanity he's so accustomed to delivering. The host finally asks him to talk a bit about the petty "Apprentice" tweets that the PEOTUS finds the time to write for some strange reason.
RUHLE: Before we go, Steve, ...if you could help me understand why is it that Donald Trump continues this tweet storm, today alone, going after Arnold Schwarzenegger and "The Apprentice" and ratings. This is the President-elect. Doesn't he have anything better to do?
CORTES: Of course (he doesn't), listen, no one can doubt his work ethic and how hard he's been working at this transition.
CORN: Yes, yes you can.
CORTES The President-elect is a very unique politician, right. he's our first --
RUHLE: Please answer my question.
CORTES: He didn't come from the military --
RUHLE: Please answer my question.
CORTES: I am. Part of what makes him unique is the way he speaks so candidly and with such authenticity to the American people.
CORN: About trivial matters.
CORTES: And he has an extensive past as a television celebrity. It's important to him and important to his brand. It's part of what made him --
CORN: He's not a grownup.
CORTES: It's part of what made him run for president in the first place. The media thinks he doesn't talk like a politician --
RUHLE: So you stand behind him going after the ratings of "The Apprentice."
CORN: The guy in charge of our nuclear codes, who is being briefed on whether the Russians intervened, he has nothing better to do than to sort of go on this sort of I'm better than you tweet storm against Arnold Schwarzenegger.
CORTES: He's not speaking to you. He's speaking to the American people.
CORN: He needs to grow up.
CORTES: He's not speaking to Washington, D.C. or New York, he's speaking to the American worker who has been forgot, I don't know. -- forgotten.
RUHLE: And if you live in New York, or Washington,D.C., you count, too.
It's about time someone called these lunatics out on their assertions that the two most populous and influential states in the nation and our capital city aren't a part of America for some idiotic reason. Pure insanity, but get used to it. It's not even begun yet.
