CNN host Abby Phillip took aim at former President Donald Trump’s “mental acuity” by opening her Thursday show with a supercut of clips of the Republican talking on immigration in 2016 and during Tuesday’s presidential debate in 2024.
Phillip asked viewers whether there was a “double standard” in questions around Trump’s fitness for office, accusing him of “veering off topic several times” during the ABC-hosted debate, compared to his 2016 border wall pitch in a bid to demonstrate a leap or change in rhetoric.
Introducing the clip, she began:
Is there a double standard over the mental acuity of Donald Trump? After months of hitting President Biden’s fitness, Trump is now under scrutiny for his rambling at rallies and at that debate that we all just witnessed this week. We compared his debate answers back in 2016 to the ones that he gave this week after the very first question on the issue of immigration that is right there in his wheelhouse. As you’ll see, he veers off topic several times.
The host then ran back the cut of clips which showed Trump, when answering a question on immigration, defending himself against Vice President Kamala Harris’s claim that his rallies are “boring.”
The 2024 clips continued to show the former president talking about illegal immigrants “pouring in through the border” and bringing “heroin” with the aim of “destroying the youth.” Trump also argued that the Biden-Harris administration’s immigration policy could “end up” starting “World War III.”
A further clip showed Trump relaying the claim that immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are “eating the pets of the people that live there” to attack Harris’s immigration record, contrasted against him in 2016 discussing in a more measured way his bid to “shore up the border.”
The cut finished with a clip of Trump during Tuesday’s debate, claiming that a Harris administration would turn the United States into “Venezuela on steroids.”
Returning to the studio, Phillip continued her critique:
You can definitely see such a clear difference. I mean, immigration is the issue for Donald Trump. It’s been that way for almost a decade now. But there was a weird clarity in 2016 that was completely absent this week.
In defense of Trump, panelist Ryan Girdusky, the founder of 1776 Project PAC and former staffer for Senator JD Vance (R-OH), argued that comparing Trump to Biden was unfair and “not even close to the exact same comparison.”
I think that Kamala Harris did very effectively was to sit there and get under his skin. So every question started with him defending some comments she made, whether it be about his rally sizes or his wealth that he had when his father passed away. And that threw him off tremendously.
There are signs of aging, as there is with everybody, but I don’t think it is clearly not at the level that Joe Biden was during his debate where he said he defeated Medicaid. I mean, that’s just it’s not even close to the same exact comparison to me.
Watch above on CNN.
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