Radio host Charlamagne the God and Anderson Cooper each called ‘bulls***’ on one another during a tense argument over the network’s coverage of Kamala Harris.
Both men have hosted town hall discussions with the vice president in recent weeks and Charlamagne appeared on CNN to talk about Cooper’s Wednesday night one-on-one with Harris.
Cooper challenged Charlamagne on Harris’ authenticity, wondering why she didn’t show ‘personality’ by appearing on programs like Joe Rogan.
‘Americans need to keep looking at the rhetoric of Donald Trump because I don’t know why we’re even thinking about electing somebody who is talking about putting people in camps,’ Charlamagne said.
The Breakfast Club host dismissed Cooper when he insisted CNN features important discussions, claiming the network wastes time discussing whether Harris is black.
Then Cooper interjected: ‘Honestly, that’s bulls***, I’m sorry.’
‘I’m a huge fan of yours, but to say that we’re sitting around discussing, is Kamala Harris black like –’ before Charlamagne – who responded to Cooper initially by saying ‘ooh, I like that’ – interrupted him with the same invective.
‘I’ve seen those roundtable discussions a lot. Now that’s bulls***, Anderson, for you to say that y’all don’t have those conversations.’
Charlamagne and liberal pundit Angela Rye both claimed that those race discussions had happened on the network, if not by Cooper himself.
Cooper asked in response: ‘I don’t think any anchor on this network has been going around saying, ‘Is she Black?”
‘I think no network has honest conversations about Donald Trump, no network has had honest conversations about Donald Trump since 2016,’ Charlamagne continued.
‘We talk about him like a threat to democracy but we don’t treat him like one,’ he added, saying that no one had been ‘honest’ about Trump against Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden.
Cooper continued to defend himself, pointing out that he’d discussed John Kelly’s claims that Trump was a fan of Hitler, which the former president has virulently denied.
‘I 100% think enough people have not heard his rhetoric,’ Charlamagne responded, comparing that to something similar Harris told Cooper last night.
Rye said that both men had made fair points but felt that Cooper needed to do a better job of pointing out lies, like suggesting that Kamala Harris wasn’t a black woman.
Cooper then suggested the ‘double standard’ was because Harris has policies that she doesn’t discuss in detail enough, while Trump ‘does not have policies.’
‘I’m not a pundit, I’m not interested… I don’t think my opinion is particularly interesting,’ Cooper added.
‘I’m not on MSNBC for a reason, I’m not on some other network for a reason. I’m on CNN because I want to talk to Republicans, I want to talk to Democrats and I want to learn from them. I don’t think I have the answers, I’m willing to change my mind.’
Harris branded Donald Trump a ‘fascist’ and got flustered when confronted about whether the border wall was ‘stupid’ during a high-stakes CNN town hall just 13 days from the election.
But it was Harris’ inability to provide clear answers on both domestic and foreign policy, and trademark meandering responses throughout the 90-minute session that had even CNN’s left-leaning panelists ripping her afterwards.
Veteran Democratic strategist David Axelrod, who helped get Barack Obama elected and served as one of his top advisers, summed up Harris’ performance with the catchphrase of the night: ‘Word salad city.’
Harris stood before undecided voters in the swing district of Delaware County, Pennsylvania as new polling showed Trump taking a slight edge over the VP nationally.
But while she hoped to gain an edge with undecided voters in the Keystone State via the town hall performance, the post-game critiques told another story.
It came a few days after Harris and Charlamagne held a separate town hall on the radio.
The vice president spoke at length with Charlamagne about campaign issues, as the sometimes-critical host asked her to clear up a number of online issues surrounding her campaign.
When asked about prosecuting over a thousand people for marijuana when she was District Attorney of California, Harris denied it.
‘It’s just simply not true. And what public defenders who around those days will tell you. I was the most Progressive prosecutor in California on marijuana cases,’ Harris said.
As district attorney, Harris oversaw 1,900 convictions for pot offenses according to the Mercury News, a higher rate than her predecessor and also opposed legislation that would legalize marijuana until she became a United States senator.
She lamented the ‘purposeful’ talking points about her record as a prosecutor in California.
‘One of the biggest challenges that I face is mis and disinformation. And it’s purposeful because it is meant to convince people that they somehow should not believe that the work that I have done has occurred and has meaning,’ she said.
Harris also bristled at the notion that she and Biden mishandled the border and deserved ‘a lot of the blame.’
‘First thing we dropped, was a bill to fix the broken immigration system,’ she said defensively, blaming Congress for failing to pass it.
The vice president also recommitted to the idea of reparations for descendants of slavery.
‘It has to be studied, there’s no question about that,’ she said. ‘And I’ve been very clear about that position.’
