CNN anchor rants about Trump's sanity as conservative media cheer Don Lemon leads a post-Phoenix broadcast by questioning Trump's fitness for office.

As President Donald Trump’s fiery Phoenix campaign rally ended, CNN anchor Don Lemon had an instant reaction: He openly questioned Trump’s fitness for office.

“Well, what do you say to that? I’m just going to speak from the heart here — what we have witnessed is a total eclipse of the facts,” Lemon began, adding: “He’s unhinged. It’s embarrassing.”


That wasn’t all. Lemon thundered on: He compared Trump to a petty 6-year-old who creates imaginary enemies. He said Trump’s speech was “without thought” and “without reason” and “devoid of fact.”

“It was devoid of wisdom,” Lemon said. “There was no gravitas. There was no sanity there. He was like a child blaming a sibling on something else.”

The CNN anchor’s rant, coming just as Trump finished, stood out among reactions to what amounted to the president's reverting to form. Time and again, Trump has followed more scripted, TelePrompTer-aided performances with free-wheeling, improvisational performances that play to the crowd.

Some reaction to Trump’s speech seemed to have that presumption baked in.

On Fox News, pundits weighed the tactics of Trump’s speech, ignoring any tonal difference between a solemn Monday night address — about Afghanistan policy — and the Phoenix speech, which was filled with asides, as well as attacks on the media and, though not by name, Arizona’s two Republican senators, Jeff Flake and John McCain.

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“He played all his greatest hits,” Tom Bevan of Real Clear Politics said on Fox News. “Obviously, the crowd waited outside … the base is still there. They want to see the show he puts on.”

But Bevan and other Fox panelists noted that Trump got off track, “relitigating Charlottesville."

"If he’s going to cover any ground," Bevan said, "I'm not sure he made any of that ground up tonight. He was talking to his base, his supporters about his agenda.”

Fox News host Sean Hannity gave an approving nod to Trump’s savage attacks on the media. “It is a disgrace how the media lied to the American people,” Hannity tweeted during the speech. “And they continue to lie every single day.”

Conservative media, including Breitbart, seemed to approve of Trump’s revved-up tone.

The site, which is once again led by Steve Bannon, the former White House chief strategist, made a headline of a line from Trump’s speech: “They are trying to take our heritage away.”

Other posts on Breitbart highlighted Trump's long rant against the media and sought to portray Trump as racially inclusive. A story headlined "Racism Narrative Defeated" noted that a niece of Martin Luther King Jr spoke at the rally, as did Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson.

Back on CNN, Lemon led a roundtable of panelists from various backgrounds in questioning Trump’s mental health.

“This was a Castro-esque speech in length, an astounding chain of lies … by a man who is obviously mentally unstable,” said Rick Wilson, a Republican operative and frequent, outspoken critic of Trump.

Later, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said the speech made him “really question his fitness for office.”

“I’m beginning to wonder about his motivation for this,” he added. “Maybe he is looking for a way out.”

Cristiano Lima contributed to this report.

