There are bad first days at work and then there is Sean Duffy’s first day at CNN. Appearing as the network’s latest pro-Trump talking head last week, the former Wisconsin congressman (and Real World: Boston castmember) claimed that the hacking of the Democratic National Committee during the 2016 election was a false flag operation conducted by Ukrainians, not the Russians. The rest of the panel on State of the Union practically shouted him down: “This is a disputed, absurd conspiracy theory that you’re talking about right now,” conservative pundit Amanda Carpenter said.



Duffy tried his luck again the next day, suggesting that all Donald Trump wanted was to find the “real” DNC hackers, i.e. anybody but the Russians. CNN host Alisyn Camerota cut him off. “That’s a conspiracy theory,” she said indignantly.



CNN executives certainly knew what they were getting into when they hired Duffy. A five-term congressman and Tea Party darling, Duffy has a long, well-documented history of making inflammatory and dishonest comments. Appearing on the network in February of 2017, Duffy defended Trump’s Muslim ban by saying Middle Eastern terrorists are a more significant threat than white domestic terrorists because the latter commit “one-off” attacks. In the same interview he cited the “good things” that stemmed from Dylann Roof’s massacre of nine black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015. He has also suggested that George Soros was rigging elections, that Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin has “ties to the Muslim Brotherhood,” and that the Democratic Party’s pro-choice policies intentionally targeted black communities and amounted to “infanticide.”



Unfortunately for CNN and any other organization clinging to a both-sides model of journalism, Duffy is probably the best the network can get. Call it asymmetric punditry: As Republicans become more extreme, it’s become near-impossible to find non-loony ones to fill airtime on cable news.



Duffy, who resigned his congressional seat this summer, will undoubtedly say outrageous and absurd things nearly every time he appears on air. That’s because he isn’t there to make cogent arguments. He is there to act as a surrogate for the president and to show that CNN is still willing to hear from the president’s defenders—that it is not, as the president often claims, solely fixated on bringing about his removal from office.

