For indispensable reporting on the coronavirus crisis, the election, and more, subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily newsletter.





Jonathan Mahler has a piece in the New York Times Magazine today about the love-hate relationship between Jeff Zucker, the president of CNN, and Donald Trump, the president of the United States. It’s mainly about how both men thrive on politics as gossip, entertainment, and conflict, but it includes one interesting tidbit at the very end. It’s about a breakfast meeting Zucker had last December with Ivanka Trump’s husband, Jared Kushner, who has become an increasingly important Trump advisor in the White House:

Kushner wanted to know why CNN still hadn’t fired anti-Trump commentators like [Van] Jones and Ana Navarro, who said on CNN in October that every Republican would have to answer the question of what they did the day they saw a tape of “this man boasting about grabbing a woman’s pussy.”…Zucker tried to explain that even though Trump won, the network still needed what he described as “a diversity of opinion.”

I’m not sure if I’m supposed to take this literally or seriously. Did Kushner really think that this was how a news organization was supposed to work? That once Trump won, all the folks who didn’t like Trump would be fired in some kind of Stalinesque purge?

Apparently so. Welcome to the Trump Show.