Chris Cuomo pressed Republican National Committee Chair Ronna Romney McDaniel over the organization’s accusations that Sen. Cory Booker was “mansplaining” to DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen during a tense exchange at a Capitol Hill hearing this week.

Booker grilled Nielsen over whether the president referred to Haiti, El Salvador and unspecified African nations as “shithole countries” in an Oval Office meeting on immigration, in a dramatic display the RNC rapid response director decried as “mansplaining.”

“Why did you call it that?” Cuomo asked McDaniel on New Day.

McDaniel argued the exchange “would have been covered differently” had it been a Republican senator lecturing Nielsen, before hitting Booker for “grandstanding” and “auditioning for 2020.”

“He was disrespectful and he did mansplain to her,” McDaniel said. “She deserved an opportunity to answer his rant.”

Cuomo asked why “in this age of recognizing women as equal,” Booker would “have to treat Nielsen differently.”

“He was disrespectful to her as the secretary of Homeland Security, and he was mansplaining to her,” McDaniel said.

“How was that mansplaining just because she’s a woman?” Cuomo shot back.

McDaniel made the wise decision to invoke “how [Sen.] Elizabeth Warren is treated compared to how Nielsen is treated,” to which Cuomo replied:

“The president calls her Pocahontas.”

McDaniel proceeded to list off a series of talking points that sounded almost memorized from an RNC fundraising email: “Here’s the deal, Cory Booker was grandstanding, he was lecturing her, he didn’t give her a chance to respond, it was disrespectful and he’s auditioning for 2020, Oprah just got the headlines and now he wanted to get the headlines and he got em.”

Watch above, via CNN.

[image via screengrab]

—

Follow Aidan McLaughlin (@aidnmclaughlin) on Twitter

Have a tip we should know? [email protected]