Rick Wilson, whose joke about Trump playing to his base led to the spat, hits back at first daughter’s ‘breathtaking hypocrisy’

This article is more than 7 months old

This article is more than 7 months old

Ivanka Trump has waded into a row over a CNN segment in which host Don Lemon laughed as two guests ridiculed supporters of her father.

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The president’s daughter said: “The arrogance, mocking accents and smug ridicule of this nation’s ‘real elites’ is disgusting.”

Amid backlash to the CNN clip and Ivanka’s Tuesday morning tweet, one of the CNN guests, Rick Wilson, a Republican consultant turned Trump critic and author, responded with characteristic force.

Wilson said in a message to the Guardian: “Her hypocrisy is breathtaking. She went to Chapin and never worked for anyone not called Daddy.”

Chapin is an exclusive all-girls school in Manhattan, which the first daughter attended before boarding at Choate Rosemary Hall in Connecticut. She joined the Trump Organization from college, appeared with her billionaire father on TV in The Apprentice and is now a senior White House adviser.

The CNN footage was broadcast on Saturday night but came to attention on Monday when an excerpt was tweeted by the media analyst Steve Krakauer.

In the footage, Wilson and the New York Times columnist Wajahat Ali joined Lemon to discuss secretary of state Mike Pompeo’s public clash with NPR over a reporter’s questions about Ukraine.

Pompeo, Wilson said, “knows deep in his heart that Donald Trump couldn’t find Ukraine on a map if you had the letter U and a picture of an actual physical crane next to it. He knows that this is an administration defined by actual ignorance of the world.”

Lemon burst into laughter, lowering his head to his desk and mopping his eyes with a handkerchief.

Pompeo, Wilson continued, was “playing to [the Republican] base. You know, the credulous boomer rube demo that backs Donald Trump that thinks Donald Trump’s the smart one and” – he adopted an exaggerated accent – “Y’all elitists are dumb.”

Amid laughter, Ali interjected: “You elitists, with your geography and your maps and your spelling.”

After more remarks and more laughter, Ali said: “Sorry, I apologise. It was Rick’s fault. I blame Rick.”

Collecting himself, Lemon said: “That was a good one. I needed that.”

In his tweet, Krakauer wrote: “The arrogance, the dismissiveness, the smug cackling, the accents. If Donald Trump wins re-election this year, I’ll remember this brief CNN segment late one Saturday night in January as the perfect encapsulation for why it happened.”

On Monday, a story on the footage was duly published by the conservative news site the Daily Caller, which said in an accompanying tweet: “America, this is what CNN thinks of you.”

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Donald Trump, a president who has by one count made more than 16,000 false or misleading claims since entering office, has excoriated CNN as a bastion of supposed “Fake News” media. On Monday night he retweeted the clip and criticized Lemon in familiar fashion, calling him “the dumbest man on television (with terrible ratings!)”.

Amid predictable furore, Wilson and Ali responded in kind.

“I believe we have ‘triggered’ the ‘snowflakes’ just by doing a short segment on TV with some levity,” Ali wrote. “Did I use the terminology correctly?”

Things took a more serious turn in Ali’s penultimate tweet of the night, however, when he wrote: “Trump tweeted our CNN clip from [two] days ago. Friends are now concerned about my safety. I refuse to be intimidated [and] bullied by bad faith actors who cry fake victimhood, whining about a harmless, silly 30-second clip while endorsing Trump, a cruel vulgarian who debases everyone.”