

In the ongoing battle between President Trump and the always hostile mainstream media, CNN has taken center stage as either the fight’s biggest victim or its most egregious offender, depending on one’s perspective.

I vote the latter.

Its various Twitter feeds offer things like this all day:

President Trump's Puerto Rico response is confirming his critics' worst fears https://t.co/T4NpLyDMtM via CNN's Gregory Krieg pic.twitter.com/nxWPFo8OMj — CNN International (@cnni) September 29, 2017

That, of course is part of an ongoing effort to portray the president as inept in his response to this crisis. This despite the fact that the governor of Puerto Rico has praised the federal planning that happened even before the earthquake struck and is tweeting things like this for the last several days:

Something else that probably goes unnoticed by a lot of people really reinforces the awfulness that is CNN in the Trump era. The network loves to trot out a guy named Tony Schwartz, who was the ghostwriter on Trump’s The Art of the Deal.

Thirty years ago.

Having this guy on once for a “What was he like then?” segment would be understandable, but CNN keeps bringing Schwartz on as if he were an expert trial witness who has unique insights into the president’s mind today. Here is an example from his most recent appearance:

Many have looked to Tony Schwartz — who spent 18 months with President Donald Trump in the 1980’s as he was ghost writing Trump’s perennial bestseller The Art of the Deal — as something of a Trump soothsayer in recent months. While the jury is still out on Schwartz’ssuggestion that Trump will resign before year’s end, the author made another prediction with a greater level of certainty Thursday night on CNN. Appearing on AC360, Schwartz said that after two months as Chief of Staff, Gen. John Kelly, at this point, has a pretty good idea what Trump is all about. “I do believe John Kelly knows clearly that Trump is deeply disturbed and he is utterly untrustworthy,” Schwartz said. “And he is managing him all the time out of some belief — put aside ideology — that it’s better that he be there than he not be there. I never met anybody who worked for Trump who didn’t know who Trump was within a very short time.”

The ghostwriter who no one ever heard of until last summer is now Dr. Phil and a mind reader rolled into one.

This isn’t journalism, it’s a slander party. That it happened on Anderson Cooper’s show is all the more galling. Cooper used to be one of the few hosts at CNN who could be counted on to do real journalism fairly often. Now he’s just a high-priced Jim Acosta, his colleague who trying to make a name for himself by bashing President Trump but usually merely ends up being impossible to not mock.

Now Cooper is reduced to pretending someone like Schwartz is credible, even when he says things like this:

“Is Trump crazy like a fox or is he just crazy?” Schwartz said. “And I think the overwhelming weight of evidence suggests that he’s just crazy. And not… casual crazy. I’m talking about crazy — I’m not a psychiatrist so I actually can get away with saying this — but crazy as a personality disorder.”

That’s a non-psychiatrist making a psychiatric diagnosis and justifying it by admitting that he has no expertise.

The news really can’t get more fake than that.