CNN’s Brian Stelter Calls Out Donald Trump For Using His Platform To Attack Private Companies


CNN’s Brian Stelter penned an opinion editorial in which he called out President Donald Trump for using his social media and presidential platform to attack private companies.

The opinion piece, published on CNN on Sunday, used Trump’s recent tweet that encouraged his followers to drop Comcast as an example of “an egregious use of his presidential platform to hurt an American business.”

According to Stelter’s analysis, Trump’s recommendation didn’t have much effect on the company. However, it could potentially be an example of conduct considered unacceptable from the highest office in the land.

Stelter described the president’s moves as a “yearslong effort to punish media companies for news coverage he doesn’t like.”

In addition to his recent infraction, Stelter cited a time when Trump encouraged a boycott of CNN’s parent company, AT&T. While the president’s recommendation had the opposite effect, with stocks surging the next day, the CNN anchor still considered it an inappropriate move on the part of the president.

Stelter went on to explain that the president’s ire was drawn by a tweet from former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee who complained about the company’s customer service. However, the tweet didn’t seem to get much traction.

To illustrate his point, Stelter quoted Norman Eisen, a special assistant from the Obama White House on ethics and government reform, who called it “an abuse of power for an American president to use the awesome authority of the Oval Office to target an American company.”

“It is even worse because here he is retaliating against the exercise of the First Amendment-protected constitutional rights.”

According to Stelter, Eisen also worked with Democrats in 2019 on the impeachment inquiry and had some strong feelings about the president’s ethics after that interaction. Eisen said that while they worked on the impeachment trial, they pointed out “the president’s propensity for abusing his power for purely personal and political ends” and warned that if unchecked, it would continue.

Eisen also pointed to Trump’s recent tweets as proof that their prediction is coming true, ending with a stern warning about historical leaders with similar propensities.

CNN and Stelter himself have been at the center of the president’s ire in recent months, leading to Stelter asking a Trump campaign legal adviser whether the campaign had a media strategy aside from “anti-media strategy” leading up to the November election.

“What evidence do you have that attacking the media actually helps you?” Stelter questioned.

The campaign representative pointed out that Stelter was the subject of a lawsuit, concerning the “defamatory” statements he has made against the Trump campaign.

Following her comments about the lawsuits, Stelter noted that the Trump campaign was suing several networks for what they considered to be unacceptable news coverage, not just CNN.

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