President Trump’s campaign criticized the work of a CNN contributor who questioned the president’s health on Tuesday morning.
CNN political analyst Joe Lockhart, who was the deputy press secretary under former President Bill Clinton, came under criticism from Trump and his allies after Lockhart posited that Trump might have been treated for a heart attack during an unannounced visit to Walter Reed Medical Center in 2019.
“CNN should fire Joe Lockhart, a lifetime failure who thought it was a great idea for fellow loser Michael Dukakis to put on that stupid helmet, for knowingly pushing a conspiracy theory about President Trump’s health,” reads a statement provided to the Washington Examiner by the Trump campaign. “Great political expert that he is, Lockhart single-handedly sank the John Kerry campaign and now he’s doing the same to Joe Biden from a distance.”
The statement accused CNN of failing to adopt standards applicable to all of its employees, arguing that any CNN contributor who pushed similar questions about former President Barack Obama’s health would have been met with swift condemnation and termination.
“If another CNN employee said similar things about Barack Obama they’d be fired immediately, so the same standard should be applied here,” the statement continued. “That is, of course, unless CNN is complicit in the smear campaign in order to level the playing field against Joe Biden, somebody who truly has lost a step.”
