Martha McSally played the media, and they rewarded her with 24 hours of free campaigning for taking the bait.
The Arizona senator enters her special election primary already besieged by smears from the MAGA crowd, and Democratic senatorial hopeful Mark Kelly has lapped McSally in fundraising for their 2020 faceoff in the general election. As the clock ticks closer to November, McSally needs to do two things: boil up the base and churn out donations. With her Thursday stunt, she used CNN to achieve both.
At 9:52 a.m., CNN’s Manu Raju tweeted that McSally had lambasted him as a “liberal hack” for asking a rather anodyne question about impeachment evidence. In exactly 40 minutes, McSally tweeted out the video of her rather rudely dismissing Raju. Within an hour of that, McSally had registered the domain name “liberalhack.com.
A casual observer of the past three years would see McSally’s schtick for what it was: bait to enrage the number one enemy of Trump’s base, CNN, and then profit off of the outrage cycle.
Well, CNN and the media at large clearly haven’t learned the greatest lesson of the Trump era, namely that nobody outside of the Acela corridor, left, right, and center, views the press as victims.
Rather than write off McSally’s stunt as exactly that, CNN went all in, spending multiple segments over the day to dissecting a playbook publicly invented by Trump years ago.
Sen. Martha McSally called CNN’s Manu Raju a “liberal hack” when he asked her about considering new evidence for President Trump’s impeachment trial in the Senate. So @AndersonCooper is placing her on the #RidicuList https://t.co/Rnazk3swlJ pic.twitter.com/FgCW3L0CF5
— Anderson Cooper 360° (@AC360) January 17, 2020
Video: Talking again about McSally’s “disgusting statement” to Manu Raju, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer seems to be giving an indirect show of support for McSally opponent/Democrat Mark Kelly, ruling that this “won’t” “score political points” in Arizona because they’re “smarter than that” pic.twitter.com/OF7fm6j7zk
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) January 16, 2020
CNN’s Chris Cuomo: Martha McSally acted like a “punk” and “did a disservice to herself” for calling a reporter a “liberal hack.”
This is from a guy who threatened to throw someone down a flight of stairs because he thinks “Fredo” is the n word for Italians. pic.twitter.com/NWM9F22x47
— Julio Rosas (@Julio_Rosas11) January 17, 2020
It continued into the morning as well.
.@SenMcSallyAZ calls CNN’s @mkraju a “liberal hack” for simply doing his job. pic.twitter.com/ZkVfQmQmkG
— CNN Early Start (@EarlyStart) January 17, 2020
Sen. Martha McSally called CNN’s @mkraju a “liberal hack” when he asked her if the Senate should consider the new evidence in the impeachment trial.
Laura Ingraham of Fox News later asked Sen. McSally the same question. Here’s how she answered.https://t.co/WH243RzMyU pic.twitter.com/apTgYWO0sC— New Day (@NewDay) January 17, 2020
All the while, McSally saw her star among the Right skyrocket overnight, doubling down with “liberal hack” T-shirt sales and earning a coveted spot on Laura Ingraham’s prime-time Fox News show. Her Senate campaign hasn’t announced any numbers just yet, but suffice it to say, they’ll likely outpace the slow drip of her final quarter of last year.
McSally’s stunt was uncouth and unfortunately directed at one of CNN’s relatively reputable reporters. But it was a stunt, and the media fell for it. Will they manage to learn before Election Day?
