President Trump was asked a simple question about a government fund on Wednesday, and he turned it into a reckoning over years of Biden-era lawfare and the media that cheered it on.
The question came from CNN’s Kaitlan Collins. She wanted to know the status of the $1.776 billion weaponization fund.
Trump answered the policy part plainly. He said he would have to ask the lawyers, and he did not know whether it was dead or on hold.
Then he turned to what the fund was actually for.
The Gateway Pundit reported on the exchange and quoted Trump praising the purpose behind the fund:
President Trump went off on CNN while speaking about the $1.776 billion weaponization fund on Wednesday, crediting CNN for the persecution of his supporters and lashing out at Collins twice for her “hatred” of conservatives despite apparently being a former right-winger.
“You used to be a conservative,” he said during a scathing rebuke of her work and the disgraced news network.
As The Gateway Pundit reported, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche on Tuesday confirmed that Trump’s weaponization fund has been scrapped after RINO Senators threatened not to fund ICE and border patrol.
Trump was asked to explain why he decided to scrap the fund, and CNN got caught in the crossfire.
“I love it. I think, it’s so important,” Trump said of the fund, noting, “what happened to great people, great American people, the way they were victimized, the way they were savage, you have suicides, they killed themselves, they went bankrupt, they were weaponized by the Biden administration by a bunch of thugs, including Obama people, and like nobody’s probably ever been.”
That is the heart of it. Trump was not talking about an abstract budget line.
He was talking about ordinary Americans who got run through the system for supporting him, and what it cost them.
When Collins tried to talk over him, Trump shut it down.
The Gateway Pundit quoted the follow-up exchange:
“People like you have abused our people so badly. The fake news, like CNN, like the New York Times, and like others, have abused our people,” he said.
When she tried to interrupt, Trump fired back, “Wait a minute, be quiet!”
“You should be ashamed of yourself. You used to be a conservative,” he said before humiliating her in front of the press corps.
“She was a conservative from Alabama. Can you believe it?
But CNN, in particular, CNN does such false reporting, but now they have new ownership, so maybe it will straighten it out. I doubt it, but it’s hard to straighten garbage out.”
Trump concluded his epic condemnation of Collins by telling her that his supporters “have been abused by you and by others, and by the politicians, by the Dumocrats; they’re dumb people, they want to have open borders, they want to have transgender mutilation of your children, they want to have men playing in women’s sports, they want to have high taxes.”
The line that stuck was the simplest one. Be quiet.
For years the press treated Trump supporters as targets and treated the people running the lawfare as sources. Trump refused to let CNN sit in that briefing as a neutral referee.
Even the Daily Beast confirmed the basic facts of the exchange, that Collins pressed Trump on the anti-weaponization fund and that he answered by pointing the finger back at the networks.
The policy fight over the fund is still unsettled, and the lawyers will sort out where it lands.
But the larger point Trump made is not in doubt. Real people were savaged, some lost everything, and the outlets that helped drive it still want to ask the questions as if they had clean hands.
