Conservative radio host Erick Erickson went after CNN anchor Abby Phillip, torching her prime-time news program as “preening and often deeply ignorant” in a scathing critique on social media.
The RedState founder took issue with the tagline of Phillip’s show “Newsnight with Abby Phillip” that says Phillip “delivers a smart, sharp approach to the day’s biggest stories” before appraising the show as “an embarrassment” to CNN and using the program’s Tuesday night panel discussion as a basis for his argument.
“Last night, the round table again piled on Scott Jennings because the panelists claimed Donald Trump wanted to use the American military to round up American citizens. Trump has not said that. His comments have been about illegal aliens,” Erickson wrote on X.
Later adding, “In fact, Abby Phillip again tried to correct Scott Jennings and, again, was wrong. She went back to Trump’s consideration of calling out the National Guard after the 2020 riots, but that was something Tom Cotton advocated for in the New York Times that Trump did not actually do. She then had the audacity to claim credentialism for the progressive panelist who claimed Donald Trump wanted to send the military after American citizens, something he has not said.”
The tag line for NewsNight on CNN is, “Abby Phillip delivers a smart, sharp approach to the day’s biggest stories.” I have been invited to be on the show several times and have had scheduling conflicts that made it impossible for me to travel for the show. I’m glad. This…
— Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) December 4, 2024
Erickson is pointing to a portion of the discussion Phillips had with several other panelists on Tuesday night about Trump’s threats to deploy American military troops inside the United States to tackle civil unrest and conduct mass deportations.
In 2020, after intense protests broke out nationwide following the death of George Floyd, Trump said he would mobilize all federal resources “civilian and military, to stop the rioting and looting,” during his first-term presidency.
“If a city or state refuses to take the actions necessary to defend the life and property of their residents, then I will deploy the United States military and quickly solve the problem for them,” Trump stated.
Trump also recently declared that his second-term administration would deploy U.S. military assets to deport undocumented immigrants.
Stephen Miller, a hardline anti-immigration advocate who Trump tapped to become the deputy chief of staff for policy in his next administration, has said that the president-elect would invoke the Insurrection Act to use soldiers as immigration agents at the U.S.-Mexico border.
The Insurrection Act is a law that allows the president to conduct a domestic deployment of military and National Guard troops to suppress outbreaks of civilian violence, insurrection, and rebellion.
Trump has also previously said at an Iowa rally that he would send troops into Democrat-run cities to quell public unrest and violence, calling areas like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco, “crime dens.”
“You look at any Democrat-run state, and it’s just not the same — it doesn’t work,” Trump said at the 2023 rally. “We cannot let it happen any longer. And one of the other things I’ll do — because you’re supposed to not be involved in that, you just have to be asked by the governor or the mayor to come in — the next time, I’m not waiting.”
All of these points were raised by several different panelists on Phillips’ show Tuesday and were labeled false by fellow panelist Scott Jennings, a political strategist who worked in former president George. H.W. Bush’s administration.
Following Erickson’s initial critique of the show on X, where he also stated that he would decline all future invites on the show and stop airing clips from the program on his radio show, Phillip responded, calling his tweet “mostly incorrect.”
Erickson dived further into his argument, stating that Phillips’ and the other panelists “wanted to stake out a position on Trump today about the use of military that was unrelated to anything from 2020 and willfully mischaracterized the present controversy.”
He continued to slam the show, calling it “not good. It is not smart or sharp. It is preening and often deeply ignorant. And at least you won’t have to waste your producer’s time by continuing to try to get me on your show, which you’ve tried to do repeatedly.”
Phillip replied once again, this time grounding her response in a reference to the Ferguson Effect, which Erickson also alluded to in his previous tweets.
The Ferguson Effect is a theory that proposes that increased public scrutiny of law enforcement has caused a decrease in police proactivity and engendered more violent crime. The term surfaced following the deadly officer-involved shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri ten years ago.
Several people responded to Erickson’s remarks about Phillip’s show, which is known for inviting panelists with different backgrounds and political views to engage in thorough and nuanced discussion about U.S. politics and world events that sometimes escalates into fiery debates.
Watch the discussion from NewsNight with Abby Phillip in which panelists discuss Trump’s remarks about military use in the U.S. below.
The tag line for NewsNight on CNN is, “Abby Phillip delivers a smart, sharp approach to the day’s biggest stories.” I have been invited to be on the show several times and have had scheduling conflicts that made it impossible for me to travel for the show. I’m glad. This…
— Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) December 4, 2024
