Chris Cuomo, the former CNN anchor whose primetime show took a cheese grater to the Trump administration on a nightly basis, said during his NewsNation program that he personally called the former president after the second assassination attempt last week to apologize for, among other things, the lack of media attention and heated words.
After being fired from the left-leaning cable network in 2021, the “Cuomo” host has made a name for himself on NewsNation with expansive centrist rants and politically opposed guests like Bill O’Reilly. On Monday night, he wound up another sprawling barnburner, calling for greater curiosity about the would-be golf-course assassin and a cooling off of the rhetoric that got us here.
“The reaction, or lack of reaction, to the second attempt on Trump in the last couple of months … What if it was your father? What if it was Kamala Harris? President Biden, God forbid,” Cuomo said. “Do you think it would be almost a shoulder shrug and more talk about the Secret Service and the allocation of funds than actual concern? It’s unacceptable.”
Cuomo said he “hears what Trump is saying” about the Democratic talking point that calls him a threat to democracy, but poked the former president for turning the same argument back on them: “He says they are the real threats to democracy. So, if it’s wrong that they’re threatening him that way by calling him that, why would he call them that? We need better.”
The NewsNation host said he was struggling with what he was going to say on the topic, “going through drafts” before he finally decided to pick up the phone and dial Trump’s number.
“I just wasn’t getting anywhere,” he said. “So I called former President Trump. I didn’t ask him any questions. I didn’t go after him about his role. I just wanted to know how his family’s taking this, because I grew up like that. I grew up worried about who was going to try to hurt my father.”
Cuomo, whose father was a prominent Democrat as Governor of New York, emphasized that he is not a Trump supporter.
“You can think what you want about Trump,” Cuomo said. “He doesn’t have many more full-throated critics of what he says and does than me. And yet, I called him today because I am ashamed of how we are responding and not responding to the threats on him. I feel for his family. You can roll your eyes and say, ‘Oh yeah, poor Trump.’ But that’s your choice, and I think it’s the wrong choice.”
Cuomo also lauded Trump’s bravery for being in public at all: “If I had been through what that guy has been through in the last two months, you wouldn’t know where I am. You would never see me on TV again. No way I would do that. How does he do it?”
Throughout, Cuomo pleaded for a toning-down of the political rhetoric that reflexively vilifies the other side, no matter what side you’re on.
“We are playing a dangerous game with ourselves, and we’re doing it for petty reasons,” he said. “The stakes are high, and this can be broken. What we have can be broken. And no, not by Trump. He is not a despot-in-waiting. I don’t buy that. And no, not by Harris. She’s not a communist just because ‘socialist’ isn’t enough, so you ramp it up to Marxist and then communist.
“What is going on with us? I don’t get it. That’s why I reached out to Trump. I wanted to just say, ‘Listen. I’m really sorry that this is going on and it’s being dealt with this way.’ Not because I’m in favor of his politics — what he says, I’m criticizing all the time. That’s my job and he deserves it. He doesn’t deserve this. A guy points an AK-47 at him while he’s playing golf, and we take solace in the fact that the guy didn’t get any rounds off? That does not work for me.”
Watch the whole thing in the video clip, above.
