CNN’s Abby Phillip hit back at her critics on the left for having MAGA mouthpieces on her show.
“I get a lot of criticism from the left, from people who are like, ‘Why does she have MAGA people on the show?’ And it’s like, well you should know what they are saying,” Phillip said Tuesday on The Breakfast Club. “Half the country voted for Trump and for Trumpism and it’s not helpful to be completely unaware of what is happening in those media ecosystems.”
As the host of CNN NewsNight, Phillip regularly hosts Donald Trump’s staunchest supporters to debate her guests representing the left. The result is often a viral confrontation, which Phillip tends to let procede without intervening.
“I don’t do it that often because I want it to be not that common… When I do, it’s like when your mom really tells you it’s time to stop,” she said of her approach. “That’s kind of how I want it to be, where it’s not like that happens all the time, but you know that when I’ve reached my limit, it’s the end.”
The host talked through recent examples, like when former panelist Ryan Girdusky told Mehdi Hasan, a Muslim journalist, “I hope your beeper doesn’t go off,” on Phillip’s show, alluding to Israel’s September attack on Lebanon last year. The comment earned Girdusky an on-air rebuke from the host and a ban from the network.
Another notably tense exchange on NewsNight came when MAGA fitness guru Jillian Michaels suggested to Phillip’s panel in August that slavery cannot be blamed on white people, given that “two percent of White Americans owned slaves” in the United States and slavery has “existed for thousands of years.”
Phillip confronted Michaels over her comments in real-time, and later filmed a YouTube short to definitively declare Michaels’ statistic “incredibly misleading” and state that “Slavery in the United States was about race. It was about white supremacy, and it was really, really bad.”
“Now Jillian, like many other voters, is entitled to her opinion. She’s just not entitled to her own facts,” Phillip also said. Michaels took a cue from Trump and hit back with a jab about the CNN host’s ratings.
“Jillian Michaels crossed the line in the sense that she said something that was kind of embarrassing,” Phillip said Tuesday, “and we addressed it, but we never said to her, ‘You’re not welcome back.’ She made a decision not to want to come back.” That said, Phillip explained why Michaels’ time on the show is a good example of why it’s important to have MAGA guests on the show.
“I thought it was actually super important that that was put out there, because I think people were not aware of the extent to which slavery was the core thing that they were mad about in terms of how it was being represented in our museums,” she said. “So if you had watched our show a couple of days before, you would have known what was coming… Right after she said what she said about slavery and how it’s overemphasized at museums and in the Smithsonian, guess who said the same thing? The president.”
“It’s not just that she said it, but the president said it and then it actually became the policy that they’re trying to implement at the White House,” she added.
Phillip said that engaging with the MAGA ideology is part of her job of keeping people informed, despite what her critics say.
“People are very easy to be like, ‘Well she shouldn’t give this person a platform. She shouldn’t do this, she shouldn’t do that. And I do think it’s super easy to say that when you’re just at home like watching the clips on your phone,” she said. “This is a time in our political life where we have to really know what’s going on, and we have to know what everybody is saying on all sides of the issue because I don’t think that ignorance has served anybody well.”
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