Trump White House Communication Director Steven Cheung lashed out at CNN anchor Erin Burnett on Tuesday evening over seemingly nothing.
“Just a reminder, @ErinBurnett of CNN has one of the lowest rated shows in all of cable news. In fact all CNN programs are the lowest rated in television,” he wrote in a post on X. “Nobody likes to watch Fake News and outright lies on their screen.”
It’s unclear what exactly provoked Cheung, as Burnett’s show, until Cheung posted his tweet, was largely straightforward news coverage. Her opening segment highlighted the Trump administration’s raid in Venezuela, during which U.S. forces were ordered to abduct President Nicolás Maduro.
The Daily Beast reached out to Cheung and the White House for clarity.
Cheung had been furious with CNN last month as he made the unfounded claim that the network had banned White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller from appearing on the air. CNN soundly refuted the claims, saying in a statement, “We make editorial decisions about the stories we cover and when, and that depends on the news priorities of the day.”
California Gov. Gavin Newsom hit back at Cheung’s post, saying, “just a reminder, if a piggy complains about a woman he doesn’t like, he is still a piggy.”
The governor’s tweet got thousands more likes than Cheung’s.
In her opening monologue, Burnett pointed to a Truth Social post from President Donald Trump stating that he would “turn over between 30 and 50 million barrels of oil.”
“Trump is posting this he says this oil will be sold at its market price, and that money will be controlled by me as President of the United States of America to ensure it is used to benefit the people of Venezuela and the United States, it will be taken by storage ships and brought directly to unloading docks in the United States,” she said at the top of her show.
She added for clarity that the “current market price for that oil is about $60 a barrel. So that’s between $1.8 billion and $3 billion that Trump says that he personally now controls.”
Her segment on U.S. action in Venezuela also highlighted Trump’s thirst for oil.
Burnett, who has a long history with Trump having previously served as a guest judge for a number of seasons of his show The Apprentice, pointed to a past conversation she had with Trump about seizing oil production in countries in the Middle East.
“I had a conversation with him years ago. He said, ‘I don’t know why we just don’t go in and take all the Saudi Arabian oil and just take it. Why not?’” Burnett said. “That was just a conversation that we had then, actually, had an interview with him. We were talking about Libya. It was right after the U.S. had gone in and backed the opposition forces that took out [Muammar] Gaddafi.”
“And there’s an eerie similarity in what he said then, and what he’s doing now, right,” she continued. “This whole coming in and taking the oil, using the word ‘plunder,’ is not new.”
She then aired a clip from her 2011 interview with Trump, in which he stated a similar position on Libya.
“But, now you can’t go back, because, you know, they so called, won the war,” Trump told CNN in 2011. “We spent billions of dollars, they won the war, why didn’t we get oil, why didn’t we get oil for what we did?”
“We are very, very stupid. Our leaders are very, very stupid people,” Trump added.
After the clip ended, Burnett noted, “This is not new. This is the same, exact thing.”
The Daily Beast reached out to CNN for comment.
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