CNN host John Berman asked Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell of California Friday if his claims of former President Donald Trump showing “cognitive dissonance” interfered with other talking points.
Vice President Kamala Harris used a Wednesday press conference to highlight claims from a report in The Atlantic claiming that former President Donald Trump expressed a desire for generals like those who served under German dictator Adolf Hitler. Berman played a clip from an ad Swalwell’s campaign aired that argued Trump should be placed in a nursing home.
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“So what’s the goal here?” Berman asked Swalwell during “CNN News Central. “And I ask that because there seems to be a little bit of a mixed message in this case. You are, I think, making fun of Donald Trump, it is safe to say in this case, yet there is a message from some Democrats, including the candidate, that he is an existential threat to democracy.”
“John, he’s also in cognitive decline. And that ad, Donald Trump makes it a little too on the nose, the way that he’s acted in the last week, standing almost completely frozen on stage for nearly 30 minutes,” Swalwell claimed. “He’s almost 80 years old. He continues to talk about completely irrelevant material when he’s talking to his supporters. And so the argument is, you may like Donald Trump, he may appeal to you in some ways with his policies, but the last place we want to put him is at the White House, where he can make decisions about our lives. He’s just not ready for prime time. And yes, humor, I think, sometimes is the best way to land a point.”
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Swalwell then turned back to the claims from the article in The Atlantic.
“But his default, and if you do believe that folks will regress to the mean, his default, of course, is a fascist-like tendency during the time that he can have a cognitive ability. And that’s not an accusation that I’m making,” Swalwell maintained. “That’s an accusation that comes from people who have worked for him at the most senior levels.”
Trump and Harris are tied in the RealClearPolling average of polls from Oct. 11 to 24 in a head-to-head matchup and remain deadlocked when Green Party candidate Dr. Jill Stein, independent candidate Cornel West and Libertarian candidate Chase Oliver are included in surveys.
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“But do you see what I’m saying — that there may be some cognitive dissonance between making a joke about Donald Trump like that and saying he is a fascist?” Berman asked. “The two things seem a little bit separate.”
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First published by the Daily Caller News Foundation.