‘Right Out of the Trump Playbook’: Don Lemon Ridicules Elon Musk’s Poll on His Future as Twitter CEO
CNN’s Don Lemon cast serious doubt on Elon Musk’s poll about whether he should remain the CEO of Twitter. He did so by accusing Musk of operating out of Donald Trump’s playbook to bait the media.
On Monday, Lemon took on the news that more than 10 million Twitter users voted in Musk’s poll by saying he should step down as the platform’s CEO. Musk claimed that he would abide by the result when he made the poll on Sunday, and the development comes amid numerous outrages he has faced ever since he took ownership of the social media company.
When Lemon dove into the story with Kaitlan Collins, he bashed Musk by saying, “I think he should take [his Twitter ownership] more seriously, and I think he’s playing with us.”
“He’s doing what Trump does, right?” He said. “Trying to put out polls, trying to change the news cycle, trying to get more interest in Twitter. And I just think it should be taken more seriously than he is.”
As Ben Smith joined the fray, Collins asked for his hypothesis on whether Musk already knew what he was going to do before he even posted the poll. The Semafor editor-in-chief answered that Musk “seems like he’s living moment to moment” and “I don’t know if he thought he would lose a poll like that.”
“I think it’ll have a huge impact on Twitter,” Smith said. “You can tell there’s no one around [Musk] who is able to say ‘Boss, I’m not sure that’s a good idea,’ just based on the series of terrible ideas he’s acted on and backed off. Totally strange situation.”
Lemon followed up on that by reiterating his stance that “there is a huge place for Twitter. I think that he should be taking it more seriously.”
“I think that these polls and the antics is just to — it’s right out of the Trump playbook, which is what I feel. He is manipulating the media in order to get attention,” Lemon said. “Should journalists pull out their Trump playbook in order to deal with what Elon Musk is doing at Twitter?”
Smith called that a “really good observation,” recalling Trump’s habit of breaking long-standing norms to get attention from the indignation of the media.
Watch above via CNN.
