President Donald Trump will win over Americans when they see the progress he is making with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un — despite the mainstream media’s obsession with Michael Cohen’s congressional hearing on the same day — former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) said Wednesday night on Fox News’ “The Ingraham Angle.”
Trump is negotiating with Kim in Vietnam at their second high-stakes summit.
However, the president’s former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, dominated mainstream media coverage on Wednesday when he testified publicly before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
Cohen found himself in special counsel Robert Mueller’s crosshairs. He claimed Trump directed him to violate federal campaign finance laws to influence the 2016 presidential election by making hush-money payments to two women who have claimed they had affairs with Trump — something the president denies. Cohen has already pleaded guilty to charges of lying to Congress about his business dealings with Russia and the Trump Organization during the 2016 campaign. His prison sentence of three years will begin in May.
But even when Trump and Kim spoke live late on Wednesday evening, MSNBC and CNN continued with their breathless analysis of the long-concluded Cohen hearing.
“But they refused to break away from the ‘get Trump’ coverage,” Fox News host Laura Ingraham noted.
It is “shocking” that on “this historic night” the media “chose this time to be locked onto Cohen,” Ingraham said. She also noted that House Democrats could have chosen to hold the Cohen hearing the following week instead of the very same day Trump began his high-stakes summit with Kim.
“I think the genuine hostility on the Left is real,” Gingrich said. “But I think that for the average American, the president’s going to win today. They’re going to look at the noise in the Congress — they’re going to look at these scenes from Hanoi.”
“I mean, Cohen today is an absurdity. And yet it was an excuse for the news media to be terribly excited,” Gingrich said, adding that “all of it’s just garbage.”
Gingrich warned Democrats are embracing the “weakening” of America “if that gets them where they want to go” in their quest to oust Trump.
Related: Graham Trashes Dems for Holding Cohen Hearing During Trump’s North Korea Summit
“I think that the news media, at least 80 percent of it, hates the idea that Trump could succeed,” Gingrich said. “I mean, if Trump and Kim Jong-un actually get a major breakthrough — I don’t know how The New York Times and The Washington Post and CNN will cope with that without having a nervous breakdown.”
But Americans are so focused on “devouring ourselves” that “we forget there’s a larger world out there” with problems to solve as well, Gingrich lamented.
Foreign policy expert David Morey, an ex-adviser to former President Barack Obama, admitted that “the last three administrations” “failed by their own admission at solving” the North Korean nuclear weapons crisis.
Ingraham noted that not too long ago, Democrats and mainstream media members breathlessly predicted Trump would “cause thermonuclear war” with North Korea.
“The relationship between the president and President Kim is impressive,” Morey said. “But remember, President Kim is no Boy Scout. And what I worry about is, are we going to skip past the inventory stage and all of a sudden end the Korean War, which is a good thing?”
“You can’t do an agreement without a solid inventory accounting of facts,” Morey warned.
Walid Phares, a Fox News foreign policy analyst, told Ingraham that “the president is moving in the right direction.”
“And I think this is creating backlash in the media in general terms,” Phares said. “They want to try to change the facts and the president is achieving all these important steps.”
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