CNN chief White House correspondent Jim Acosta compared President Trump to the infamous Baghdad Bob on Tuesday, saying the president sounds “very Baghdad Bob-like” during coronavirus task force news conferences.
Acosta told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that Trump halted funding for the World Health Organization because he wanted a “distraction” to take the spotlight during the daily coronavirus press briefing.
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“These briefings, all together, are coming across like something out of Baghdad Bob,” Acosta said. “Baghdad Bob being the Iraqi military official who was claiming during the Iraq War that the United States was not making its way into the Iraqi capital, the president is sounding very Baghdad Bob-like in the way that he’s assigning blame to everybody but himself.”
Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, known as Baghdad Bob, was the outlandish spokesperson for Iraq under Saddam Hussein during the Iraq War. He became infamous for making absurdly false statements, regularly claiming victories over coalition troops and seemingly having an endless supply of insults.
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The CNN White House reporter said during the briefings Trump has placed blame on a series of things, including Democrats, China, the media, the Obama administration and the WHO. Acosta then accused Trump of “playing fast and loose with the facts” and “lying about things” related to the coronavirus pandemic.
“It should be stated that this hot take came from the same network that downplayed the virus from January to early February because it conflicted with the impeachment trial and still held its annual upfront event to a crowd of hundreds on March 5,” NewsBusters managing editor Curtis Houck wrote.
CNN's Jim Acosta compared President Trump to the infamous Baghdad Bob on Tuesday.
Earlier this week, CNN producer-turned media watchdog Steve Krakauer described Acosta, his former colleague, as a fame-seeking attention-getter who “plays the role of absurd, antagonistic journalist” during Trump’s press briefings, often teeing the president up to attack him and the media.
“I don't think CNN White House correspondent Jim Acosta is a bad guy. I worked with him at CNN, and he was a solid, competent reporter. If Acosta's goal was to be a great White House reporter, he could probably do it,” Krakauer wrote. “But that's not Jim Acosta's goal. Jim Acosta wants to be famous.”
Acosta has made a name for himself in the Trump era for his hostile exchanges with the president and members of his administration. He was recently scolded by Trump for referring to the daily coronavirus press briefings as "happy talk." Acosta regularly shouts questions when it isn’t his turn to speak and famously struggled with a White House aide for possession of a microphone during a 2018 press conference, resulting in a legal skirmish over whether or not he would be able to cover the White House.
“Jim Acosta," Krakauer wrote, "loves nothing more than Jim Acosta.”