CNN's Don Lemon Gave a Brutal Response to Donald Trump's Unhinged Phoenix Rally

CNN anchor Don Lemon gave an unusually brutal response to Donald Trump’s rambling, rambling, inflammatory, race-baiting speech in Phoenix on Tuesday night.

Trump spent much of his time pillorying the media, at one point going so far as to claim CNN had turned off their cameras—an absurd accusation broadcast live by that network, which had clearly done no such thing.

He also attempted to rewrite his response to the events in Charlottesville by omitting the fact that he made a “both sides” equivalency between the racist attendees and the protesters who stood against them.

“Well,” Lemon began, clearly shaken by Trump’s venomous rhetoric. “What do you say to that?”

I’m just going to speak from the heart here. What we have witnessed was a total eclipse of the facts. Someone who came out onto the stage and lied directly to the American people. And left things out that he said, in an attempt to rewrite history. Especially when it comes to Charlottesville.

He’s unhinged. It’s embarrassing—and I don’t mean for us in the media because he went after us—but for the country. This is who we elected president of the United States. A man who is so petty he has to go after anyone he deems to be his enemy, like an imaginary friend of a six-year-old. His speech was without thought. It was without reason. It was devoid of facts. It was devoid of wisdom. There was no gravitas. There was no sanity there. He was like a child blaming a sibling on something else. ‘He did it, I didn’t do it.’

He certainly opened up the race wound from Charlottesville. A man who [is] clearly wounded by the rational people who are abandoning him in droves, meaning those businesspeople and the people in Washington who are now questioning his fitness for office and whether he is stable. A man backed into a corner, it seemed, by circumstances beyond his control, and beyond his understanding.

That’s the truth. If you watch that speech as an American, you had to be thinking ‘what in the world is going on? This is the person we elected as the president of the United States? This petty? This small? The person who is supposed to pull the country together?’ It certainly didn’t happen there.

Goddamn.