News Nation’s Chris Cuomo is part of a family that has been big in Democratic politics for decades, with his brother Andrew and his father Mario, who were both governors of New York. He was on CNN for years, pushing the Democratic narrative.
So when he made a comment about being “open” on podcast in response to whether he could support former President Donald Trump in the upcoming election, it was stunning and went viral.
NEW: Former CNN host Chris Cuomo appears to be open to voting for Donald Trump in 2024 over Joe Biden.
Things are so bad that a Cuomo brother is open to voting for Trump. Wild times.
During the interview with @PBDsPodcast, Cuomo said that at least under Trump, people didn’t… pic.twitter.com/V65izh1pAL
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) November 30, 2023
What’s fascinating here is not only does he say he would be “open” and that he’s voted for Republicans before, but he notes things being worse under Biden as an underpinning of his thoughts. People “trying to kill us” and “more hostility.”
“If it’s Biden-Trump, look, for me—again, we survived a Trump administration,” Cuomo said during the program. “Would we survive another one? Yes, yes. I don’t think there’s any greater risk to America with him than with Biden. And for people who are now gonna attack me and say, ‘What are you talking about? Trump is, like, this crazy man,’ look, you know, as Patrick says, the data’s the data. Nobody was trying to kill us when Trump was president in a way that they’re not now.”
“If anything there’s more hostility,” Cuomo continued. “I’m just saying, existentially, I’m not afraid of a Trump presidency. Existentially, I’m not afraid of another Biden presidency because, unlike many people in America, I believe that the country is much stronger than any individual leader.”
He said we survived Biden being a “gaffe machine,” but that we were not better for it.
“Should we be doing things differently? Yes,” he said. In terms of who he was going to vote for, he said he would have to look at how things were at the time [of the vote].
That’s pretty revolutionary if Cuomo is saying this. It’s amazing what one might say out from under the bootprint of CNN.
I should note that Cuomo now seems to be trying to spin a little bit to say that he didn’t say that he was voting for Trump, as the intense reaction to what he said kicks in.
That’s right, he didn’t. But he did say he was open to it and he did point out the issues with Biden, which is already shocking enough, from him.
That’s the important part, I think because it’s not just about Cuomo, it goes beyond Cuomo.
We’ve seen other people you would never think flipping saying they would be open like anti-Trump actor Michael Rapaport or that they are outright supporting Trump over Biden, such as Mark Fisher. Fisher – who was an unusual BLM guy — who says that Democrats had done nothing for black people and weren’t protecting the nuclear family — so he was supporting Trump. As I noted when I wrote about Fisher, there were also astonishing poll numbers of black voters moving away from the Democrats and toward Trump.
They seem like benchmarks of a larger group of Democrats moving away from Biden because they’re all old enough to remember that times were better under Trump and that we were not in the middle of the messes we are in now, as Cuomo noted. If even these folks are getting it, it stands to reason there are a lot of ordinary Democrats who don’t have such a platform to speak who are also getting it.
And they will be voting.