After it was reported that Donald Trump appeared to fall asleep hours into the first day of his historic hush money trial, anchors at CNN wasted no time taking a few jabs at the former president as they mused about how the news would play out nationally, RadarOnline.com has learned.
On Tuesday's episode of CNN This Morning, anchor Jim Acosta asked his panel of pundits about their thoughts on Monday's report in The New York Timesthat said Trump "appears to be sleeping."
"His head keeps dropping down and his mouth goes slack," NYT reporter Maggie Haberman wrote just after noon Eastern Time as she published updates on the trial, where cameras are not being allowed into the courtroom.
Journalist Lulu Garcia-Navarro, one of Acosta's guests, pointed out that because the trial is not being televised, the public is "relying on the fantastic Maggie Haberman and others who are in the courtroom to tell us this."
"But did you see what the defense actually did and Trump’s people?" Garcia-Navarro asked. "They denied it. They said it did not happen and that it was lies. And so at this point, it’s—"
"Fake snooze?" Acosta quipped.
Garcia-Navarro then said that she thought "there will be a segment of the population who simply do not believe that he nodded off."
"If this had happened on television and you we were all playing that tape, it might have had an impact to the way that people perceive this trial. But instead it is going to again be filtered through the partisan lens," she said.
CNN legal analyst Elliot Williams chimed in with his own play on words: "Enemy of the sleeple."
"Well, guys, I doubt anybody at home is nodding off after the conversation," Acosta added.
Haberman wrote in the Times on Monday that "minutes" after he appeared to nod off, Trump had "apparently jolted back awake, noticing the notes his lawyer passed him several minutes ago."
His apparent struggle with consciousness came during what NYT reporter Jonah Bromwich called a "somewhat dull discussion about an important issue."
After the defense team made a series of motions aimed at delaying the trial, the judge asked Trump's lawyers to notify the court when it planned to seek new arguments.
"Ever since, the defense has sought to turn that very order, meant to combat delays, into a delay tactic," Bromwich reported. "That includes right now."
The former president and presumed 2024 Republican candidate is charged with falsifying business records to make payments aimed at concealing stories that cast him in a negative light ahead of his first run for executive office.
Among the allegations is that Trump's former lawyer, Michael Cohen, paid pornstar Stormy Daniels $130,000 in October 2016 in exchange for her silence about an alleged sexual encounter in 2006. At the time of the alleged affair, Trump was married to Melania.
When he arrived at the courthouse, Trump greeted reporters with the message: "This is political persecution, this is a persecution like never before, nobody has ever seen anything like it… It’s an assault on America."