Rick Santorum is implying that CNN seized upon his gaffe about Native Americans as a pretext to cancel him after the 2020 election because he was a diminished asset.
“The juice wasn’t worth the squeeze” with Donald Trump out of office, the former Republican U.S. senator from Pennsylvania claimed, relying upon an adage.
Santorum, who often expressed on-air criticism of the 45th president, spoke about the end of his four-year CNN punditry career to the Washington Examiner at the Western Conservative Summit in Denver, Colo.
He described CNN as having changed in the past four years (which perhaps is an allusion to the network devolving into a 24-7 anti-Trump infomercial) and that his ouster demonstrated “the intolerance of the left” and its cancel culture.
“Once the value that I brought to the network was less because Trump wasn’t in the news very much anymore, they decided it wasn’t worth it. The juice wasn’t worth the squeeze,” the ex-lawmaker asserted.
“They wanted someone who conservatives knew and respected saying things critical of Trump. I felt my responsibility to the country, not to CNN, but to the country, was to call it as I saw it and hold Trump to the values that I think are important for the country…I would call him out and say, you know, this is not what I would do, and this is not how a president should behave.”
Defending Trump on occasion drove the left “crazy,” he added.
It wouldn’t be the first time that a TV network jumped on a offensive or controversial remark as a way to cut payroll, especially for someone who is no longer deemed useful.
“But with Trump gone, then my utility was pretty much diminished. They made a business decision that you know, look, ‘as an asset, he’s not as valuable to us as he used to be,'” Santorum. 62, noted in that context.
As alluded to above, CNN is a ratings-challenged channel that generally only gives a platform to conservatives of the Never Trumper variety, and only, for the most part, as long as they play ball with the liberal Democrat agenda.
About 70 percent of its audience has reportedly abandoned CNN once Trump left the White House.
CNN fired Santorum after he disparaged Native American culture at a Young America’s Foundation event by claiming that “there isn’t much Native American culture in American culture.”
Don Lemon loses it when Rick Santorum refuses to apologize and confess to being morally repugnant https://t.co/qTNheUoozs pic.twitter.com/Y0t0hpM1Wb
— Conservative News (@BIZPACReview) May 6, 2021
Santorum subsequently acknowledged that he blundered, explaining in part that “I was not trying to dismiss Native Americans. In fact, I mentioned them because, yes, they were here and did have an impact…they have a huge impact, particularly in the West and many other areas of the country, where they have a huge impact on American culture. I was talking about — and I misspoke in this respect — I was talking about the founding and the principles embodied in the founding.”
Although CNN showed Santorum the door, it reinstated Jeffrey Toobin despite his sketchy background, as it were. “I am not going to be critical of giving people second chances. At the same time, people have to be held accountable for their behavior…It’s a balance,” Rick Santorum said, without commenting directly about the legal analyst’s job status.
Rick Santorum ran for president in 2012 and 2016. If you followed politics in those prior cycles, you may remember that in the GOP debate setting, Santorum would tout his resume by repeatedly prefacing many of his remarks with “I’m the only man on this stage” who had accomplished this, that, or the other.
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Robert Jonathan is a staff writer for BizPac Review. He is a longtime writer/editor for news aggregation websites and has also developed content in the legal and financial publishing sectors as well as for online education. He earned a Juris Doctorate from the University of Connecticut School of Law, “a law school the basketball teams can be proud of.”
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