Conservative commentator and CNN host S.E. Cupp didn’t hold back on President Donald Trump in a new column, calling him out for attacking people who can’t defend themselves.
Specifically, Cupp targeted his consistent pattern of “picking on the dead and harassing their surviving family members,” as she wrote in an op-ed in the New York Daily News.
Trump in recent days has been tweeting a baseless conspiracy theory that implies MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough might have killed a congressional staffer in 2001, Lori Klausutis.
Klausutis worked in one of Scarborough’s Florida district offices when he was a Republican member of Congress. She was found dead in the office one morning, and authorities later determined that she had fainted due to an undiagnosed heart condition and fatally struck her head on a table.
Klausutis’s widowed husband, Timothy Klausutis, has asked Trump to stop spreading the “vicious lie,” but Trump has refused.
Cupp wrote:
“Even someone with just a modicum of decency and awareness of social mores would know better than to drag the deceased and their relatives through the muck for no good reason at all.”
But Trump, she said, “has neither decency nor awareness.”
And she noted Trump’s longtime pattern of using the deceased to advance his own agenda, mocking the late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and suggesting that the late Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.) might be in hell.
Cupp said Trump was “punching down” by attacking those who can’t defend themselves.
“Punching down — even at the dead — isn’t the mark of a strong, secure, courageous man,” she wrote. “It’s the mark of a small, weak, insecure coward with no impulse control, compassion or common decency. That’s our president.”
This article has been updated to amend a reference to Klausutis’ title