For those of you fortunate enough not to know who Matt Schlapp is, allow me to ruin your day.
Schlapp, a right-wing media commentator and former advisor to President George W. Bush, is what would happen if you took every doughy conservative cable news pundit, put them in a blender, hit “frappe,” and poured the resulting effluvium into a vaguely human-shaped mould. He is a bad person with bad opinions, and whenever he goes on TV to blabber about how great Donald Trump is, he ends up saying incredibly stupid, embarassing things. (Oh, and his wife Mercedes is Trump’s communications director.)
Which brings us to Schlapp’s Monday morning appearance on CNN’s New Day—which was essentially eight minutes of host Alisyn Camerota heroically attempting to contain his increasingly unhinged outbursts, like a parent resigned to ride out their toddler’s particularly rough temper tantrum.
Asked to clarify what Trump meant when he claimed that people in California were “rioting” over sanctuary cities, Schlapp admitted he didn’t know specifically what Trump was talking about (hint: because it’s totally made up) and pivoted instead to the caravan of Central American asylum seekers crossing into Mexico en route to the United States—whom Trump claimed this weekend were trying to enter the U.S. so the Democrats could give them “luxury cars.”
“Just to fact check,” Camerota asked Schlapp. “Will you get a luxury car?”
Here’s his answer, in full:
You get all kinds of...What the Democrats want to do is in every one of these things is give them...you get Obamacare, you get a telephone, you get all kinds of things. I don’t know about a car. I haven’t heard about a car, but I mean you get all kinds of programs.
“Matt,” Camerota calmly replied, clearly suppressing the urge to roll her eyeballs out of her skull and down the street like tumbleweeds . “You don’t get a Rolls-Royce, you don’t get a luxury car. George Soros doesn’t meet you at the border handing out millions of dollars. Matt, come on!”
The whole exchange went on like this for another five minutes. Faced at one point with an accurate description of the Central American caravan, Schlapp emphatically channeled his inner three-year-old and simply said “no, nope!” while shaking his head. I lost count of how many times Camerota kept repeating “...Matt.”
If nothing else, it was a crystal clear example of why putting Schlapp on television is a good way to lower the average cable news viewer’s IQ by double digits. But you can watch it in full, if you absolutely must, here.