CNN’s Abby Phillip Defends Having ‘MAGA People’ On Her Show: ‘It’s An Opportunity’

CNN host Abby Phillip on Tuesday joined “The Breakfast Club” to promote her new book, “A Dream Deferred: Jesse Jackson and the Fight for Black Political Power,” when she was asked about the “rainbow coalition” of politically diverse guests on her “NewsNight” show.

Frequent “NewsNight” panelist Scott Jennings staunchly supports President Donald Trump.

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“This is a time in our political life where we have to really know what’s going on, and we have to know what everybody is saying on all sides of the issue, because I don’t think that ignorance has served anybody well,” she told the “Breakfast Club’s” Charlamagne Tha God.

“I get a lot of criticism from the left, from people who are like, ‘Why does she have MAGA people on the show?’” Phillip added. “And it’s like, well, you should know what they’re saying because, just so you know, half the country voted for Trump and for Trumpism.”

Phillip went on to argue that “we need to have that debate” between people from all sides of the political spectrum, and that it’s better for these discussions to be “right there out in the open” instead of being siloed away into exclusively conservative echo chambers.

When asked how she endures some of the more difficult conversations as one of the only Black female hosts on CNN, Phillip noted that she controls her show — and draws the line when she needs to. Phillip pointed to a few notable controversies from recent history.

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The first example was Jillian Michaels, a pro-Trump influencer and author who argued during a “NewsNight” appearance in August that Trump was right about museums focusing too much on American slavery, and that the perpetrators can’t be tied “to just one race.”

“But I’ll say honestly, Jillian Michaels crossed the line in the sense that she said something that was kind of embarrassing, and we addressed it — but we never said to her, ‘You’re not welcome back,’” Phillip said Tuesday. “And I don’t think she crossed the line, either.”

She concluded, “I just think she just wasn’t informed.”

Phillip said the subject was only discussed on her show because the president himself had raised it on social media, “and then it actually became the policy that they’re trying to implement at the White House.” She then moved on to another controversial guest.

Former MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan appeared on “NewsNight” last year alongside conservative panelist Ryan Girdusky, who implied Hasan was a member of Hezbollah and a supporter of Hamas — before saying, “Yeah, well, I hope your beeper doesn’t go off.”

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It was reference to the hundreds of pagers possessed by suspected Hezbollah operatives in Lebanon, which exploded spontaneously last September, killing at least 37 people and injuring thousands in an attack that is widely believed to have been carried out by Israel.

“And that was an actual line that was crossed because you wishing death on a guest on the show is completely unacceptable,” Phillip said Tuesday. “And he was told, and I said publicly on the show, that he was not invited back.”

“And so, there are lines that are crossed, and I think people understand that I’ll draw them when they need to be drawn,” she continued. “But I also think that we want to have real conversations. Sometimes they get a little bit messy and that’s OK.”

Watch the full discussion below beginning at the 14:32 minute mark:

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